Bill Garvey in his, as usual excellent, editorial in the June issue of Business & Commercial Aviation, Studebaker Time, reminds us that it has been 63 years since Chuck Yeager pushed the Bell X-1 faster than the speed of sound and became celebrated as the first human to do so. Except for the Concorde, a technological triumph and an economic disaster, as Bill correctly describes this British and French bird, civilian air travel has been restricted to subsonic speed. He suggests that a business jet may be the first to make supersonic travel possible in the next ten years.
Behind Yeager’s well-known tale of his famous flight in the X-1, there is a little known story about a man who may have reached the other side of the “sound barrier” before Yeager. There is substantial evidence that George Welch, a civilian North American Aviation test pilot, exceeded the speed of sound in an XP-86 the week before Yeager did. My good friend Al Blackburn’s book, Aces Wild, the Race for Mach 1, tells the story of pilots who explored this unknown region of flight in the Mojave Desert in the fall of 1947.
George Welch was an Army Air Corps fighter pilot who shot down at least four Japanese aircraft as they attacked Pearl Harbor. Some records say that Welch should have gotten credit for six kills that awful morning, but there were no gun site cameras to record the action. George would have needed only one camera as one gun jammed. He decimated the enemy aircraft with only half of his weapons!
After the World War II, Welch joined North American Aviation, the company that designed and built 17,000 T-6 Texans. Almost all military pilots in the 40’s and early 50’s received basic training in the T-6. The two most successful combat aircraft developed by North America were the P-51 Mustang and the F-86 Sabre. The latter was the first swept wing jet fighter and dominated the sky during the Korean War.
While test flying the XP-86, Welch would routinely create a ba-boom over the famous, or infamous, desert watering hole, Pancho’s. All the while Bell engineers and Yeager were furiously trying to get the X-1 in flying condition. The X-1 was a single-purpose rocket ship that could not take off by itself, but was carried aloft by an Air Force B-29 bomber. The government had spent millions on the X-1 trying to prove supersonic flight was possible despite the fact that Nazi V-2 rockets exceeded Mach 5 thousands of times years before. Stuart Symington, Secretary of the Air Force, determined that the V-1 should be the first over the Mach 1 line, directed North American Aviation to keep the gear down on XP-86 test flights. Welch ignored the orders, proving there was no such thing as the Sound Barrier.
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