Chuck Yeager’s wife reached out to me last night.
She’s referring to my Air-Minded post about supersonic flight, in which I recount the story of North American Aviation test pilot George Welch putting an XP-86 prototype into a supersonic dive 13 days before Chuck Yeager hit Mach 1.06 in level flight in the Bell X-1 and became the first man to officially break the sound barrier.
I get it that she’s defending her late husband’s legacy (and doing so in a manner consistent with his legendary ego). Yes, the George Welch claim was never verified, but it’s part of the lore around Yeager’s record-breaking flight, attested to by one of Welch’s fellow North American test pilots. I’m sticking to the sources cited in my original post, even if I wind up getting blocked.
Staying with the Air-Minded theme, remember the Sky Dong? Now it appears there’s a Sea Penis, etched onto the surface of the ocean by no less a ship than the Ever Given, the very one now blocking the Suez Canal.
See, though, the thing about sky dongs is that fighter aircraft move fast enough for your artwork to stay visible in the sky overhead, at least until the jet stream blows it away. With a slow-moving ship, the only way anyone’s going to be able to appreciate your work is to interpret tracking data.
The dick meme may be the oldest meme. Older than Kilroy even. Roman legionnaires knew how to make dicks last: carve them in stone.
I wonder if Chuck Yeager ever did a sky dong?
I can’t believe you just segwayed from breaking the speed of sound and Chuck Yeager’s legacy to “sky (and sea) dongs” – didn’t need to read that! 😛 Interesting transition to say the least.
In regards to Chuck Yeager there MAY have been other who broke the sound barrier – but that doesn’t diminish his legacy *politically incorrect language coming*(or solve the mystery of how he was able to fit in a cockpit with his enormous brass balls)! In my opinion anyway.
Cool blog, I’ll have to bookmark the main page so I remember it
So the famously litigious deceased general’s widow is trying to suppress the George Welch story? I’m not even surprised. Probably their whole life she said “general, you know you were the first and not the second pilot to break that sound barrier, those desert sonic booms were just thunder before you”.
I blogged about this in 2016, ‘The Man Who Broke the Sound Barrier: George Welch’. I wrote: “This is not to denigrate Gen. Yeager’s feat unduly, just to point out that apparently history has overlooked Welch’s place in it. Test pilot work can be deadly, the F-104 almost killed Yeager and the F-100 did kill Welch, nobody can question their bravery.” Just yesterday a commenter suggested I read Chasing the Demon on this subject. Well, at least the widow hasn’t threatened to sue you or me. Yet.
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