#BREAKING THE SOUND BARRIER SIMULATOR#

He was also a technical advisor on three flight simulator video games. But Yeager wasn’t selected for the first astronaut program because he didn’t have the requisite educational qualifications.

#BREAKING THE SOUND BARRIER MOVIE#

Yeager made a cameo appearance in the 1983 movie The Right Stuff-based on the 1979 book by Tom Wolfe-as a bartender named Fred (Sam Shepard portrayed Yeager in the movie). He retired from the Air Force in 1975, although he still occasionally flew as a consulting test pilot for USAF and NASA. He went on to have a distinguished military career, holding several squadron and wing commands and achieving the rank of brigadier general in 1969, assigned as vice-commander of the Seventeenth Air Force. The news of Yeager’s record-breaking flight wasn’t publicly announced until June 1948. I was alive.” On the ground, however, the resulting change in pressure sounded like an explosion reverberating across the California desert. “There was no buffet, no jolt, no shock,” he later recalled. On October 14, 1947, Yeager and the X-1 achieved 20 seconds of supersonic flight. By the day of the flight, Yeager was in so much pain that he was unable to close the X-1’s hatch fortunately, Ridley left part of a broken broom handle in the cockpit to help Yeager seal the hatch door. Determined not to be sidelined, he asked a veterinarian in a nearby town to treat his injury, telling only his wife and fellow test pilot Jack Ridley. Two days before the scheduled flight, Yeager broke two ribs after falling off a horse. He later claimed he never worried about whether or not something would go tragically wrong. The original plan was to choose a test pilot without a family, but Yeager argued that having a wife and little boy would make him more careful, and got the assignment. Jet engines didn’t have the thrust to push the airplane into the region of the speed of sound or beyond.” He nicknamed the X-1 the Glamorous Glennis, after his wife. You know, we’d been fooling around with jets. “It burned liquid oxygen and a mixture of five parts alcohol to one part water. “Basically, the X-1 was a pure rocket,” Yeager recalled in a 1997 interview with NOVA.

Breaking the sound barrier