The First Supersonic Flight Is Still Astounding 70 Years Later

(light, techy music)

[Narrator] One day soon,

if projects like this get approved,

supersonic passenger flight could be a reality again.

NASA is working on this low-boom flight demonstrator,

which could trim trips from LA to New York

to just two and a half hours.

That means flights at faster than the speed of sound,

something that regular folks

haven't been able to experience since Concord.

But none of this would've been possible

without daring experiments 70 years ago

over the Mojave Desert in southern California.

[70s Announcer] Through the sound barrier

the first time ever... On October 14th, 1947,

Chuck Yeager officially flew at Mach 1.06

or just over the speed of sound

in a Bell X-1, a rocket-powered plane

that was hoisted 23,000 feet into the air

slung underneath a B-50 Superfortress.

He became the fastest man on Earth

and the aircraft became the first

of a long line of experimental X planes.

Legend has it that Yeager had broken two ribs

after being thrown off his horse the night before,

so he used a bit of broomstick to close the cockpit

because his injury prevented him

from reaching over with his hand.

The flight was a monumental achievement,

the culmination of decades of theoretical work,

top-secret wartime projects,

and in the end, international collaboration.

In the early days of flight,

engineers thought it was impossible to fly that quickly,

that the speed of sound in air, over 700 miles an hour,

was literally a barrier.

But those velocities, aerodynamics get wacky.

There's a sudden increase in drag,

so planes need more and more power

just to keep moving forwards.

That also makes an aircraft incredibly hard to control,

which is why Yeager's flight was so gutsy.

Shockwaves can build up on control surfaces,

like flaps and the tail, making them impossible to move.

Controls can even flip at transsonic speeds.

A push to the left leads to a flip to the right.

Yeager could easily have joined the long list of test pilots

who died pushing the limits of flight.

The X-1 was designed to get around the issues

by being shaped like a bullet,

something that engineers knew was stable at high speeds.

When an object does punch through

the barrier of sound waves,

anyone nearby hears a large crack or boom,

which the anxious spectators watching Yeager's flight

heard like distant thunder.

That was one of Concord's biggest problems.

Its boom was so loud that regulators

wouldn't let it fly over land.

(sonic boom cracking)

Limited to trans-Atlantic routes,

chiefly from New York to London and Paris,

the plane was never an economic success,

and after a crash in 2000, which killed 113 people,

and the general downturn in aviation

after the September the 11th attacks,

Concord was retired in 2003.

Now, military supersonic flight is routine.

The mighty SR-71 Blackbird showed that

cruising at over three times the speed of sound was easy.

Yet the traveling public is still stuck

at the relatively slow, certainly subsonic speeds

of passenger jets, for now.

But with companies like Airon Corporation

and Boom Technology working on updated,

super-fast plane designs that could

enter service within the next decade,

the X-1's legacy flies on.

(light, techy music)