The Miles M.52 was bullet-shaped with a pointed cone nose, cylindrical fuselage, razor-thin wings and powered by a Whittle jet engine specifically designed for supersonic speeds – due ‘to be in flight in early 1946’. But was it a doomed project due to poor execution – or a stunning design ahead of its time cut short before it could prove itself? Rockets, wings and tails The result was the top secret Miles M.52. the design and construction of what was to be the world's first supersonic aircraft.’Īs the project evolved during the final months of 1943, Miles was told to build a single-engined aircraft capable of reaching 1,000 mph in level flight: double the 500mph top speed of aircraft then in use. The man who wrote these words was Don Brown, the personal assistant to George Miles, the technical director of Miles Aircraft Ltd in Reading, which in 1943 was given ‘the most ambitious and advanced research project ever attempted in the history of aeronautics. Its path as determined by the radar corresponded roughly to a bomb trajectory!’ ‘Four and a half seconds later, the chasing Meteor reported an explosion, and the A.2 disappeared into cloud. It was not to be their lucky day: the A.2 ‘rolled slowly over on to its back, and when the rocket motor should have ignited 15 seconds after release it failed to do so’. Powered by a rocket engine from the Royal Aircraft Establishm ent, Farnborough, it was theoretically capable of between 800mph and 1,000mph, taking it well beyond the sound barrier. This unmanned aircraft, the A.2, was in fact a 30 per cent scale model of a British supersonic prototype jet, the Miles M.52 – and was intended to prove concept. Six days before, a very similar-looking plane was dropped from a modified de Havilland Mosquito at 35,500 feet over the Atlantic ocean, west of Land’s End. ( Related: How Concorde pushed the limits – then pushed them too far.) He was the first pilot to control a craft beyond the speed of sound. In the moments that followed, the aircraft – nicknamed, like all Yeager's craft, ‘Glamorous Glennis’ after his wife – reached Mach 1.05, or about 700 miles per hour. He was flying the Bell X-1, which had been dropped from a modified B-29 bomber at 26,000 feet, before sequentially opening the taps on the aircraft’s four rockets. Scott Kelly, a Nasa astronaut, said Yeager was a “true legend with the right stuff”.On 14 October 1947, travelling 45,000 feet above the Mojave desert in California, Major Chuck Yeager of the United States Air Force broke the sound barrier. Yeager, however, would go on to train 26 people who went into orbit as Nasa astronauts as part of the Gemini and Apollo programmes. The secret to my success was that somehow I always managed to live to fly another day.” “If there is such a thing as the right stuff in piloting, then it is experience. “All I know is I worked my tail off learning to learn how to fly, and worked hard at it all the way,” he wrote. Yeager was less certain of the notion of the right stuff as a gift – dismissing it in one interview as not worth a “rat’s fanny” – preferring to emphasise the hard work involved. Ironically while the story of his first supersonic flight is now well known, at the time it was initially kept secret by the US Air Force because of its military significance, with details leaking out a few months later. Hershey played his then wife, Glennis, in the film. “A career in flying was like climbing one of those ancient Babylonian pyramids made up of a dizzy progression of steps and ledges,” wrote Wolfe, “a ziggurat, a pyramid extraordinarily high and steep and the idea was to prove at every foot of the way up that pyramid that you were one of the elected and anointed ones who had the right stuff.”Ĭhuck Yeager and actor Barbara Hershey at a 20th anniversary screening of The Right Stuff in Hollywood in 2003. While Wolfe never succinctly defined what he meant by “the right stuff” or “righteousness”, Yeager, who grew up in the hills of West Virginia, encapsulated it for him as the man who was “the most righteous of all the possessors of the right stuff”. It was Yeager’s depiction in Wolfe’s book, however, chronicling the early days of the US space programme and the test pilots who made up the first ranks of astronauts, that cemented the myth, reinforced by Sam Shephard’s depiction of him in the subsequent film. The fact of the first supersonic flight was one thing. An incredible life well lived, America’s greatest Pilot, & a legacy of strength, adventure, & patriotism will be remembered forever.- Chuck Yeager December 8, 2020 Fr It is w/ profound sorrow, I must tell you that my life love General Chuck Yeager passed just before 9pm ET.
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