The Right Stuff

by Tom Wolfe

  The plane the Air Force wanted to break the sound barrier with was called the X–I at the outset and later on simply the X–I. The Bell Aircraft Corporation had built it under an Army contract. The core of the ship was a rocket of the type first developed by a young Navy inventor, Robert Truax, during the war. The fuselage was shaped like a 50-caliber bullet—an object that was known to go supersonic smoothly. Military pilots seldom drew major test assignments; they went to highly paid civilians working for the aircraft corporations. The prime pilot for the X–I was a man whom Bell regarded as the best of the breed. This man looked like a movie star. He looked like a pilot from out of Hell’s Angels. And on top of everything else there was his name: Slick Goodlin.

  The idea in testing the X–I was to nurse it carefully into the transonic zone, up to seven-tenths, eight-tenths, nine-tenths the speed of sound (.7 Mach, .8 Mach, .9 Mach) before attempting the speed of sound itself, Mach 1, even though Bell and the Army already knew the X–I had the rocket power to go to Mach 1 and beyond, if there was any beyond. The consensus of aviators and engineers, after Geoffrey de Havilland’s death, was that the speed of sound was an absolute, like the firmness of the earth. The sound barrier was a farm you could buy in the sky. So Slick Goodlin began to probe the transonic zone in the X–I, going up to .8 Mach. Every time he came down he’d have a riveting tale to tell. The buffeting, it was so fierce—and the listeners, their imaginations aflame, could practically see poor Geoffrey de Havilland disintegrating in midair. And the goddamned aerodynamics—and the listeners got a picture of a man in ballroom pumps skidding across a sheet of ice, pursued by bears. A controversy arose over just how much bonus Slick Goodlin should receive for assaulting the dread Mach 1 itself. Bonuses for contract test pilots were not unusual; but the figure of $150,000 was now bruited about. The Army balked, and Yeager got the job. He took it for $283 a month, or $3,396 a year; which is to say, his regular Army captain’s pay.

  The only trouble they had with Yeager was in holding him back. On his first powered flight in the X–I he immediately executed an unauthorized zero-g roll with a full load of rocket fuel, then stood the ship on its tail and went up to .85 Mach in a vertical climb, also unauthorized. On subsequent flights, at speeds between .85 Mach and .9 Mach, Yeager ran into most known airfoil problems—loss of elevator, aileron, and rudder control, heavy trim pressures, Dutch rolls, pitching and buffeting, the lot—yet was convinced, after edging over .9 Mach, that this would all get better, not worse, as you reached Mach 1. The attempt to push beyond Mach 1—“breaking the sound barrier”—was set for October 14, 1947. Not being an engineer, Yeager didn’t believe the “barrier” existed.

  October 14 was a Tuesday. On Sunday evening, October 12, Chuck Yeager dropped in at Pancho’s, along with his wife. She was a brunette named Glennis, whom he had met in California while he was in training, and she was such a number, so striking, he had the inscription “Glamorous Glennis” written on the nose of his P–51 in Europe and, just a few weeks back, on the X–I itself. Yeager didn’t go to Pancho’s and knock back a few because two days later the big test was coming up. Nor did he knock back a few because it was the weekend. No, he knocked back a few because night had come and he was a pilot at Muroc. In keeping with the military tradition of Flying & Drinking, that was what you did, for no other reason than that the sun had gone down. You went to Pancho’s and knocked back a few and listened to the screen doors banging and to other aviators torturing the piano and the nation’s repertoire of Familiar Favorites and to lonesome mouse-turd strangers wandering in through the banging doors and to Pancho classifying the whole bunch of them as old bastards and miserable peckerwoods. That was what you did if you were a pilot at Muroc and the sun went down.

  So about eleven Yeager got the idea that it would be a hell of a kick if he and Glennis saddled up a couple of Pancho’s dude-ranch horses and went for a romp, a little rat race, in the moonlight. This was in keeping with the military tradition of Flying & Drinking and Drinking & Driving, except that this was prehistoric Muroc and you rode horses. So Yeager and his wife set off on a little proficiency run at full gallop through the desert in the moonlight amid the arthritic silhouettes of the Joshua trees. Then they start racing back to the corral, with Yeager in the lead and heading for the gateway. Given the prevailing conditions, it being nighttime, at Pancho’s, and his head being filled with a black sandstorm of many badly bawled songs and vulcanized oaths, he sees too late that the gate has been closed. Like many a hard-driving midnight pilot before him, he does not realize that he is not equally gifted in the control of all forms of locomotion. He and the horse hit the gate, and he goes flying off and lands on his right side. His side hurts like hell.

  The next day, Monday, his side still hurts like hell. It hurts every time he moves. It hurts every time he breathes deep. It hurts every time he moves his right arm. He knows that if he goes to a doctor at Muroc or says anything to anybody even remotely connected with his superiors, he will be scrubbed from the flight on Tuesday. They might even go so far as to put some other miserable peckerwood in his place. So he gets on his motorcycle, an old junker that Pancho had given him, and rides over to see a doctor in the town of Rosamond, near where he lives. Every time the goddamned motorcycle hits a pebble in the road, his side hurts like a sonofabitch. The doctor in Rosamond informs him he has two broken ribs and he tapes them up and tells him that if he’ll just keep his right arm immobilized for a couple of weeks and avoid any physical exertion or sudden movements, he should be all right.

  Yeager gets up before daybreak on Tuesday morning—which is supposed to be the day he tries to break the sound barrier—and his ribs still hurt like a sonofabitch. He gets his wife to drive him over to the field, and he has to keep his right arm pinned down to his side to keep his ribs from hurting so much. At dawn, on the day of a flight, you could hear the X–I screaming long before you got there. The fuel for the X–I was alcohol and liquid oxygen, oxygen converted from a gas to a liquid by lowering its temperature to 297 degrees below zero. And when the lox, as it was called, rolled out of the hoses and into the belly of the X–I, it started boiling off and the X–I started steaming and screaming like a teakettle. There’s quite a crowd on hand, by Muroc standards … perhaps nine or ten souls. They’re still fueling the X–I with the lox, and the beast is wailing.

  The X–I looked like a fat orange swallow with white markings. But it was really just a length of pipe with four rocket chambers in it. It had a tiny cockpit and a needle nose, two little straight blades (only three and a half inches thick at the thickest part) for wings, and a tail assembly set up high to avoid the “sonic wash” from the wings. Even though his side was throbbing and his right arm felt practically useless, Yeager figured he could grit his teeth and get through the flight—except for one specific move he had to make. In the rocket launches, the X–I, which held only two and a half minutes’ worth of fuel, was carried up to twenty-six thousand feet underneath a B–29. At seven thousand feet, Yeager was to climb down a ladder from the bomb bay of the B–29 to the open doorway of the X–I, hook up to the oxygen system and the radio microphone and earphones, and put his crash helmet on and prepare for the launch, which would come at twenty-five thousand feet. This helmet was a homemade number. There had never been any such thing as a crash helmet before, except in stunt flying. Throughout the war pilots had used the old skin-tight leather helmet-and-goggles. But the X–I had a way of throwing the pilot around so violently that there was danger of getting knocked out against the walls of the cockpit. So Yeager had bought a big leather football helmet—there were no plastic ones at the time—and he butchered it with a hunting knife until he carved the right kind of holes in it, so that it would fit down over his regular flying helmet and the earphones and the oxygen rig. Anyway, then his flight engineer, Jack Ridley, would climb down the ladder, out in the breeze, and shove into place the cockpit door, which had to be lowered out of the belly of the B–29 on a chain. Then Yeager had to push a
handle to lock the door airtight. Since the X–I’s cockpit was minute, you had to push the handle with your right hand. It took quite a shove. There was no way you could move into position to get enough leverage with your left hand.

  Out in the hangar Yeager makes a few test shoves on the sly, and the pain is so incredible he realizes that there is no way a man with two broken ribs is going to get the door closed. It is time to confide in somebody, and the logical man is Jack Ridley. Ridley is not only the flight engineer but a pilot himself and a good old boy from Oklahoma to boot. He will understand about Flying & Drinking and Drinking & Driving through the goddamned Joshua trees. So Yeager takes Ridley off to the side in the tin hangar and says: Jack, I got me a little ol’ problem here. Over at Pancho’s the other night I sorta … dinged my goddamned ribs. Ridley says, Whattya mean … dinged? Yeager says, Well, I guess you might say I damned near like to … broke a coupla the sonsabitches. Whereupon Yeager sketches out the problem he foresees.

  Not for nothing is Ridley the engineer on this project. He has an inspiration. He tells a janitor named Sam to cut him about nine inches off a broom handle. When nobody’s looking, he slips the broomstick into the cockpit of the X–I and gives Yeager a little advice and counsel.

  So with that added bit of supersonic flight gear Yeager went aloft.

  At seven thousand feet he climbed down the ladder into the X–I’s cockpit, clipped on his hoses and lines, and managed to pull the pumpkin football helmet over his head. Then Ridley came down the ladder and lowered the door into place. As Ridley had instructed, Yeager now took the nine inches of broomstick and slipped it between the handle and the door. This gave him just enough mechanical advantage to reach over with his left hand and whang the thing shut. So he whanged the door shut with Ridley’s broomstick and was ready to fly.

  At 26,000 feet the B–29 went into a shallow dive, then pulled up and released Yeager and the X–I as if it were a bomb. Like a bomb it dropped and shot forward (at the speed of the mother ship) at the same time. Yeager had been launched straight into the sun. It seemed to be no more than six feet in front of him, filling up the sky and blinding him. But he managed to get his bearings and set off the four rocket chambers one after the other. He then experienced something that became known as the ultimate sensation in flying: “booming and zooming.” The surge of the rockets was so tremendous, forced him back into his seat so violently, he could hardly move his hands forward the few inches necessary to reach the controls. The X–I seemed to shoot straight up in an absolutely perpendicular trajectory, as if determined to snap the hold of gravity via the most direct route possible. In fact, he was only climbing at the 45-degree angle called for in the flight plan. At about .87 Mach the buffeting started.

  On the ground the engineers could no longer see Yeager. They could only hear … that poker-hollow West Virginia drawl.

  “Had a mild buffet there … jes the usual instability …”

  Jes the usual instability?

  Then the X–I reached the speed of .96 Mach, and that incredible caint-hardlyin’ aw-shuckin’ drawl said:

  “Say, Ridley … make a note here, will ya?” (if you ain’t got nothin’ better to do) “ … elevator effectiveness regained.”

  Just as Yeager had predicted, as the X–I approached Mach 1, the stability improved. Yeager had his eyes pinned on the machometer. The needle reached .96, fluctuated, and went off the scale.

  And on the ground they heard … that voice:

  “Say, Ridley … make another note, will ya?” (if you ain’t too bored yet) “ … there’s somethin’ wrong with this ol’ machometer …” (faint chuckle) “ … it’s gone kinda screwy on me …”

  And in that moment, on the ground, they heard a boom rock over the desert floor—just as the physicist Theodore von Kármán had predicted many years before.

  Then they heard Ridley back in the B–29: “If it is, Chuck, we’ll fix it. Personally I think you’re seeing things.”

  Then they heard Yeager’s poker-hollow drawl again:

  “Well, I guess I am, Jack … And I’m still goin’ upstairs like a bat.”

  The X–I had gone through “the sonic wall” without so much as a bump. As the speed topped out at Mach 1.05, Yeager had the sensation of shooting straight through the top of the sky. The sky turned a deep purple and all at once the stars and the moon came out—and the sun shone at the same time. He had reached a layer of the upper atmosphere where the air was too thin to contain reflecting dust particles. He was simply looking out into space. As the X–I nosed over at the top of the climb, Yeager now had seven minutes of … Pilot Heaven … ahead of him. He was going faster than any man in history, and it was almost silent up here, since he had exhausted his rocket fuel, and he was so high in such a vast space that there was no sensation of motion. He was master of the sky. His was a king’s solitude, unique and inviolate, above the dome of the world. It would take him seven minutes to glide back down and land at Muroc. He spent the time doing victory rolls and wing-over-wing aerobatics while Rogers Lake and the High Sierras spun around below.

  On the ground they had understood the code as soon as they heard Yeager’s little exchange with Ridley. The project was secret, but the radio exchanges could be picked up by anyone within range. The business of the “screwy machometer” was Yeager’s deadpan way of announcing that the X–I’s instruments indicated Mach 1. As soon as he landed, they checked out the X–I’s automatic recording instruments. Without any doubt the ship had gone supersonic. They immediately called the brass at Wright Field to break the tremendous news. Within two hours Wright Field called back and gave some firm orders. A top security lid was being put on the morning’s events. That the press was not to be informed went without saying. But neither was anyone else, anyone at all, to be told. Word of the flight was not to go beyond the flight line. And even among the people directly involved—who were there and knew about it, anyway—there was to be no celebrating. Just what was on the minds of the brass at Wright is hard to say. Much of it, no doubt, was a simple holdover from wartime, when every breakthrough of possible strategic importance was kept under wraps. That was what you did—you shut up about them. Another possibility was that the chief at Wright had never quite known what to make of Muroc. There was some sort of weird ribald aerial tarpaper mad-monk squadron up on the roof of the desert out there …

  In any case, by mid-afternoon Yeager’s tremendous feat had become a piece of thunder with no reverberation. A strange and implausible stillness settled over the event. Well … there was not supposed to be any celebration, but come nightfall … Yeager and Ridley and some of the others ambled over to Pancho’s. After all, it was the end of the day, and they were pilots. So they knocked back a few. And they had to let Pancho in on the secret, because Pancho had said she’d serve a free steak dinner to any pilot who could fly supersonic and walk in here to tell about it, and they had to see the look on her face. So Pancho served Yeager a big steak dinner and said they were a buncha miserable peckerwoods all the same, and the desert cooled off and the wind came up and the screen doors banged and they drank some more and bawled some songs over the cackling dry piano and the stars and the moon came out and Pancho screamed oaths no one had ever heard before and Yeager and Ridley roared and the old weatherbeaten bar boomed and the autographed pictures of a hundred dead pilots shook and clattered on the frame wires and the faces of the living fell apart in the reflections, and by and by they all left and stumbled and staggered and yelped and bayed for glory before the arthritic silhouettes of the Joshua trees. Shit!—there was no one to tell except for Pancho and the goddamned Joshua trees!

  Over the next five months Yeager flew supersonic in the X–I more than a dozen times, but still the Air Force insisted on keeping the story secret. Aviation Week published a report of the flights late in December (without mentioning Yeager’s name) provoking a minor debate in the press over whether or not Aviation Week had violated national security—and still the Air Force refused
to publicize the achievement until June of 1948. Only then was Yeager’s name released. He received only a fraction of the publicity that would have been his had he been presented to the world immediately, on October 14, 1947, as the man who “broke the sound barrier.” This dragged-out process had curious effects.

  In 1952 a British movie called Breaking the Sound Barrier, starring Ralph Richardson, was released in the United States, and its promoters got the bright idea of inviting the man who had actually done it, Major Charles E. Yeager of the U.S. Air Force, to the American premiere. So the Air Force goes along with it and Yeager turns up for the festivities. When he watches the movie, he’s stunned. He can’t believe what he’s seeing. Far from being based on the exploits of Charles E. Yeager, Breaking the Sound Barrier was inspired by the death of Geoffrey de Havilland in his father’s DH 108. At the end of the movie a British pilot solves the mystery of “the barrier” by reversing the controls at the critical moment during a power dive. The buffeting is tearing his ship to pieces, and every rational process in his head is telling him to pull back on the stick to keep from crashing—and he pushes it down instead … and zips right through Mach 1 as smooth as a bird, regaining full control!