Chasing the Demon

by Dan Hampton

  Dutch Kindelberger reportedly said, “I don’t give a happy damn,” about who got official credit for busting the Mach. He was a businessman and as long as NAA got the contracts, someone else, even Larry Bell, could take the credit. This attitude paralleled George Welch’s perfectly: he wanted to do it because glimpses of the demon’s tail were not enough; he wanted to catch the thing, or at least chase it a bit farther out. Supersonic flight was the next big challenge, and Welch existed for challenges of any type. The official credit was of no more consequence to him than recording his kills in combat. One retelling of that Monday night at Pancho’s has George Welch asking his friend Millie Palmer to be his data recorder. To listen up on Wednesday morning for a “sharp boom like a clap of thunder,” and to write down the time and the reactions around her.

  Whether this happened or not, George Welch did take XP-86 PU 597 off the ground from Muroc early Monday morning, October 1, 1947—exactly four years after the flight of America’s first jet, the XP-59. He headed south, enjoying the smooth, powerful plane and climbing up easily into clear skies with fellow test pilot Bob Chilton flying chase with a F-82 Twin Mustang.* It was Chilton who told him that his main gear doors were not shut, and after cycling the handle, George got all three wheels up and locked. The P-82 remained over El Mirage Dry Lake, east of Muroc, and Welch spent the next ten minutes getting the Sabre up to 35,000 feet. Because this was just a familiarization flight, he was to get a general feel for the jet’s flying characteristics and check out all the systems. There was no recording instrumentation aboard, very likely the only flight where this would be the case, so if he intended to push past the Mach it had to be now. Eyes darting around the cockpit, George let the airspeed jump to 320 knots then he rolled left, the stick hard against his leg, and dropped the nose into a 40-degree dive. Leaning forward, he stared through the clear canopy and pointed directly at the only green area visible: Pancho’s Happy Bottom Riding Club.

  According to the NAA flight test report filed by Welch, as he passed 29,000 feet the wing rolled slightly and the airspeed indicator jumped from 350 to 410 knots. Steepening the dive to 45 degrees increased the airspeed to 450 knots. Leveling off at 25,000 feet, he slowed the Sabre down, checked everything, then did two big barrel rolls to slow further. Meeting up with Chilton over El Mirage, the pair descended into Muroc where Welch again had trouble. This time the nose gear would not fully extend until the jet slowed below 77 knots on the runway, when it finally locked into place. Later that day George Welch left for Los Angeles to debrief with the project engineers, but apparently he called Millie Palmer before departing. She told him that the sound was exactly how he described and it shook the walls. Millie, according to Al Blackburn in Aces High, also said, “Pancho is really pissed. You know how nuts she is about Yeager.”

  There are some problems with this account. First is veracity; the story is hearsay, though the sources are credible. The second problem is scientific. Recall the effects of air temperature and air pressure on the speed of sound. As air gets farther from Earth it becomes thinner and colder, thus less velocity is required to exceed the speed of sound. Temperature above a few thousand feet decreases at a fairly constant 5.5 degrees per thousand feet, so at Welch’s 30,000-foot altitude this would be about-48 degrees Fahrenheit.* Mach 1 here would be approximately 678 mph, or 589 knots. According to Welch’s data at 30,000 feet, he saw 450 knots, or 519 mph, which equates to 0.76 Mach: far too slow.

  However, instrument gauge inaccuracies, particularly airspeed indicators that rely on ram air pressure, were common during high-speed flights. Ram air pressure becomes extremely unpredictable at higher speeds, thus often producing wild, unpredictable readings, so it is certainly possible that the Sabre was going much faster than indicated. The other indications Welch reported, like a wing dropping in conjunction with an airspeed jump, indicate this was the case. Mach effect, as it is called, results from shock wave formation and radical airflow changes within the transonic region. Recall also that the high transonic X-1 flight profiles yielded similar results, and at a higher indicated Mach number, so it is reasonable to conclude the XP-86 suffered the same effect.

  Many of the patrons at Pancho’s were aware of the two flight programs, and some understood enough to know what they were hearing. Millie Palmer was not alone in this and, though Pancho Barnes tried to blame the noise on nearby mining operations, no one had ever heard explosions coming from the mine before. Sonic booms are very directional; they propagate in the direction of the supersonic object’s travel, which, in this case, was west from El Mirage toward the base. Unless someone was directly in line, or close to it, the sound would be much less pronounced, more like a dull, distant boom that could be mistaken for an explosion.

  So what is fact is that on that October morning George Welch had everything he needed to chase the demon. That is, the correct airframe with the necessary swept wings; the right engine; and without question the right skills and attitude. He also had the correct parameters: at least 35,000 feet in altitude, 350 knots of airspeed, and nothing but flat, dry desert below. In level flight the J35 jet engine could never have produced the thrust to bust the Mach but in a dive it, and the XP-86, could push past the speed of sound—if Welch did it. The rest is conjecture, but it is unemotional, informed, and agendaless conjecture. If Welch’s instrument readings, which are consistent with high transonic speeds, are taken with the nature of the man and testimony of those who heard “something” that morning, it is extremely likely that the XP-86 achieved supersonic flight on October 1, 1947.

  The next few days were as eventful as they are largely unknown. On October 3, the X-1 flew its sixth flight to test the new trim settings for the horizontal tail actuator. The NACA team had also been noticing the Mach effect, as Yeager routinely reported lower indicated numbers than they were recovering in the postflight data. For instance, on this sixth flight he showed 0.88 Mach, but the NACA folks read 0.92 from the instrumentation package. With the benefit of this knowledge, it is more certain the XP-86 was flying faster than George Welch observed in the cockpit. This phenomena was repeated on the seventh rocket flight, which Yeager recorded as 0.92, but was truly 0.945 Mach.

  Welch flew again on October 9, this time with the Sabre’s gear locked down for low-speed stability and control checks. Landing back at Muroc after his second flight, he was told his wife, Jan, was in premature labor. Grabbing the NAA logistical aircraft, he flew to Santa Monica and was in her St. John’s hospital room by early afternoon. While this was happening, the X-1 was also airborne on its eighth hop, and at 0.94 Mach suffered a complete loss of elevator effectiveness—no pitch control at all. Yeager instantly shut the rockets down, jettisoned the fuel, and glided back to Muroc. Proving his practical brilliance yet again, Jack Ridley calculated that the entire horizontal tail could be manipulated, in increments of a degree, at high Mach numbers and this would provide enough pitch control for safety. “It will keep you flying,” he said, and Yeager believed him. “I trusted Jack with my life,” he admitted quite honestly.

  That evening it was discovered that Yeager had actually achieved 0.997 Mach, rather than the 0.94 he read from the gauge. He was close, he knew it, and he wanted to chase the demon all the way. One account states Pancho told him that night about Welch’s boom nearly two weeks earlier, and that Yeager dismissed it as a fluke—whatever that meant. General Joe Swing had flown in on the C-54 for the weekend and was also at the Happy Bottom that night. He had been hoping to see George Welch, whom he knew well from his time in Australia during the war and had kept up with during his frequent trips to Muroc. Swing also knew Stuart Symington, the new secretary of the Air Force, and the general was discussing the real meaning behind the X-1 program with the NAA folks. According to Al Blackburn, the paratrooper called Yeager a “creative thespian” and laid out the political implications of anyone other than the military breaking the “wall.”

  Over the weekend, George Welch brought his wife home to Brentwood, but Giles, his th
ree-pound, premature baby boy, would have to wait. The next XP-86 flights were to be made with the gear down to complete the low-speed tests, and apparently George was suspicious of this. The timing was too convenient, and it seemed likely that someone at Muroc had heard his October 1 sonic boom, put it all together, and called Washington. With the gear extended there was no way to break the Mach again, so Welch asked for, and was given, permission to not lock the gear on the ground, but simply keep the wheels down in flight unless safety dictated otherwise. In any case, his flights were scheduled for Tuesday, October 14: the same day the X-1 would fly again.

  But Chuck Yeager also had problems. On Sunday night he and Glennis ate dinner at Pancho’s then decided to go for a night horseback ride. Coming back to the Happy Bottom, the pilot failed to notice someone had closed the gate to the corral and he and the horse hit it dead-on. Yeager flew off and was “knocked silly,” as he put it. Having trouble breathing, the following day Chuck and Glennis went to a civilian doctor in nearby Rosamond, who taped up his three broken ribs. Worried that he could not shut the X-1’s peculiar hatch, Jack Ridley improvised a ten-inch wooden handle for Yeager to use.

  Tuesday, October 14, 1947, dawned clear and quiet. George Welch had arrived very early from Los Angeles and was airborne after sunrise with Bob Chilton again flying chase. The Sabre’s sixth flight lasted exactly six minutes; the airspeed indicator had not been reconnected properly. Refueled and airborne again, Welch spent thirty minutes or so climbing up to altitude and running through the test card, reading off results as he went. At some point, apparently with Chilton’s prearranged concurrence, he retracted the gear and disappeared.

  By this time, B-29 “Eight-Zero-Zero” had gotten airborne off runway 06 from Muroc with the little orange rocket hanging off its belly. Dick Frost was flying low chase and Bob Hoover was climbing up to the high position at 40,000 feet some ten miles ahead of the bomber. Muroc Tower directed all aircraft to stay clear of the dry lake, and at 1025 Jack Ridley asked Yeager if he was ready to go and told him to remember the stabilizer settings. “Hell yes . . . let’s get it over with,” was the reply. From 20,000 feet and indicating 250 miles per hour, the X-1 dropped free at 1026, just as the silver XP-86 landed at Muroc.

  The actual transcript, courtesy of Dr. Alex Spencer from the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum reads:

  YEAGER: Firing Four . . . Four fired okay . . . will fire Two . . . Two on . . . will cut off Four . . . Four off . . . will fire Three . . . Three burning now . . . will shut off Two and fire One . . . One on . . . will fire Two again. . . . Two on . . . will fire Four . . .

  RIDLEY: How much of a drop?

  YEAGER: About forty psi . . . Three on . . . acceleration good . . . have had mild buffet . . . usual instability. Say, Ridley, make a note here. Elevator effectiveness regained.

  RIDLEY: Roger. Noted.

  YEAGER: Ridley! Make another note. There’s something wrong with this Machmeter. It’s gone screwy!

  RIDLEY: If it is, we’ll fix it. Personally, I think you’re seeing things.

  YEAGER: I guess I am Jack . . . will shut down again . . . am shutting off . . . shut off . . . still going upstairs like a bat . . . have jettisoned fuel and lox . . . about thirty percent of each remaining . . . still going up . . . have shut off now.

  Reaching Mach 1.05 at 42,000 in the vicinity of Victorville, Yeager toggled off all four chambers, which cut off the fuel and lox, then pulled back on the yoke with both hands. Trading all that airspeed for altitude, Chuck and the little aircraft put the earth behind the tail and soared upward; a speck of orange slicing through the blue so far away from the tan desert and its dirty white lakebeds miles below. There was no horizon, just sunlight and the clear air of a vast empty sky . . . and the demon. With no power, the X-1 gradually slowed and at 45,000 feet, over seven miles above the Mojave, it shuddered into a 1-g stall.

  With both hands wrapped around the yoke, Chuck watched cockpit dust float up as the nose dropped and he got light in the seat. After a long, quiet glide Yeager landed smoothly on the dry lake at 1040: a mere fourteen minutes after his release. There was then, as now, no physical drama in supersonic flight, no black hole and no wall in the sky. No demon; at least, no demon that could be seen or felt. It had already fled deeper into the thin air and was waiting for whomever would come next. Chuck was disappointed with the simplicity of passing Mach 1 and recalled, “It took a damn instrument meter to tell me what I’d done.” His brief, six-paragraph report also stated “stability about all three axes was good as speed increased.” There were no issues and the whole thing was anticlimactic. A “poke through Jell-O,” as Yeager remembers his 20 seconds of supersonic flight.

  Back at Muroc the engineers verified that the X-1 had indeed reached Mach 1.06, about 700 miles per hour at 43,000 feet, officially flying past the speed of sound. Everyone wanted a party, but Colonel Al Boyd locked the situation down so the military and Bell crowd went to Yeager’s house, where, understandably, they got plowed. Chuck got drunk, rode off in the dark on a motorcycle, and Ridley found him sprawled on his back in the road. George Welch, under no such official ban, was at the Happy Bottom Club with Major General Swing, who asked him about the sonic boom and the cracks in the Pancho’s east-facing windows. The test pilot, who loved pranks and gags, is reputed to have innocently replied, “Maybe a V-2 flew off course out of White Sands.” Swing apparently laughed—he knew what had happened.

  Then he asked why there were two booms . . . about twenty minutes apart.

  So the deed had been done.

  The engineers analyzed their reams of data; the Air Force kept a lid on the big secret and the pilots basically shrugged and went back to work on other things. Without detracting from the physical feat itself, it should be apparent that Jack Woolams, Slick Goodlin, or really any fighter test pilot (like Jack Ridley) could have flown past the speed of sound; Goodlin certainly could have done this anytime in 1946 after the X-1 got its rockets, but he did not because he was a professional. Ken Chilstrom was unequivocal about the situation. “Slick Goodlin was a much better test pilot than Yeager,” he said. “No contest.” Exceeding Mach 1 was not part of the Bell contract and Chal, as his friends called him, was not a cowboy.

  Chuck Yeager was.

  And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Yeager, according to those who knew him, was exactly what you would want a World War II combat fighter pilot to be: supremely confident and physically skilled with fast reflexes. Exceedingly calm under pressure, he was convinced enough of his own immortality that calculated risks did not bother him a bit—he figured he could get himself out of any situation he got himself into. These are defining characteristics of successful fighter pilots and, hopefully, always will be.

  But a test pilot is something different.

  Granted, the late 1940s were a transition period from the ballsy stick-and-rudder types to those who actually understood and could analyze the aerodynamic phenomena they were witnessing. This is precisely why Glen Edwards, Gus Lundquist, and others were sent back to top-notch schools to complete advanced engineering degrees. Times were changing and, as the future astronaut program would make quite clear, just being a great pilot was no longer enough for this type of flying, which is precisely why Jack Ridley was an essential, deal-breaking part of the X-1 team. Yeager and Hoover were good ’ol boys; any competent pilot could have flipped the switches and rode the rocket past the Mach—it just happened to be Yeager. And he did do it, which should always be remembered. He knew the risks, and he knew that in spite of the conviction that Mach 1 was just a number, no one absolutely knew for sure.

  Except perhaps George Welch.

  This author’s personal opinion, based on the men, aerodynamics, aircraft, the timing, and my own gut judgment as an ex-fighter pilot, is that George Welch caught the demon first. He did the same Mach run during his first flight in the F-100 six years later so why, with the aircraft and opportunity, would he have not done it in 1947? Yet General Yeager, who has been houn
ded by this question for decades, has an excellent point: Where is the data? Can anyone prove Welch and the XP-86 exceeded Mach 1 before Yeager did it officially on October 14, 1947? Not yet. But if there is hard evidence out there, then hopefully it will eventually surface, and in the meantime the converse is equally valid. Can anyone prove that Welch did not bust the Mach early in October 1947, over the high desert? Other pilots, including Ken Chilstrom who flew that exact Sabre, state that from 35,000 feet, in a full power dive, it would positively go supersonic. The jet was strong enough to withstand transonic forces and, unlike the Natter or Me 262, could withstand the recovery to subsonic flight.

  In either case, it was done.

  If what occurred that morning was the truth, then it shall endure; if it was not, then someday the truth will emerge. Truth always does. What is certain is that on an October day in 1947 a man officially flew past the speed of sound and buried the myth of a sound “barrier” forever. There were other barriers to break now, some very real, some exaggerated, and some as yet unknown. Perhaps this is the century where man chases the demon into the thin air as far as he can go, to the limits of our capability, science, and imagination. Perhaps it is not. Maybe the demon cannot be caught but only exists to lead us ever deeper into the unknown and, in the chase itself, it continues to teach us that mankind truly has no limits.

  Epilogue

  Ripples

  It is formally labeled a capillary wave, “a traveling wave affected by surface tension,” though most of us would simply call it a “ripple.” Ripples occur each day for every human in big or small ways; every action taken, each choice made has consequences. Often not noteworthy, they are usually ignored altogether or absorbed into what each of us calls life. Yet some events do occur, manmade or natural, that create visible ripples and alter the very fabric of our existence. What if, for instance, an anonymous Austrian farm girl named Anna Maria Shicklgruber never gave birth to an illegitimate child she named Alois who, in turn, fathered Adolf Hitler? Would the Second World War have occurred and over sixty million humans, at least 3 percent of the total population, lose their lives? Very likely, but certainly not as it did, and would the motivation then have existed to develop the rocket and jet which resulted in manned flight past the speed of sound?