Chuck Yeager, the test pilot who first broke the sound barrier and became the epitome of the pilot with "the right stuff," punched through again today on the 50th anniversary of his historic flight.
Piloting an F-15 jet fighter, the 74-year-old Yeager sent a sonic boom thundering across the Mojave Desert shortly after 10:30 a.m.Leaving a white contrail like a chalk mark across a cloudless sky, Yeager radioed from the cockpit, "I'm smoking along at about 1.35." He meant 1.35 times the speed of sound, or roughly 900-950 mph.
Edwards is home to the Air Force Flight Test Center where Yeager became the first to fly faster than sound.
For the 50th anniversary of Yeager's flight in the Bell X-1, the U.S. Postal Service is issuing a stamp. A street at Edwards Air Force Base will be named after him.
Yeager will continue to fly for industry, but the flight today, at the 50th anniversary ceremonies, will be his last in an Air Force plane, he said.
"I'll miss military flying. I've been doing it 55 years," he said in a recent interview with The Associated Press. "I've been very lucky . . . I might as well hang it up while I'm on top."
Yeager's flight through the sound barrier heralded the dawn of the space age in a time of secrecy and Cold War with the former Soviet Union.
Some scientists had feared there was literally a "sound barrier:" an invisible wall of air they thought might smash any airplane going faster than sound.
But on Oct. 14, 1947, Yeager eased into the little X-1 rocket plane and took off.
The X-1 bucked, its airspeed indicator needle bouncing. There was no safe way to bail out. Suddenly, Yeager was flying slightly faster than the air could carry the shriek of his own speeding plane.