Faster & Faster

News about supersonic planes was boiling out of its military wraps last week.

In Washington, Air Force Secretary W. Stuart Symington finally made formal announcement of a fact that had already leaked: the Bell rocket plane XS-1 had flown "much faster than sound."* The exact speed, said Symington, is "an interesting figure."

Other facts & figures were seeping out to the public. According to good authority, the speed reached by the rocket plane was probably above 1,000 m.p.h. When its oxygen & alcohol fuel was exhausted (after about two minutes at full power), the pilot had to land with dead controls, at 160 m.p.h. Two XS-1s have been built, the first for the Air Force, the second for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. Both have reached supersonic speed, and four more of them are on order.

The first man to fly faster than sound in the XS-1 was Air Force Captain Charles Yeager. By now, four others have done it: Major G. E. Lundquist and Captain James P. Fitzgerald of the Air Force, and NACA Test Pilots Herbert Hoover/- and Howard Lilly, who was recently killed in a crash. These five had the strange experience of outflying the roar of their own rocket motors.

Dive Down. Other pilots have outstripped sound in other ways. North American Aviation Inc. stated flatly last week that its jet fighter XF-86 has often exceeded the speed of sound in power dives. A later, more powerful model, the F-86A, may be able to do the same in level flight.

The Bell XS-1, with its rocket motor and two-minute fuel supply, is merely a flying laboratory, but the F-86A is a practical military aircraft (see BUSINESS). One of the secrets of its speed is probably its swept-back wings. When the plane itself is flying faster than sound, the air passes over the back-slanted wing at less than sonic speed, and so makes less trouble.

The Russians, too, probably have supersonic airplanes. According to the London Daily Mail last week, the U.S.S.R. has developed a model with "a top speed approaching 760 m.p.h." The Daily Mail attributed Russian progress to 50 Rolls-Royce Nene jet engines which Britain sold them about a year ago.

Blowup. The current issue of Aviation Week contains what it claims is a picture of the speedy Russian plane itself (see cut). The drawing was made from a blown-up motion picture film smuggled from behind the Iron Curtain. The original photographs, the magazine says, were taken with a telescopic lens while the plane was being tested, and "arrived in this country by a circuitous process."

"Trained observers," says Aviation Week, "have been reporting rumors for months that a Russian jet plane has flown faster than sound." Its estimated speed: 745 m.p.h. "The plane can now be identified as the Russian design of the DFS 346, a plane begun by the Germans . . . The Germans never finished the DFS 346, and it, along with its engineers, presumably went into Russian possession at the end of the war."

* 763 m.p.h. at sea level in air at 59DEG F.; 662 m.p.h. at 40,000 ft. at -67DEG F. /- No kin to the ex-President.

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