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00:32In the 1940s, the holy grail for pilots was to fly faster than the speed of sound.
00:39To do that meant confronting the mysterious sound barrier.
00:43For many, it resulted in death.
00:48But the demands of global conflict forced the great powers to confront the dangers and wage a secret war in
00:54the race to break the sound barrier.
00:56Their weapons would be strange wing shapes, mysterious tails and revolutionary engines.
01:03This is the story of Britain's struggle to keep its lead, its secrets and its technology in an international race
01:10with global consequences.
01:13For the winner, lay the key to the future domination of the skies.
01:19Which nation would be first to fly faster than the speed of sound?
01:34In the skies of a Nazi-occupied Europe, above Russia, Britain and across the Pacific, streamlined, high-speed, supercharged fighters
01:44engaged in epic duels.
01:51The demands of combat pushed aircraft beyond their limits.
01:59Pilots began to experience a mysterious and frightening phenomenon called compressibility.
02:11A lot of buffeting, vibration, very heavy and dangerous.
02:19And you get what is an effect forming ahead of you, a brick wall.
02:39Compressibility often caused a fatal loss of control and could shake an aircraft apart.
02:49It occurs as a plane approaches the speed of sound, about 660 miles per hour at high altitude.
03:00An aircraft in flight sends pressure waves ahead of it that break up the atmosphere and allow the aircraft to
03:06fly forward.
03:11As the plane approaches the speed of sound, it begins to catch up with its own pressure waves, and so
03:17the air piles up in front of the aircraft.
03:23The air is compressed and suddenly you run into this brick wall, which can have a very heavy effect on
03:31the flight handling characteristics of the aircraft.
03:47Because the catastrophic effects of compressibility kick in as a plane comes close to the speed of sound,
03:53pilots began to think of it as an impassable barrier.
03:58It became called the sound barrier.
04:04Many people, science fiction writers, even some scientists, doubted that it could ever be penetrated.
04:17The sound barrier became demonised.
04:20What could possibly be on the other side of it?
04:28Much was fictionalised about it.
04:32I mean, I've read accounts of if you went through it, you would return into being a child.
04:41Nonsenses of this kind were rife at that time.
04:45And uncertainty bred fear.
04:57There were a lot of grounds for believing that it wasn't going to be possible to go supersonic.
05:01For one, they had to solve the problem of controllability, carrying off the wings and so forth.
05:07These were practical problems.
05:11There was some feeling that the barrier would be impenetrable.
05:15There were some people that felt if you had sufficient power, then you would be able to penetrate it.
05:20But there were disagreements about whether this was feasible or not feasible.
05:24If flying any closer to the sound barrier carried such risk of death, such uncertainty, and was probably impossible,
05:33why would anyone choose to do it?
05:41The British were given no choice when they translated a secret German report in 1943.
05:48It contained astonishing news.
05:51And it said that the Germans were planning to make an aircraft to fly at 1,000 miles per hour.
06:041,000 miles per hour was twice the speed any Allied fighter was then capable of,
06:10and far more than the speed of sound, about 660 miles per hour at high altitude.
06:18National security demanded a British response.
06:22The fate of the nation was on the line.
06:30But how could any plane possibly be made to travel at 1,000 miles per hour?
06:35Everyone knew a propeller-powered plane could not exceed the speed of sound or break the sound barrier.
06:49In 1944, the Germans offered a glimpse into the future.
06:56A radical new threat to the Allies.
07:01A super-fast aircraft that had no propeller.
07:04The Messerschmitt 262.
07:07We didn't have anything that could match.
07:16They could get as many as two or three kills of bombers on one pass.
07:22It's power gave them a huge edge in combat.
07:26They had such a speed advantage, it was just unbelievable.
07:32These sleek German predators publicly revealed a revolutionary new power source, the jet engine.
07:40These first-generation jets could still not break the sound barrier,
07:44but they did offer the key to the future.
07:46I think the appearance of the jet engine on the aviation scene was the greatest thing that has happened in
07:55the last hundred years of flight.
07:57We moved into a completely new phase of high speed.
08:04Although the Nazis had got the first jet aircraft airborne,
08:08the British had also been working on jet technology for a decade.
08:12A British scientist named Frank Whittle had invented the turbojet engine.
08:22The decoded 1,000 miles an hour memo forced the British government to discover if it was possible to break
08:28the sound barrier.
08:35They obviously went to Frank Whittle and said,
08:38look, Germans are doing 1,000 miles an hour, can you produce an engine for this?
08:43And he said, well, by modifying this I can make you a supersonic engine
08:48which will produce these very high thrusts at these very high speeds.
08:54Frank Whittle proposed a new, massively enhanced jet engine to prove the capabilities of his invention.
09:03This would form the heart of a secret British plane
09:06to achieve the seemingly impossible task of breaking the sound barrier.
09:16It would carry Britain's hopes.
09:18Its name would be the M-52.
09:24The contract was given to the specialised aircraft company, Miles, based in Reading.
09:31Dennis Bancroft was Miles' chief aerodynamicist.
09:35He would have to call on all his ingenuity and imagination to achieve this miracle.
09:41The specification that Mr Miles was given consisted of six lines.
09:47First, to design and produce an aircraft to fly at 1,000 miles an hour with this Whittle engine.
09:57And the one other thing was they wanted it in nine months, which was really pretty impossible.
10:06Dennis would have to reinvent everything then known about manned flight.
10:12He was full of ideas, as all the Miles team were.
10:15Innovation was the trump card of the Miles team.
10:20Miles was undoubtedly the best company to take on this job because of their innovative ideas and designs.
10:26They were always ahead of the rest of the firms in the country at the time.
10:32Many leading scientists told Dennis he was wasting his time, that it was impossible.
10:37It was obviously something that nobody had ever done or even thought of doing before.
10:42And it was going to be very early for jet engines as well.
10:47The modest Miles team now led the way in what was about to become a global challenge.
10:55How could they get a man to fly through the sound barrier and survive?
11:20By 1944, the British and Germans led the way in a top-secret race to build a plane that could
11:26fly faster than the speed of sound.
11:32The winner would gain the secret to the future of air power.
11:38On a vast industrial scale, the Nazis explored various new concepts in high-speed flight and power.
11:48While in a more modest plant near Reading, Dennis Bancroft led the team designing the revolutionary Miles M-52.
12:00Abandoning every existing design concept, gradually a completely new aircraft shape evolved.
12:09More sci-fi than sci-fact.
12:26The basic shape of the fuselage was based on the shapes obtained from bullet firing tests at supersonic speeds.
12:44Bullets were the only things then known to fly supersonically, or beyond the speed of sound.
12:57In the 19th century, the Austrian scientist Ernst Mark used bullets to record the speed of sound, thereafter called Mark
13:05I.
13:08660 miles per hour at altitude, or 760 miles per hour at sea level.
13:15Solid lead was one thing, but many still believed it was impossible for a person to survive crossing the sound
13:22barrier.
13:29The only way to discover if the M-52 could survive the impact of high-speed flight was in a
13:35wind tunnel.
13:38But tests quickly revealed a new problem.
13:42As they began to simulate speeds approaching Mark I, the smoke in the wind tunnel choked and stalled.
13:50They were not able to go to supersonic speeds, and this was one of the reasons that a lot of
13:55scientists initially believed that it would be impossible to exceed the speed of sound.
14:01So if the M-52 hit the sound barrier, no one could even guess at what would happen next.
14:11It would take an extraordinary pilot to fly into such an unknown.
14:15The test pilot for the aircraft would be Captain Eric Brown, who would be doing the high-speed tests.
14:23Captain Brown certainly had the credentials for the job.
14:27Having pushed Spitfires to the limits of their high-speed endurance, he went on to achieve a number of aviation
14:33firsts for Britain.
14:38He had one characteristic vital to flying the M-52.
14:42The main factor, strangely enough, was I was not too tall.
14:48Nobody over five feet eight could have got into that cockpit and flown the aircraft.
14:56Like much of the M-52, the small cockpit was an innovative design.
15:01The whole cockpit was attached to the main body of the fuselage with four explosive bolts.
15:10And in an emergency, the pilot fired these bolts, which propelled it forward.
15:17The pilot could then carry out a normal bailout because he had a parachute in the cockpit.
15:25Men like Eric Brown, the first generation of high-speed test pilots,
15:30played a vital part leading the way into the truly unknown.
15:35I think to remember that there always is a lot of risk in this business.
15:41You have to have what it takes to climb into one of these planes and sit on top of all
15:46that power
15:47and fly it up to the very limits and maybe beyond.
15:56I think the prime requirement is to have a lack of imagination, really,
16:00and not think of what might happen to you.
16:07By 1944, the British and Germans both had jet fighters in service.
16:13But this was still not a priority for the U.S. military.
16:23But somehow, the Americans had got wind of the Miles project in Reading.
16:30The ministry told Miles aircraft to expect a team from the States
16:35and to give them all cooperation, data, performance figures, drawings, the lot on the Mars M-52.
16:43We would tell them all that we knew about supersonic flight,
16:46and then a fortnight or so later, we would go to America
16:48and they would tell us what they knew about supersonic flight.
16:54So we gave them all the information and provided them with the drawings,
16:57and they took those away, and within a week, when we tried to get to America,
17:03they said, sorry, the Pentagon says it's secret
17:05and we cannot divulge any information to Britain.
17:09So we had no information in return.
17:14I feel that they really haven't got anything to show us anyway,
17:18and that's why they weren't allowed to go back.
17:21The full might of the American armed forces now entered the race,
17:26if a little late.
17:29Over a year and a half after the M-52 specification had been issued,
17:33a contract was signed between the U.S. government and the mighty Bell Corporation
17:37to design and build a research plane capable of flying at Mark 1.
17:43Only time would reveal what, if anything,
17:46the Americans had learned from the M-52's design.
17:51The Bell X-1 was born.
17:57Its designers borrowed ideas and inspiration from wherever they could find them.
18:04Well, if we know a .50 caliber bullet routinely goes supersonic,
18:08let's design the nose of the plane like a .50 caliber bullet.
18:16The end of the war in Europe put the Germans out of the race.
18:25It also revealed an ironic translating mistake.
18:28The Germans had only ever attempted to reach 1,000 kilometers per hour,
18:32never miles per hour,
18:34actually less than Mark 1.
18:40never-the-less, the Nazi experiments in high-speed flight directly contributed to the Anglo-American efforts to break the
18:47sound barrier.
18:52Along with jet engines,
18:53the Germans had pioneered another form of high-power propulsion, the rocket motor,
18:58which had pushed the unmanned V-2 terror weapon past the sound barrier.
19:12The Americans adapted a rocket to power the X-1.
19:18In Britain, the large de Havilland aircraft company, which had produced some of the fastest British planes used in the
19:24war,
19:25were also quick to explore German innovations.
19:30Within two weeks of the end of the war, in May 1945,
19:34my boss and other colleagues went to Germany to interview senior people in their aircraft design industry,
19:44just to see what they've been up to.
19:46John Wimpenny's boss returned with some exciting discoveries from the German research.
19:54They had realized that if you swept the wing back,
19:58you could delay the effects of the speed of sound and the compressibility by significant amounts.
20:06De Havilland now had to discover how fast they could go using swept wings.
20:15John Wimpenny helped adapt the pioneering de Havilland vampire jet
20:20to create a revolutionary, experimental aircraft.
20:28It had all the potential to beat the world's speed record,
20:33and it had the possibility of breaking the sound barrier.
20:40Now there was a second British contender, the DH-108 Swallow,
20:44radically different from the M-52.
20:50Where the Swallow pioneered swept wings,
20:54the M-52 utilized traditional straight wings,
20:57but introduced the concept of an ultra-thin design.
21:04Flight tests revealed that traditional thick wings on planes like Mustangs
21:09actually increased the impact of compressibility.
21:14At miles, designer Dennis Bancroft hoped the M-52's slender wings
21:19would provide less resistance in high-speed flight,
21:22but would they work at low take-off and landing speeds?
21:28The new ultra-thin wings were tested on a small training aircraft.
21:35It was nicknamed the Gillette, because it was so sharp.
21:40And our engineers were wrapped up in sticky plaster,
21:43because they were getting cut, they were so sharp.
21:47The razor edge sliced through the air, and the wings proved to function well.
21:55Making up ground, the de Havilland Swallow and the Bell X-1
22:00both quickly went from the drawing board to the production line in less than a year.
22:07But with Whittle's enhanced engine, providing the required 6,000 pounds of thrust,
22:14it looked certain that Britain's M-52 would soon be the first to break the barrier.
22:39The Bell X-1
22:41December 1945.
22:43The Bell X-1, America's contender to break the sound barrier, is rolled out, ahead of its British rivals.
22:54Work continued on perfecting the four rocket motors,
22:57and delayed the X-1's first powered flight for a year.
23:02The interesting thing about the X-1 is that it was a mixture of total high-tech and very basic.
23:10The engines, the fuel compression, the fuels themselves, were very exotic for the period.
23:19The shape is very sophisticated.
23:22Other than that, the systems were very basic.
23:29Meanwhile, Britain's leading contender, the stunning M-52, had gained its final innovation.
23:38A unique tailplane.
23:46The tailplane on traditional aircraft only possessed a small moving section.
23:51Useless against compressibility when approaching the sound barrier.
24:02The M-52's tailplane would be one solid piece, and the whole thing would move.
24:10It was hoped that this all-moving tailplane would give test pilot Eric Brown more control.
24:18It was an innovative design of gigantic proportions.
24:25We were moving into a completely new era of flight.
24:31And here we were, top of the heap, so to speak.
24:35I would say 15 months ahead of the Americans, that stage.
24:42By 1946, we had reached about 80 percent completion of the aeroplane,
24:47and it would have flown supersonically in about three months at a time.
24:53The Miles team felt proud of what they had achieved in two years, until some shocking news arrived.
25:00On the 13th of March, FG Miles received a message cancelling the M-52,
25:09and saying that they were not interested in us continuing it with it.
25:18Without warning, the government scrapped the M-52,
25:22the leading contender in the race to break the sound barrier.
25:30The cancellation of the M-52 was, without doubt, the most catastrophic event in the annals of British aviation.
25:38And when the news was announced to FG Miles, there was nothing but dismay in the drawing offices.
25:45They were completely dumbfounded.
25:48Well, I mean, we were extremely disgusted with the whole thing.
25:52Great disappointment and bewilderment, because we were all certain that it was going to be a success.
26:00For the man who would have been the first to try and take the M-52 through the sound barrier,
26:06it was devastating news.
26:09I was hopping mad, because I felt that we were on the road to success,
26:19and there was no, in my opinion, no logical explanation to justify this cancellation.
26:29The government never provided any real justification.
26:33There were a multitude of reasons given, none of which were, I believe, anything but red herrings.
26:39Various sources blame politics, escalating costs, disputes with Frank Whittle,
26:45the lack of a swept wing, and even the risk to the test pilot.
26:51And I said, well, since I was going to be the pilot, why hadn't I been asked whether I was,
26:57had any worries about or concerns?
27:01But I got nowhere I'm afraid on that line.
27:07Almost 60 years later, it is still not known why the groundbreaking M-52 was cancelled.
27:15But its innovations would live to fly another day.
27:28The cancellation left one British team still in the race.
27:35John Wimpany watched nervously as the graceful DH-108 swallow made its first flight.
27:43Well, naturally, one can't help feeling butterflies in the tummy.
27:48I'd be dishonest if I said otherwise.
27:52You see the aircraft take off fairly rapidly, diminishes to a little speck in the sky.
28:00And then, of course, you wait to see this little speck reappear
28:04from the opposite direction when it's coming into land.
28:09The swallow proved capable of very high speeds.
28:14Flown by de Havilland's chief test pilot and son of the company's founder,
28:19Geoffrey de Havilland, Jr.
28:21Geoffrey was big, hearty. I mean, he was a pretty solid chap.
28:27And a delightful personality, easy-going, a brilliant pilot.
28:35De Havilland, Jr. loved pushing the first truly swept-wing jet to its limits.
28:40The 3,000-pound thrust engine quickly powered its sleek shape
28:45to within sight of the world's speed record of 616 miles per hour.
28:51On the 27th of September 1946,
28:54de Havilland took off on a practice run for the record-breaking attempt.
29:00In a sunny late afternoon, he climbed through the clouds.
29:08His aim was to dive to speeds at the very edge of the sound barrier
29:11and see how the swallow handled at full power.
29:18They dived from 10,000 down to 7,000 feet.
29:23And he was doing a Mach number of 0.875.
29:31This was almost 90% of the speed of sound,
29:35as fast as any aircraft had safely managed to fly at that time.
29:41And then, suddenly, the aircraft starts doing this as it goes along.
29:51The aviation doctors say that
29:54that will induce unconsciousness in 10 seconds.
30:05And it built up to such a degree
30:08that the wings were given too much of a load and broke off.
30:16And it is almost certain that his head struck the canopy
30:20in one of these oscillations and broke his neck.
30:36The swallow's wreckage was scattered across the Thames estuary.
30:44Geoffrey de Havilland Jr.'s body was washed up near Whitstable.
30:49The sound barrier had claimed another victim.
30:54The news of the death of Geoffrey de Havilland, of course,
30:58was very, very devastating.
31:02Everyone was very, very sad about that.
31:05But nevertheless, one simply had to press on if one really felt that
31:11it was worthwhile so you don't give up.
31:17The swallow would still play a key role in Britain's battle with the barrier.
31:24Everybody else in the business, of course,
31:26was acutely aware of what happened to the British and Geoffrey de Havilland.
31:30And, in fact, that reinforced the idea that this sonic wall is something to be treated with great respect.
31:43Other powers were not deterred by this tragedy or the risk.
31:47The Russian bear was about to enter the race.
31:54The Russians were given a start when the British sold them their latest jet engine design in 1946,
32:00even though Soviet forces had occupied most of East Europe.
32:07The Russian bear was about to enter the race.
32:08Now fearful of the West's technology lead and of U.S. atomic power,
32:12Stalin demanded the Soviet Union catch up.
32:16He knew that whichever nation cracked the secret of supersonic flight would dominate the skies,
32:22even in a Cold War.
32:26After the initial flights, the American military speeded up the X-1's test program from mid-1947.
32:35The man now chosen to fly the X-1 would be 24-year-old Captain Chuck Yeager.
32:41Number one, I could fly airplanes. I'd been to test pilot school and I understood machinery.
32:46The X-1 would blow up on you real easy if you didn't know the system.
32:49And a lot of the systems in the X-1 were systems that my dad used in the natural gas
32:55fields in West Virginia.
32:57And so it was easy for me.
32:59Lieutenant Bob Hoover would be his backup and chase pilot.
33:04Chuck Yeager was just the greatest pilot I'd ever encountered.
33:08And then we became very good friends.
33:11Both men had been distinguished fighter pilots in the war,
33:14with Yeager scoring five kills in one day.
33:24The U.S. attempt on Mark I would take place far away from prying eyes,
33:30in the middle of the Californian Mojave Desert at Muroc.
33:38We are here because of an accident of geology that gave us the world's
33:42biggest and most superb natural landing field, and that is Muroc Dry Lake.
33:50Roughly 12 miles along, 8 miles across.
33:57The speed to be attempted in each test flight was increased in stages.
34:05Jager's 8th powered flight, the 10th of October 1947, the aim to go 94% of Mark I.
34:15The fastest speed ever flown in controlled flight.
34:22A converted B-29 bomber carried the X-1 aloft, as its four highly volatile rockets could only be fired
34:30for a few minutes.
34:38Once dropped, Jager could then use all the rocket's power to gain speed,
34:43and enter the danger zone, as compressibility hit.
34:50When we got the airplane up to 94% of the speed of sound,
34:53and I was sitting out there, and I decided to turn the airplane,
34:58I pulled back on the control car, nothing happened.
35:01The airplane just went the way it was headed, and said, man, we've got a problem.
35:05Flying faster than anyone had before, Jager had lost control of the X-1.
35:13Would the sound barrier claim another victim?
35:25October 1947.
35:28Piloting America's X-1, Chuck Jager is flying faster than anyone has before.
35:33But he has lost control of his aircraft.
35:40He could shove back and forth on the stick, and absolutely nothing would happen.
35:44The nose stayed glued right to the horizon.
35:47A horrifying experience for any pilot.
35:50I said, man, we've got a problem.
35:51So I raked the rockets off, and jettisoned the liquid oxygen and alcohol,
35:56and came down and landed, and got the engineers together.
35:59We had a little heart-to-heart talk.
36:00We've got a problem.
36:02Could the X-1 be made safe at such speeds?
36:06The engineering team found a feature on the X-1 that had never been made operational.
36:11An all-moving tail plane, or horizontal stabilizer.
36:15And Jack Ridley, who was our engineer on the program, said,
36:20we could make this horizontal stabilizer movable,
36:24and then that would give you more power on the elevators.
36:29We called it a flying tail.
36:34Larry Bell had designed an adjustable horizontal stabilizer.
36:39This was not a new invention, but he thought it might be handy to put it in there to refine
36:44the handling of the airplane.
36:46There would be fatal consequences if the all-moving tail plane failed on its next flight.
36:59The thing to remember about October 14, 1947, is that it was just another working day.
37:06It was flight number nine in this particular series.
37:12That particular morning, it was pretty chilly out there on the ramp.
37:16And I remember Chuck and I were sitting there in my car out of the cold until
37:22they'd finished up the refueling process.
37:26You have Jaeger, you have the Sound Barrier, which could have torn him apart,
37:31and quite a few people thought it would.
37:35At least four US government scientists on the team
37:38predicted disaster if the X-1 went any closer to Mark 1.
37:46Most people do not realize the risk that was involved.
37:54He had to not only concentrate on flying, but keeping a certain amount of pressure
38:00for the different kinds of fuels. And they were fuels that could believe the kingdom come.
38:05The rocket fuel comprised sub-zero liquid oxygen and highly unstable alcohol.
38:12Some have called it flying a streamlined bomb. And given the volatile nature of the propellants,
38:17you're sitting on so many potential sticks of dynamite.
38:22There was no escape from the X-1. There was no seat ejection.
38:28And if you got out of it, you'd go right into the wing and the tail.
38:47The B-29 carried the X-1 slowly to 20,000 feet.
38:54Hoover raced ahead in his jet chase plane.
38:59I would be on my way to altitude, because it would take me forever to get there.
39:03Speed, road altitude at 210 miles per hour, Charlie.
39:08Yeager took the lift down into the freezing cold X-1, held only by a strap below the B-29.
39:17They let you down until you're opposite the door and you slide in feet first.
39:23Asked if he was good to go, Yeager replied,
39:26Hell yes. Let's get it over with.
39:28It was 10-26.
39:36Five, three, two, one.
39:44Okay, drop it.
39:47Drop.
40:01When he came out of the darkness into the sunlight,
40:05he could look up and see my contrail, and he'd go for it.
40:10Yeager ignited each of the four rockets and was thrown back in his seat.
40:22As the X-1 neared the speed of sound, compressibility hit.
40:26Yeager struggled to maintain control.
40:30The nose begins to come up on the airplane.
40:33I just crank the leading edge up on the horizontal stabilizer, keep the nose down.
40:40Below, the handful of anxious spectators lost sight of the streaking aircraft.
40:52Miles away, they heard a huge explosion.
40:56And there were a lot of people here at Muroc who heard that and thought,
40:59my God, Yeager's blown up.
41:01Well, they could see the vapor trail, they could hear the explosion, what would they expect?
41:07The world had heard its first sonic boom.
41:12I was an eight-tenths Mach number, and I felt like I was sitting still.
41:16Just hanging there, he was right on by me.
41:22Mach meter went off the scale.
41:25When it did, all the buffeting smoothed out,
41:28because there was a supersonic flow with the whole airplane.
41:30And even I knew that we'd gotten above the speed of sound.
41:35Yeager became the first man to see the far side of the sound barrier
41:39and found nothing but tranquility.
41:46He had reached Mark 1.06, 700 miles per hour at 43,000 feet in a total flight time of
41:5614 minutes.
42:02The sound barrier had finally been broken, and Yeager had earned his place in the history books.
42:17When he went by me, I took a picture.
42:20And somebody flew all night, so we had that on President Truman's desk the next morning.
42:30The X-1 team went out to celebrate.
42:33We were having a great time, and then somebody came in and said,
42:38this is top secret.
42:41We all looked at one another.
42:45Everybody already knew what had happened, but it was not publicized for a long, long time afterwards.
42:53The Americans had discovered the secret of breaking the sound barrier.
42:57And wanted to keep it for themselves.
43:00We found out, in order to control the airplane through Mach 1, we had to have a flying tail on
43:06it.
43:06That really was the answer to flying at supersonic speed.
43:12They didn't want the Russians to know about this movable tail.
43:22When it became public, the British M52 team felt robbed.
43:33As far as I know, the Bell people took the idea from us that an all-moving tail plane was
43:41desirable.
43:42Months before the X-1 had even been commissioned, a US team had been given access to the Miles design.
43:50My personal view is that when we handed over all the data,
43:58we gave the Americans the flying tail.
44:02American government scientists had put the need for a moving tail plane in the X-1's specification.
44:09This feature was in the original Bell design, but wasn't particularly designed with that in mind.
44:14It was just happy use of a facility which was already there.
44:19The British claimed to know exactly what it was there for.
44:23A moving tail plane is absolutely essential to a supersonic aeroplane.
44:28It was known in 1943, therefore we put it on.
44:34I do not have any knowledge of British engineering being involved in that kind of development,
44:42though they well could have been, and I just didn't know about it.
44:47Frankly, I do not believe that they could have gone supersonic so early.
44:53Without the data we passed on to them.
44:58Almost exactly a year after Jaeger's historic flight, the British M52 had its own moment of glory.
45:07Britain had continued its research into high-speed flight using unmanned test vehicles.
45:15In 1948, a rocket-powered scale model of the M52 was dropped from a mother plane,
45:21and quickly broke the sound barrier.
45:25Along with tests conducted by Rolls-Royce in the 1970s,
45:29this seemed to prove the M52 would have flown at 1,000 miles per hour,
45:33about one and a half times the speed of sound.
45:42Dennis Bancroft and the M52 had been vindicated.
45:48And the de Havilland team won the runners-up prize in 1948, when a DH-108 Swallow also achieved Mark
45:551 in an uncontrolled dive.
45:59Quickly followed by the Russians, whose copied British jet engine powered what they claimed to be the first supersonic fighter.
46:09And the man who got so close to being the first through the barrier finally got his chance to make
46:14his own sonic boom when on secondment in the United States.
46:20We had to prove it by making the boom over the airfield.
46:31And unfortunately, my boom broke the Admiral's greenhouse.
46:37So after the flight, I was on the carpet for that, and the Admiral fined me, I think it was
46:42$30.
46:48The RAF did not receive its first operational supersonic fighter until 1960,
46:54years after the Russians and the U.S. Air Force.
47:01Speed records continued to be broken, but it was the X-1 that had finally dispelled the myth of the
47:08sound barrier.
47:11It got rid of a demon, if you like.
47:17Many people believed it couldn't be done, so it got rid of that demon.
47:23Now we had proof that human beings in conventional aircraft could go faster than the speed of sound.
47:30Now let's look forward.
47:34The X-1 was merely the first in a family of experimental X-planes that would eventually take man to
47:42the moon.
47:43Chuck pioneered going into space.
47:46He proved that the sound barrier didn't exist.
47:51That opened up the frontier for all kinds of developments in that chain reaction for the future.
48:30As the plane approaches the speed of sound.
48:32As the plane approaches the speed of sound.
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