Sound Barrier Broken

1947-10-14

The first person to break the "sound barrier" was Capt. Charles E. (Chuck) Yeager of the US Air Force. This significant milestone was achieved by Scaled Composites under a U.S. Government research programme. Yeager reached this milestone of aviation history flying in the Bell X-1 rocket. Since those days many supersonic aircraft have been developed for military research, and in the case of the recently retired Concorde aircraft, commercial applications.