Sir Frank Whittle, inventor of the jet engine
Credit: Geoff Pugh
News of the death of Chuck Yeager last week, aged 97, prompted tributes across the aerospace world to ‘the man who broke the sound barrier’.
As a young US Air Force test pilot in October 1947, Yeager raced across the sky over California’s Mojave desert in a bullet-shaped experimental plane called the Bell X-1. It marked the start of the celebrated era in American military aviation that was chronicled in such dizzying style by Tom Wolfe in his 1979 book
The Right Stuff. (Yeager, wrote Wolfe, was ‘the most righteous’ of all who possessed said stuff.)