So, off he went. The old man didn't fool around. The moment he was dropped, he threw the ignition switch and whistled out of sight. But apparently he blew a fuse in his radio, because I could hear him but he couldn't hear me. He got up to 55,000 feet arcing out over the California coastline, seeing the Pacific far below, and I heard him calling, "Chuck! Chuck! Chuck!" I knew damned well he was worried whether he was too far from the Mojave to be able to glide down to the lakebed, but I picked him up visually after he turned and jettisoned, and flew out to meet him as he dove to line up with Rogers Dry Lake. He, too, landed with a little-kid look. He said "I think I burnt up more calories than fuel. You're so busy in there. There're so many instruments to watch. And that restricted cockpit visibility. I didn't expect that." I had never seen him so happy and excited; he had reached 1.2 Mach.
In December 1947, Aviation Week leaked the news of the sound barrier flight, but it wasn't until the following June that the Air Force confirmed it. I went to Washington and received the MacKay Trophy from General Vandenberg, the Chief of Staff; later that year, President Truman awarded me the Collier Trophv at the White House. Requests for public appearances began flooding in. But there wasn't much I could say about the Flights because all details were restricted. But I did attend a top-secret meeting at Wright at which the nation's leading aircraft manufacturers and high ranking officers from various branches of the military were briefed in detail on our flights. The consensus among the experts was that breaking the barrier was much easier than expected, but that many questions remained about whether or not large size supersonic aircraft could now be built. The X-1 was small, flown at high altitudes where air loads on the structure were less than at lower altitudes. There were plans (soon abandoned) for using the X-1 to research aerodynamic heating and weapons systems for supersonic aircraft. The Air Force contracted with Bell and other manufacturers for four additional X research planes.
The publicity about my supersonic flight really heated the rivalry between the Air Force and the Navy, which had contracted with Douglas for a research airplane of its own. This kind of rivalry was good for aviation (the more research the better), but the Navy began taking cheap shots at the X-1 by announcing that their Douglas D-558-I Skystreak was the first truly supersonic airplane because it could take off from the ground and didn't have to be dropped from a mother ship like a bomb. (Ironically, that is exactly what they would later do with the D-558II Skyrocket. Ironically again, I flew chase for Navy pilot Bill Bridgeman on many of his Skyrocket test nights.)
Anyway, I was real annoyed at the Navy, and when they brought the Skystreak to Muroc, they invited in the press to see a demonstration flight by the Douglas civilian test pilot, Gene May. He was the same pompous little guy who had challenged Hoover and me at Pancho's about why we thought we could break the sound barrier. Definitely, he wasn't one of my favorites.
The morning of his fly-by demonstration, I took off in an F-86 and climbed to about 40,000 feet, right above the reviewing stands loaded with Navy brass and press people. I sat up there and watched May take off in the Skystreak, heading toward the Antelope Valley, where he was going to turn then rip past those stands flying just under Mach 1. I timed it then rolled over, came in over the lakebed, roared past those stands ahead of May, did a slow roll, pulled up and left, just as May began his approach over the field. The Navy never knew what hit them. But when I landed, a Navy admiral was standing there, purple with fury. "Captain," he said, "if you were in the Navy I'd have you hung from the yardarm."
"Yes, sir," I said. "But I ain't in the Navy."
But the Navy kept at their publicity campaign by building up the Skystreak at the expense of the X-1, which they called a gimmick. Around Christmas in 1949, I was in New York to receive an award at the Wings Club banquet and had a talk with Larry Bell. I told him the Douglas people were making us look pretty shoddy. He agreed. He said, "Chuck, how would you feel about trying a ground takeoff in the X-1?" I said, "Ridley and I talked about it more than once. That landing gear is really weak, but I think we could do it." So, during cocktails, Larry steered me over to General Vandenberg. " General," he said, "Chuck and I were just talking about all the publicity the Navy has been getting with their Skystreak. I think the time is ripe for the Air Force to put on a show of its own and do a ground takeoff with the X-1.
Vandenberg turned to me and asked what I thought. I told him I thought we could do it successfully. He asked, "What are the risks?" I replied, "Sir, I don't know. The airplane isn't designed for that sort of thing, but if we take off from a smooth lakebed surface and put in maybe half a load of fuel, I think we can do it." The general nodded. Then he buttonholed Secretary of the Air Force Stuart Symington and brought him into our little cocktail-party conference-which was pretty stiff for an Air Force captain. "Mr. Secretary," he said, "Yeager here thinks he can make the Navy chew nails by doing a ground takeoff in the X-1." Symington grinned. "Go ahead and work up the program and do it," he said.
And we did. I sat down with Jack Ridley and asked him what he thought. He scratched his head scribbled some calculations on a pad, then laughed. "Well," he said, "the worst that could happen is the gear might fall off and you'd bust your ass. But if we keep the fuel light, you can do it." The big problem was trying to measure the amount of liquid oxygen in the fuel tank. The LOX was constantly boiling off and you couldn't tell whether you had half a tank or three-quarters. So, Jack hit on one of his brilliant ideas. We went to the base hobby shop and bought a couple of two-by-six boards. I sawed them out on a bandsaw to contour to the bottom of the X-1 wings. Jack measured out the mean aerodynamic chord on the wing and the percentage where the airplane's center of gravity would be located with the fuel tanks exactly half-full. We put jacks under the airplane at that spot. Then we measured in half a tank of water alcohol. This went into the rear tank. Then we began filling the front tank with the LOX until the airplane balanced exactly. We let down the jacks and towed the X-1 to the south end of the lake with the jeep. We figured we had fifteen minutes to take off before the LOX boiled off. Hell, if you tried doing something like that today, it would take five hundred engineers and a stack of authorizations ten feet high. But it was just Jack and myself and a couple of ground crew guys in the jeep.
We didn't even have camera coverage. I borrowed a 16-millimeter movie camera from the photo lab and gave it to a friend who was a major. The roar of the X-1 engines almost knocked the camera out of his hands, so the film is a sorry mess. But the flight was fabulous. I was so excited, I forgot to put on my oxygen mask and nearly passed out breathing all that nitrogen. But I hooked it on just in time.
There was no ride ever in the world like that one! I fired all four rockets simultaneously. From a standing start, I just streaked down that runway for about fifteen hundred feet, raised the nose at 200 mph, and we jumped into the air. It was accelerating so rapidly that when I flipped the gear handle up, the actuating rod snapped and the wing flaps blew off. Eighty seconds after starting the engines I was at 23,000 feet at 1.03 Mach! The fuel ran out, so I rolled over and came down. Despite the damage, the X-1 touched down on the lakebed two and a half minutes after taking off. That January 5, 1949, flight occurred the day before the Navy was scheduled to fly its new rocket-powered model of the Skystreak. In Air Force circles, I was a bigger hero for beating the Navy to the punch than for breaking the sound barrier.
But the X-1 program was rapidly winding down. My folks came out for a visit, and Jack Russell drove them out to the lakebed to watch me land. I came in at 500 mph only thirty feet from where they stood. Mom practically died of fright, but Dad got a big charge out of it. In all, I flew the orange beast thirty-three times and achieved the highest speed-1.45 Mach (957 mph). In the summer of 1950, Glamorous Glennis was loaded under a B-29 for the last time. Then Ridley, Jack Russell, and I flew it back east. En route, we came in over Main Street at Hamlin at about 500 feet, then pulled back up and delivered the X-1 to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. At the ceremonies, a Smithsonian official perfectly summed up the role of the X-1. He said, "The X-1 marked the end of the first great period of the air age and the beginning of the second. In a few moments the subsonic period became history and the supersonic period was born."