Was Chuck Yeager the first pilot to fly at the speed of light?”
Breaking the Sound Barrier One of the great unknowns of the time was the so-called “sound barrier.” Planes like the British Meteor jets that approached the speed of sound (760MPH at sea level, 660 MPH at 40,000 feet) had encountered severe buffeting of the controls. At that time, no one knew for sure whether an airplane could exceed “Mach 1,” the speed of sound. A British pilot, Geoffrey de Havilland, had died trying. The U.S. Army was determined to find out first. The Army had developed a small, bullet-shaped aircraft, the Bell X-1, to challenge the sound barrier. A civilian pilot, Slick Goodlin, had taken the Bell X-1 to .7 Mach, when Yeager started to fly it. He pushed the small plane up to .8, .85, and then to .9 Mach. The date of Oct. 14, 1947 was set for the attempt to do Mach 1. Only a slight problem developed. Two nights before, after an evening at Pancho’s, Chuck and Glennis went out horseback riding, Chuck was thrown, and broke two ribs on his right side. He couldn’t have rep
In physics, the speed of light (usually denoted c) is a physical constant, the speed at which electromagnetic radiation, such as light, travels in free space (i.e., perfect vacuum). Its value is 299,792,458 metres per second (see the table on the right for conversions). In the theory of special relativity, c is an important constant connecting space and time in the unified structure of spacetime, defines the conversion between mass and energy (E = mc2), and is an upper bound on the speed at which matter and information can travel. This constant is significant in the understanding and study of astronomy, space travel, and other fields.
