![]() ![]() There, she met wealthy businessman Floyd Bostwick Odlum (the pair would marry in 1936). The Florida native had made a name for herself in New York City, putting charm and good looks to use in the task of landing a position at the famous Saks Fifth Avenue salon. Image: Smithsonian Mag.įemale American pilot Jackie Cochran made history on this day when in 1953 she became the first woman to break the sound barrier.Īmerican pilot Jackie Cochran, who became the first woman to break the sound barrier 65 years ago today, owes some of her breakthrough success in the sky to a rather ironic source: cosmetics. New York: Penguin Studio, 1997.Jackie Cochran (right) alongside her wingman and lifelong friend, Chuck Yeager, who accompanied her on her supersonic flight. The Quest for Mach One: A First-Person Account of Breaking the Sound Barrier. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979. Washington, DC: Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, 2006. Chuck Yeager and the Bell X-1: Breaking the Sound Barrier. It was the last time he participated in an official Air Force flight. On the same day, Yeager-then 89-broke the sound barrier again in an F-15 Eagle he nicknamed Glamorous Glennis III, although he reportedly only flew the plane during takeoff and landing. ![]() He jumped for a world-record altitude of 24.26 miles (128,100 feet) and hit speeds as high as 833.9 mph (Mach 1.26) during his 4 minute, 18 second freefall. A supersonic car called the ThrustSSC, driven by Royal Air Force pilot Andy Green, surpassed Mach 1 on October 15, 1997, almost exactly 50 years after Yeager’s fight.Īnd in 2012, Felix Baumgartner became the first person to break the sound barrier during freefall. Also in 1953, Jackie Cochrane became the first woman to break the sound barrier in a Canadair Sabre Yeager was her wingman. On November 20, 1953, pilot Scott Crossfield reached twice the speed of sound in a D-558-II Skyrocket. Records have continued to fall since Yeager’s historic flight. (The Concorde made its last flight in 2003.) Though many in the industry hoped that the introduction of supersonic commercial airlines in the 1970s-the Concorde and the Tupolev Tu-144-would lead to the next evolutionary stage of airline travel, neither were replaced when they were decommissioned. Today, combat aircraft can easily break the sound barrier, thanks to the introduction of improved design features like swept wings and more powerful engines. He was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 1973. He was also a technical advisor on three flight simulator video games. But Yeager wasn’t selected for the first astronaut program because he didn’t have the requisite educational qualifications. Yeager made a cameo appearance in the 1983 movie The Right Stuff-based on the 1979 book by Tom Wolfe-as a bartender named Fred (Sam Shepard portrayed Yeager in the movie). He retired from the Air Force in 1975, although he still occasionally flew as a consulting test pilot for USAF and NASA. He went on to have a distinguished military career, holding several squadron and wing commands and achieving the rank of brigadier general in 1969, assigned as vice-commander of the Seventeenth Air Force. The news of Yeager’s record-breaking flight wasn’t publicly announced until June 1948. I was alive.” On the ground, however, the resulting change in pressure sounded like an explosion reverberating across the California desert. “There was no buffet, no jolt, no shock,” he later recalled. On October 14, 1947, Yeager and the X-1 achieved 20 seconds of supersonic flight. By the day of the flight, Yeager was in so much pain that he was unable to close the X-1’s hatch fortunately, Ridley left part of a broken broom handle in the cockpit to help Yeager seal the hatch door. Determined not to be sidelined, he asked a veterinarian in a nearby town to treat his injury, telling only his wife and fellow test pilot Jack Ridley. Two days before the scheduled flight, Yeager broke two ribs after falling off a horse. He later claimed he never worried about whether or not something would go tragically wrong. The original plan was to choose a test pilot without a family, but Yeager argued that having a wife and little boy would make him more careful, and got the assignment. ![]() Jet engines didn’t have the thrust to push the airplane into the region of the speed of sound or beyond.” He nicknamed the X-1 the Glamorous Glennis, after his wife. You know, we’d been fooling around with jets. “It burned liquid oxygen and a mixture of five parts alcohol to one part water. “Basically, the X-1 was a pure rocket,” Yeager recalled in a 1997 interview with NOVA. ![]()
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