Who was the first to break the sound barrier?

Originally posted by Broadsword20068
Germany built the Bell X-1??

- No of course not.

But the variable sweep Bell X - 5 was a reworking of the Messerchmitt P.1101.

(I also think there are ways of determining an element of 'proof' about this.

Waynos is 100% correct, WW2 prop planes couldn't go supersonic.

For a start the propeller blades would have to be going supersonic long before the rest of the plane and, due to their design and materials used in construction, they just couldn't do that and then there is a load of flow-dynamics stuff regarding the ability of the prop to shift sufficient air to create enough thrust which, again given the designs then used, mean it was impossible too.

As for the Me 262 and Me 163 - or even the Meteor or Vampire - the wing aerofoil section will tell you everything you need to know.
These planes couldn't go supersonic not even in a 90' dive at max power. They would go fast enough to enter the transonic unstable regime at around mach .85 or so but they most certainly would not emerge into the smooth supersonic flight condition - which they would have to do if they truely did manage to piece he 'sound barrier'.)

Interesting as many of the German late war jet designs were they were at the infancy of all this.....the essential 'flying tail' was just around the corner but never crossed anyone's mind at that point, for instance.

If you want to see what they thought they needed for supersonic flight check out the Lippisch and Horten designed Ho XIIIb.


It's no Blackbird is it?

(apologies this is the best I could come up with]

[edit on 12-1-2005 by sminkeypinkey]

Chuck yeager was the frst man to fly a plane through the sound barrier in controlled flight, however a british (not german) company which was working on one of the two british supersonic planes did manage to break the sound barrer in a dive but only in a dve. However when the head test pilot who was also the son of the companies owner died in just such a dive it put the project on hold and was shortly thereafter cancelled by the british gov.
Names escape me at the moment however i am pretty sure of the facts as they had archival video footage on the program that i saw it on. Discovery channell of course.

The British project that was ahead of the X-1 was the Miles M.52, it is covered elsewhere on ATS, with the actual prototype well under construction and victory in the supersonic race in sight the British Govt ordered all work on it stopped, claiming that supersonic aircraft would not be needed for another ten years. The one success of the M.52 programme was that it gave the world the 'flying tail' as used by the X-1, F-86 and almost every supersonic aircraft ever since. This was first flown on the Miles 'Gillette Falcon' a conversion of a standard Miles Falcon created to test the very thin wing section of the M.52 (hence the name).

The other project, the one in which the designers son was killed, was the De Havilland DH.108 I showed earlier and the designers son was Geoffrey De Havilland Jnr. It was not before the X-1 however but a few months after it , Yeager is definitely the record holder. The DH.108's claim to fame was that it was the first aircraft to take off under its own power, break the sound barrier and then land conventionally. The first 'practical' supersonic plane if you like. Practical but evidently not safe.

Originally posted by mwm1331
Chuck yeager was the frst man to fly a plane through the sound barrier in controlled flight, however a british (not german) company which was working on one of the two british supersonic planes did manage to break the sound barrer in a dive but only in a dve. However when the head test pilot who was also the son of the companies owner died in just such a dive it put the project on hold and was shortly thereafter cancelled by the british gov.
Names escape me at the moment however i am pretty sure of the facts as they had archival video footage on the program that i saw it on. Discovery channell of course.

Are you positive about that? I am just wondering, because I had read that it was found to be physically impossible to take a plane into a dive and go faster than sound and live; once you went past that barrier, in a dive, you were a goner. That was why so many pilots came very very close to the speed of sound in a dive, but never actually broke it (as far as I've read....could be wrong).

^^^^ That applies to propeller driven aircraft but not jets, several early jets were supersonic in a shallow dive, even the HP Victor bomber, the first four engined type to go supersonic. However his post was flawed, see my explanation above your own post.

it is definitely chuck yaeger. i dont know who told you that a german pilot did it, but it was not true.lol

Originally posted by waynos
The British project that was ahead of the X-1 was the Miles M.52, it is covered elsewhere on ATS, with the actual prototype well under construction and victory in the supersonic race in sight the British Govt ordered all work on it stopped, claiming that supersonic aircraft would not be needed for another ten years. The one success of the M.52 programme was that it gave the world the 'flying tail' as used by the X-1, F-86 and almost every supersonic aircraft ever since. This was first flown on the Miles 'Gillette Falcon' a conversion of a standard Miles Falcon created to test the very thin wing section of the M.52 (hence the name).

Nothing compared to the shame that is what the Canadian government did to the Avro Arrow... not only was it cancelled, all evidence was destroyed, desipte some of the immensly advanced concepts in it ....

I hate Deifenbaker....

Osiris

Originally posted by Echotebarknwhale
I forget what his name is, but it is not Chuck Yeager. I believe that he was german and it was in the late 1930's or early 1940's. Does anyone know his name?

It was my wife. Years ago, Coach was having a year end clearance sale. Never saw a Kia go so fast. Sea level too...amazing.

otlg 27, that is one of the really odd things about the cancellation of the TSR.2 as well, not content with merely axing the best bomber in the world the British Govt ordered all trace o9f it destroyed, all the drawings, production jigs, everything! It was a concerted effort to make sure it could not be revived. The prototype XR222 that is on display a Duxford only survived after it was rescued by personnel og the gunnery range it was sent to for destruction. Truly scandalous, as with the Arrow. Still, thats a story for another thread I reckon.

Originally posted by Echotebarknwhale
I forget what his name is, but it is not Chuck Yeager. I believe that he was german and it was in the late 1930's or early 1940's. Does anyone know his name?

Yeager was the first person to exceed the speed of sound who lived to talk about it! Several Aircraft reach Mach 1 before Yeagar, but they all desintegrated, as far as I know. However there was an RAF Pilot who reach Mach .96 or .97 and survived to talk about it, but he was still high subsonic/ transsonic, but not supersonic!

Tim
ATS Director of Counter-Ignorance

Klaus von Bulow(?) came up with the idea of the swept wing in the thirties and said if you wanted to go supersonic you needed one. He was ridiculed, at the same conference one of the other designers drew a plane with swept wings, swept tail and swept propeller and called it von Bulow's (again, have I got the right name?) 'plane.

Everyone knew you couldn't go supersonic with a prop, the physics mitigate against it. Even when Typhoons went into dives and experienced the extreme buffeting described they were not supersonic.

The Komet could have done it, in a dive, but I've never read of a Komet pilot flying a powered dive. Of course that doesn't mean it didn't happen but given all the hoopla over Yeager's flight I'm sure some old Luftwaffe guy would have come out by now saying "I did it first".

As a footnote to the Komet and Me 262 speculation I have since read that no Komets were ever dived under power, entirely because of the risk of explosion should the C-stoff and T-stoff come into contact with each other, as many Komets exploded on the ground when this happened if the plane flipped on landing etc. A supersonic dive in a glide would seem to be stretching things a little, also Willy Messerschmitt himself concluded that the Me 262 airframe was incapable of withstanding speeds in excess of Mach 0.86 and this finding was confirmed by the boffins at RAE Farnborough in a series of postwar experiments so that would appear to put the tin lid on that theory.

I forgot to add that a DFS Rocket powered prototype was captured by the Russians in 1945 which was transported back to the USSR and the story is that it was completed and became the first Russian plane to beat Mach 1 in 'early 1947', however I have not been able to confirm this but if there is any truth in it (ie it happened but not before Yeager might be realistic) then it would seem that the Germans were trying to beat mach 1 but not with the aforementioned fighters.

James Blonde says:

"Look this is a matter of principle, Yeager is always credited with the first through the sound barrier thing which is and always has been false."

James, if it really makes you feel better about the world situation for you to believe this, then by all means do so.

"Once again you yanks are sore about being pipped by the good old Germans who have always been streets ahead anyway being the 'master race' and all that (Well at jet building anyway they practically built the Bell X-1 for you)."

Not with the atomic bomb. We stole the atomic bomb from the Brits, if I recall.

Or maybe the French.

"...dont be surprised when the rest of the world starts laughing."

Ahhh. so that's what that rustling noise is.

I think you may be thinking of this back in 2001.

Pilot claims he broke sound barrier first

It was never proved as far as I know...

Pilot claims he broke sound barrier first

BERLIN (AP) — A former Luftwaffe pilot says he broke the sound barrier first — not Chuck Yeager. But the German's claim cannot be verified, at least not yet.

Flying alone over Austria on April 9, 1945, at the end of World War II, Hans Guido Mutke pushed his Messerschmitt 262 to full throttle in hopes of reaching a friend who had bailed out under U.S. attack.

Mutke says he later realized the shaking and loss of control he felt before the plane reached 690 mph meant he had broken the sound barrier.

"I knew nothing about a sound barrier," he said Thursday from Munich. "I just went full speed to help a comrade."

Now age 79 and a retired doctor, Mutke has asked an aeronautics professor to help substantiate his claim using computer simulation.

By all accepted accounts, on Oct. 14, 1947, Yeager was the first human to break the sound barrier when he flew his rocket-powered X-1 over Rogers Dry Lake in southern California.

Mutke said he was cruising at 40,000 feet when he heard of his friend's trouble and went into a dive. As his jet accelerated, he said he felt his plane "buffeting" — a known phenomenon of vibration before reaching the speed of sound.

Mutke believes he then went supersonic — something test pilots hadn't done previously because they usually backed off when their planes shook.

"It's like when you pass a finger slowly through a candle flame and your finger gets burned. When you move it quickly, then nothing happens," said Mutke. "I went so fast through the buffeting area that it was only heavily damaged, both engines lost function and the rivets flew out of the wings."

After landing because of the damage to his plane, Mutke denied to superiors that he had exceeded 590 mph — the top speed then allowed.

There had been several unexplained Me262 crashes earlier that Mutke speculates were caused when pilots broke the sound barrier and paid with their lives.

"I always said the first person who broke the sound barrier is the unknown pilot, exactly as we have the unknown soldier," Mutke said.

For the last several years, Otto Wagner, a professor at Munich's Technical University, has done computer simulations to try to verify Mutke's claim. He has been able to simulate the Me262 at Mach 1.02 — just above the speed of sound — but he says the basic data on the plane's aerodynamics are not reliable. He's now trying to obtain wind tunnel studies from 1944 at the Messerschmitt factory in Berlin to do a more accurate simulation.

"If I had better data, then I could say it was faster than sound or not," Wagner said. "Now I can't say anything."

But the head of the Deutsches Museum air and space collection — which houses another Me262 flown by Mutke — rejects the pilot's claim.

"In science, you have to be able to reproduce something to put it on the record," said Matthias Knopp, a physicist. "If someone says they did it, but it can't be reproduced, then many could say that they have done it."

Originally posted by skippytjc


It was my wife. Years ago, Coach was having a year end clearance sale. Never saw a Kia go so fast. Sea level too...amazing.

LMAO!!! sounds like my mother!!! Von Maur having a opening sale!!
theres also a supersonic Mercedes, thats to my mother!

possibly what our British airman is alluding to is the fact that the prop tips of most WWII aircraft operated near sonic velocities in level flight, and in some cases exceeded the sound barrier in a dive situation. Resulting in a trans-sonic situation, this is understandable.
I find it very difficult to believe that a piston-powered aircraft would be capable of generating enough horsepower to spin a prop fast enough to pull any aircraft through the sound barrier iin straight and level flight.
Why do you think survivors were coming back with moderate to severe prop damage?
I think the point has been clarified that the sound barrier record in question, involved a sustained, controlled straight and level flight.


[edit on 22-1-2005 by 82dftw]

United States stole the atomic bomb from Britain?? My understanding was the U.S. was working on the program, but then Albert Einstein came over to inform the U.S. that Hitler was working on the same project, and helped to develop the bomb.

I wouldn't go so far as to say you 'stole' it but it was more of a joint effort with a large team of British scientists relocating to the USA to develop it with you. However the US decision to then keep it for themselves and force Britain to begin developing its own from scratch was a bit underhand.

Regarding Einstein, he sailed to the USA in 1930, well before Hitler came to power, but he was goaded by scientists who had worked out the possibility of the atomic bomb into signing a letter to Roosevelt to persuade him to allow the US to try and build one before the Germans did, on the basis that if we know how to build one they do too. It was a political influence and Einstein played no further part in the development of the A bomb.

[edit on 23-1-2005 by waynos]

Originally posted by 82dftw
possibly what our British airman is alluding to is the fact that the prop tips of most WWII aircraft operated near sonic velocities in level flight

Actually the NA Harvard trainer is reknowned for the distinctive sound it makes during flight due to the fact that the tips of the prop blades actually travel FASTER than sound.