This guy first broke the sound barrier.
That would be George Welch, of Pearl Harbor fame.
Posted on 10/06/2016 9:54:54 AM PDT by DFG
Yeager’s book is very enjoyable. The only hint of bitterness was that he wasn’t selected to be an astronaut. His reason was he didn’t have a college degree. Perhaps his personality had something to do with that, too.
Cousin? That takes all the fun out of it.
Steve also invented that little neck flap for catchers after he took a broken bat in the neck. Interestingly, he was in the on deck circle, not catching, when it happened.
That would be George Welch, of Pearl Harbor fame.
I plan to visit Strasbourg next summer and will be sure to visit the museum you mentioned.
In the past couple of years, two elderly men from my church (one now deceased) were awarded the French Legion of Honor for their service in France during WWII. I think France is trying to recognize as many of these distinguished veterans as possible before they all die off.
Just as with first ascent mountaineering, a necessary condition for being considered “first” as a respectable accomplishment is to fully complete the action and return alive. Leigh and Mallory ***might*** have made it to the summit of Everest but they did not return alive and so it should not (in the eyes of sane people) count as a “first ascent”....
Here’s the one I went to, in Turckheim:
http://www.cheminsdememoire.gouv.fr/en/battle-colmar-pocket-memorial-museum
This, the Audie Murphy site, and the U.S. memorial and French military cemetery on a nearby hilltop would be must-do items for me. The views from the memorial give you a good idea of what the fight would have been like. Lots of wide open terrain with good fields of fire favoring the defense.
Plus just visiting downtown Strasbourg and the cathedral is nice.
One famous incident was the report of investigation on Yeager crashing an F-104. The conclusion effectively was that Yeager didn't know the airplane well enough to be pushing it as hard as he did. Yeager campaigned to ruin the career of the officer who ran the investigation.
Thanks, FP!
A fiction author made that up to sell books.
He is pretty much right .... He forgot to add Stupid
Brits dumped Churchill after the war and threw open their gates of immigration to every former Empire 3rd World riff-raff that wanted to immigrate . They closed their eyes to the mortal dangers of self injecting the poison of Islam into their Anglo-Christian culture .
What made them so stupid ? Infatuation with socialistic. communistic Liberalism .
And we are now following these arrogant fools to the same demise
Wings, horizontal stabilizers, vertical fins - with their associated ailerons, elevators, and rudders - all, by design, generate forces from the wind passing over them. So much is obvious. Less obvious is the fact that when those forces act on those surfaces, the structure supporting those surfaces bend. And or twist. When that happens, the forces created by the action of the wind on those surfaces changes. At some (hopefully very high) airspeed, an increase in the force on a structure causes deflection of the structure which increases the force on the structure in a positive feedback loop which rips the structure right off the plane.That happens at zero frequency - the motion is one way. But structures, in addition to being flexible, always have mass, and thus tend to vibrate. At some speed (again, hopefully very high) bending and torsional vibrations interact via the forces on the aerodynamic surfaces, enough so that those vibrations become unstable. Similar effect, pieces fall off of the plane. Generally this is highly undesirable . . .
Again, all airplanes are subject to the effect, it is just a matter of successfully designing the strength and mass of the structures so that those “highly undesirable” effects do not actually happen in practice because the plane never goes that fast (at the wrong altitude).
I have not mentioned the “aileron reversal” effect which can occur if the plane flies fast enough so that the flexibility of the wing allows it to twist so much when the aileron applies a load on the back surface that the overall effect of lifting an aileron forcing the back of the wing down is to cause the wing to twist so much that the net effect is that the wing increases, rather than decreases, lift. A P-38 in a powered dive was notorious for that . . .
The above issues are directly related to the speed and density of the air - and also markedly affected by Mach Number, particularly in the vicinity of Mach 1.0. Compared to WWII and Yeager’s postwar “breaking the sound barrier” era, today’s designers enjoy transcendently better ability to crunch the numbers necessary to get a good handle on these issues. AFAIK, they still have to do extensive testing to confirm that their designs adequately account for the above issues. If the day ever comes when they don’t, some regs will have to be changed . . .
Maybe, but the RAF was more egalitarian and open to class mobility than the British Army or Navy. RAF officers might have acted snobbishly, but a lot of them weren't top drawer in their own country themselves.
I notice that Chuck Yeager was shot down over France and escaped with the aid of the French Resistance. There were rules against fliers who'd been shot down doing additional combat missions, because if they were shot down again and captured, they could be tortured and reveal secrets about the Resistance.
Chuck wanted to fly anyway -- and did. Maybe his troubles with the British go back to that. Or maybe he was a guy who liked to break rules as he liked to break the sound barrier, and that put him at loggerheads with the RAF bureaucracy.
Ready to go, sir!
Yes. We, the Brits, French, and Russians were flying German-influenced designs well into the 1950s. But in all fairness, the Horten brothers were influenced by Jack Northrop's flying wing designs:
Well, they kinda are. Do they not think so?
Well, they kinda are. Do they not think so?
The next generations were trying to bury their own history and forget everyone and everything that transpired in WWII. The teen age girls liked American boys and that grated on the metrosexuals the German males had become.
Of course, forgot about Northrup’s design.
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