Chuck Yeager and the IAF

Dudley

Some additional comments.

I took a P-40N above 25K and rolled over in a full throttle dive and
ran the air speed up as far as I could. Never came close to Mach One
and bird didn't come unglued either (thank God). Oh to be so young and
inicient again )

Never ran the P-51D/K over 505 MPH (red line). Had a number of friends
from ETO who said they ran the A/S well over red line in a dive when
being chased by a 109. The 109 was supposed to have a weak tail and
would come unglued in a very high airspeed dive. The P-51 terminal
velocity dive tactic was an escape maneuver.

The Jug in a terminal velocity dive tended to tuck. If you cut power
it tucked harder. To recover you had to keep a high power setting and
wait until you got to a lower altitude when you could recover.

The P-38 ended up getting some dive boards so it may have gotten a
little closer to Mach One than the rest of the WWII fighters????

All I remember from that era.

Big John
***************************************

On Thu, 24 May 2007 16:40:16 -0400, "Dudley Henriques"
wrote:


"Gig 601XL Builder" wrDOTgiaconaATsuddenlink.net wrote in message
...
Dudley Henriques wrote:
wrote in message
oups.com...
Funny story:
http://www.bharat-rakshak.com/IAF/Hi...unPrakash.html


Although Yeager is without question one of the finest sticks the
United States military has ever turned out, and he is entitled to
many accolades involving his fine career, the following statement
accompanying the photograph of Gen Yeager from this article is
incorrect.
"The first man to break the sound barrier - Brigadier General Charles
E "Chuck" Yeager, USAF."

In fact, Chuck Yeager was the first man to beak the speed of sound in
LEVEL FLIGHT.
His flight in the X1 at Edwards followed by a week the flight of the
first man to actually break the sound barrier. That man was George
Welch. The aircraft was the North American F86 prototype.
Dudley Henriques

And there are stories of pilots during WWII doing it in powered dives. But
the X1 was the first to do it with only the power it's engines were
producing.

Actually, no prop fighter can exceed mach 1, as a shock wave builds on the
propeller disc and the prop itself will prevent supersonic airflow. The tips
however can easily go supersonic and can easily cause catastrophic failure
at the prop hub.
I had a friend who experimented deeply into the transonic range with prop
fighters while a test pilot for Curtis Wright. Using a P47 Thunderbolt and
many different propeller combinations, Herb Fisher never actually got the
Jug through the barrier.
Another friend, Erik Shilling of the Flying Tigers, lost a good friend when
the friend was playing around with a P40 in China. In a deep dive over the
field, the prop was heard to go supersonic just before it tore the P40 apart
in the air.
Tony Levier from Lockheed did many deep dives in the P38 dealing with mach
tuck and never put the Lightning through the barrier. The Brits at Boscombe
Down after the war worked with Spitfires in high mach dives with no success
there either.
On the German side, one ME-262 driver was absolutely certain he had gone
mach 1 in a dive, but later tests proved he was dealing with the lag in his
pitot static system as that affected his airspeed readout. The 262 due to
design couldn't break mach 1 anyway which later tests at Wright Pat proved
out without question.
I personally have a P51 out to about .70 mach in a dive and I can tell you
it was one scary experience :-))
George Welch did it the week before Yeager while on a test flight in the
Sabre prototype.
Through the years of my own career, I either knew or met at least a half
dozed people who were at Pancho's bar eating lunch the day Welch went
through. The boom knocked all the pictures off the walls at Pancho's. The
story goes she wasn't all that happy about it either as she liked Yeager and
knew of the rivalry to be the first. But that's another story :-))
Dudley Henriques