"Ron" wrote in message
om...
An interesting passage in General Yeagers book "Press ON".

" Just a ten inch steel shaft, once silvery, but now, after forty
years in various Yeager closets and attics, a kind of dull gray It
jumped out at me as something special.
It was the pitot tube off the Bell X-1
I picked it up and plopped down on the sofa. Normally, there's
nothing terribly special about a pitot tube, which is an instrument
that measures air pressure so that a pilot can find out how fast he's
flying.

But Ron, if you get IAS from a pitot tube then the lunes of ram have been
wrong all along.

But according to the plaque it came mounted on, this
particular pitot tube had been on the nose of the X-1 on, as it said,.
"10-14-47." That's the day we reached Mach 1 . . .Murac Air Base . . .
That old plane part felt cool to the touch, but the memory it brought
back was of a little orange aircraft sitting on Rogers Dry Lake bed
and shimmering in the Mohave Desert heat . . . the Glamorous Glennis,
I'd called the X-1.
The General has a way with words too, doesn't he.

Yes he does. The time he came to see me, all the reaction he would have
gotten was a snap to, a salute and "sir, yes sir".