Bob Cardenas: The X-1 s Quiet Driver avweb.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from avweb.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
AVweb
Chalmers Slick Goodlin imagery courtesy of Jean-Luc Beghin.
Last October, when I wrote a commemorative on the anniversary of the Bell X-1’s exceeding Mach 1, I spent many minutes contemplating my office wall. Or more precisely, what’s
on my office wall. It’s one of a short list of my possessions that spark Kondo-esque joy: a fabulous pen-and-ink illustration of the Bell X-1 cockpit by Belgian-American artist Jean-Luc Beghin.
I grabbed a Post-It note and wrote “X-1 video” reasoning that there’s enough source material to pull together a nice video on the X-1, one of history’s most interesting airplanes. I figured I could knock it out in three days. A week into it, halfway done isn’t in sight, but I’ve accumulated a small library on X-1 lore. The more I learn about it, the more I wonder how anyone survived flying the damned thing. You know all about the late Chuck Yeager, but about a dozen others flew the X-1 series, if not X-1 number 1.