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. Nobody is going to know the effects of that until the car actually does go supersonic.“Basically, the X-1 was a pure rocket,” Yeager recalled in a 1997 interview with NOVA. It would sound like the thunder before an epic storm to anyone who didn’t know what was really going on.Īlso unlike a plane, the sonic boom Bloodhound will generate when it does rip through the sound barrier will hit the ground rather than going off in the air. Because of this, pressure at the front of the vehicle skyrockets into supersonic shock waves that the human eye can’t see, but the human ear can definitely hear when they merge together into a fantastic boom. Air molecules then begin to compress because they just can’t keep up with that. When something goes that fast for long distances, it outruns the sound waves it creates. Another is the massive shockwave phenomenon otherwise known as sonic boom. Aerodynamic drag is just one side effect of breaking the speed of sound, and the drag when Bloodhound finally gets there is going to be tremendous. For something that is meant to stay on Earth and not reach Mach-whatever in the air, it means an immense amount of strain.

Going beyond the speed of sound might sound easy for a supervehicle like the Bloodhound. Zoom over here to find out what it’s like to be in the cockpit. I’m told it’s amazing to watch,” Green said in his latest monthly diary entry tracking Bloodhound’s progress. “The one thing I can’t tell you is what the car looks like when it’s running at high speed. Just to give you an idea, that same engine is used in some fighter planes. He’s behind the wheel of 7 tons of metal with a Rolls-Royce EJ200 turbo jet engine. Developed at Swansea University, Wales, is going to be ripping through the desert for the next year and a half, trying to crush that barrier and the land speed record of 763 mph.īy the way, the same former Royal Air Force pilot who broke that land speed record in another jet-powered vehicle (Thrust SSC) has been gunning this thing around. If the jet engine and built-in parachute braking system aren’t badass enough - never mind the name Bloodhound - it’s been tearing around the Kalahari Desert in South Africa and recently hit 501 mph. There is now actually such a thing as a car-on-steroids designed to reach supersonic speeds.

You won't even think it's a big deal that it doesn't actually fly. For anyone who’s ever dreamed of owning one of those flying cars from Blade Runner or stealing Han Solo’s iconic Star Wars ride, the Millennium Falcon, the Bloodhound is kind of like a mashup of both.

Speed of sound jet