Chuck Yeager Breaks the Sound Barrier (With Two Broken Ribs)
California
Two nights before the most important test flight in American aviation history, the pilot broke two ribs falling from a horse at a desert ranch. He did not tell anyone. He was afraid they would pull him from the flight.
His name was Charles Yeager, Captain, United States Army Air Forces, twenty-four years old, and on the morning of October fourteenth, nineteen forty-seven, he drove out to Rogers Dry Lake at Muroc Army Air Field, which would later be renamed Edwards Air Force Base, and climbed into a small orange rocket plane called the Bell X-one. The plane was named Glamorous Glennis, after his wife. Because his ribs made it impossible to seal the cockpit door with his right arm alone, a fellow pilot had cut him a length of broomstick before the flight. Yeager used the broomstick to push the hatch lever closed.
At altitude, dropped from the belly of a B-twenty-nine bomber, Yeager lit the X-one's rocket engine and accelerated. The airspeed indicator passed through eight hundred miles per hour. The theoretical barrier that some engineers had predicted would destroy any aircraft attempting to cross it, the region of transonic shock waves where drag spikes and control surfaces stop responding, turned out to be something you flew through. Yeager reached Mach one point zero six. The flight lasted fourteen minutes.
Below, on the dry lake bed and in the monitoring stations of the Mojave, the shock wave from the X-one rolled across the desert. People heard what they could not explain: a boom from a clear sky, from a plane already gone.
The flight was classified. It did not become public knowledge until June of nineteen forty-eight, about eight months later. In the meantime, Yeager flew the X-one seven more times, pushing higher and faster, and reported his ribs had healed on their own.
Rogers Dry Lake, the flat expanse below you, is forty-two square miles of alkaline lake bed so flat and hard that it served as an emergency runway for the Space Shuttle for decades. There is no runway on Earth more forgiving. The desert itself was the engineering solution.
