Famous Flyers (and Drivers) - Speed

Famous Flyers (and Drivers)- Speed records


World records are often very temporary things. Given the rate of technological progress, and the number of people in the world, they often do not last for long. Every year hundreds of people try to beat all kinds of world bests, from impressive feats of endurance to bizarre challenges of specific skills. In sports records are frequently broken, whether it's on the athletics track, the playing field or the fairway. In many aspects of technology and business records are broken every year. So it is a curiosity, given the importance of planes, cars and boats to everyone's lives, that the speed records for these forms of transport seem to have peaked, with very little progress or attempts to beat them. For aircraft especially the airspeed records seem particularly old. The oldest, in fact. The fastest ever human-piloted flight within the Earth's atmosphere occurred in 1967, and has never been topped. The fastest ever flight by a jet-powered aircraft that could take off and land under it's own power happened in 1976. Only a year from the end of the Vietnam war - when personal computers were still in the future, and Elvis Presley was still alive and kicking and on stage in Las Vegas - a Lockheed SR-71 'Blackbird' spy plane, with a crew of two, flew faster than any aeroplane had before, and faster than any has since.  Only the absolute speed record, set by a North American X-15 rocket plane, remained out of reach of the Blackbird. And only because the X-15 was more a rocket booster with wings and a seat than what most people would define as an aeroplane.

It took forty four years from the first powered flight for the speed of sound to broken by an aircraft, and then in only a decade for the limit to be trebled to three times the speed of sound. In another twenty years paying passengers could buy an (expensive) ticket on a supersonic airliner. That plane was the Anglo-French Concorde, that first flew in revenue service 1976, the same year as the record setting Blackbird flight. But ever since, it seems, everything has calmed down somewhat. After thirty years the Blackbird was retired from it's US Air Force duty as a high altitude spy plane. Thirteen years later Concorde was put out to pasture too. The fastest airliner in the world is to be found today in museums rather than the departure gate. The museum is the only place to see the X-15 too, it never flew again after 1968, and nothing with a pilot has come close to matching it. And, of course, the ultimate in aviation, the Apollo moon landers and the NASA Shuttle, have also become part of history. It is as if we are all content to climb aboard Airbuses and Boeings and take ourselves on holiday at the same speed as they did in the 1960s. Back then everybody thought that within years everybody would be able to board suborbital space planes that could fly halfway around the world in an hour, or fly us to giant space stations. Those dreams seem to have been completely forgotten. At least, for now.


Aircraft took far longer to reach their limits than cars. Today a decent high performance car is expected to be able to reach around 200 mph in a straight line. But the first car that reached 200 mph was built way back in 1927. The 1000 horsepower Sunbeam, driven by Captain Henry de Hane Segrave was the car that did it and it boasted a power output that for a car would be impressive today. There are a few caveats though; the Sunbeam was seven and half metres long - it's nickname was "The Slug" - and could only seat one brave driver. It had two engines, and each one was twenty two litres in capacity. And, most glaringly, the Sunbeam could not turn corners in any practical way. Segrave set his record on the sands of Daytona Beach in Florida, a seemingly endless stretch of straight sand on the eastern coastline of the Sunshine State. Daytona attracted many record breakers in the 1920s due to it's accessible location, good weather, and even the added safety value of having the shallow waters to run into in the event of a fire or brake failure. The standard rule of record runs for cars and boats is that vehicle must make two runs in opposite directions - to cancel out the effects of inclines or the wind - and the speed record is the average of the two runs. For aeroplanes the rule is usually a one-way record but over a measured distance and in level flight. Daytona Beach was just the kind of place where a support crew could easily reach the car after it's first run and turn it around to return. The fastest speed ever reached by a car on a public highway was set in January 1938 by the German racing driver Rudolf Carraciola on a German motorway in a streamlined Mercedes W125 'Rekordwagen' car. Rival racer Bernd Rosemeyer, driving for the Auto Union team (an ancestor of the current Audi company) had set a record shortly before, and would be killed in a crash trying to beat Carraciola's new record. The records were set on a stretch of motorway south of Frankfurt, between the city and to nearby suburb of Darmstadt. Driving 260mph in a specialised car on a large motorway may seem very dangerous but not entirely reckless - after all, many of today's motorways can have four or five lanes heading in either direction - but this was a German autobahn of the 1930s, with two lanes in each direction, and no safety barriers as is standard today. The course was not even a straight line; there were some gentle curves on the road. The two rival teams dominated Grand Prix racing thanks in part to the financial support of the Nazi government, and the speed records were the feather in the cap of the German automobile industry.

The German streamliners were very impressive but also very dangerous devices. They could get up to great speeds but had little in the way of protection for the driver if anything went wrong. Nobody knows what exactly happened to Bernd Rosemeyer on his last run. The 29 year old German ace, the darling of the public, was pushing the 500 horsepower Auto Union streamliner up to 270mph on the autobahn when it suddenly spun out of control and flew off the road, throwing it's driver out an into the forest. That was the end of car companies ever showing off the maximum speed of their cars of on a public road; the raw braggadocio of such a display disappeared along with the Nazis and car makers have stuck with motor racing - and doing the same with less - ever since. Today the site where Rosemeyer was found is a layby with a memorial. Few of the people driving past would ever guess the significance of the site without stopping and looking. Ever since then absolute land speed record has surpassed what cars do on the road, and the main drive in developing road and racing cars has been improving efficiency and packaging rather than reaching absolute speed limits. The fastest motor sport, 'Top Fuel' drag racing reaches around 330 mph, but that is only in straight line. Circuit racers often top 200 mph, though NASCAR stock cars are artificially restricted from reaching unlimited speeds on the largest tracks. Formula One cars have touched 230 mph, but only on one or two circuits. Generally F1 races are held on twisty road and street courses and the cars are not tuned for high speed. American IndyCar racers still race on higher speed oval tracks with higher top speeds but safety measures mean that the ultimate top speed is kept in check. The famed Le Mans 24 Hour race once boasted a three mile straight where cars could reach 250 mph, but that was broken up by two chicanes in 1990 and ever since the cars 'only' reach 220 mph or so. As well as safety there is also the matter of giving the spectators something to watch - plane racing was briefly popular in the 1920s and '30s but it didn't take long for the competitors to become so fast that it was quite hard to see them from the ground, and after the Second World War the speed and complexity of jet planes meant that any racing would thereafter be done by enthusiastic amateurs with propeller planes rather than any of the major companies.

Speed boats reached their limits even sooner than cars. Once the discovery was made that placing a jagged step on the underside of a boats creates turbulence in the water that raises some of the hull out of the water and reduces drag, the modern speedboat was effectively created in one go. As it goes faster a speedboat 'planes'; the front lifts up, the stepped underside lifts the middle section higher, and the hull is shaped to displace the bow wave as efficiently as possible. Better materials have made speedboats more efficient over the years but the 100 mph barrier was broken in the 1930s and most speed boats don't go faster, they just do it with smaller engines. The fastest boats are called hydroplanes; they are designed to lift as far as possible out of the water and to run on three contact points. For stability the front contact points are usually on two front pontoons with the third at the rear. The hydroplane also benefits from 'prop riding' - where on a normal boat the propeller sits entirely submerged in the water, on a prop-rider the driveshaft lifts up along the boat and only the bottom of the prop touches the water. The advent of the prop rider boat boosted the water speed record by a good 40 mph in the early 1950s, but hydroplanes have been reserved for racing and record breaking. Going fast across the water is by far the most dangerous way to travel quickly. The water is a constantly changing surface, and there is no margin for error or space to recover if anything goes wrong. Only six people have tried to break the water speed record since the 1950s, and five of them either died in the first attempt, or succeeded only to be killed in a later attempt.

The water record was a popular target during the inter-war years of the 1920s and 1930s. Many of the land speed racers also took to the water. Henry Segrave, Malcolm Campbell and the racing driver Kaye Don all battled for the record in the 1930s. In the late 1940s Campbell's son Donald took over his father's pre-war 'Bluebird' boat and tried to improve the record but eventually gave up and started planning his own, faster boat. In the early 1950s the land speed holder John Cobb, another British racing driver, built a jet engined boat, the 'Crusader' and drove it over 200 mph on Loch Ness in Scotland. This huge leap in speed was extremely impressive, and would only be the briefest of achievements. Cobb had methodically built up his speed in test runs but on the 200 mph run he suddenly put the engine into full throttle and wound up to much faster than he had been before. Halfway through the run the front of the boat gave way in the slight swell on the lake and the big silver and red jet boat nosedived into the water, exploding in a cloud of spray. Cobb was rescued but died soon afterwards. As it was only his first run he didn't set an official two-way record. The Crusader crash showed how dangerous even a tiny ripple on the water could be, and how even an experienced record breaker could be caught out. The current record is an astonishing 317 mph (511 kph) set by Australian power boat racer Ken Warby on the remote Blowering Dam reservoir, hidden in the bush to the west of the Australian capital Canberra.

That record was set in 1977 and nobody has challenged it since. A high speed hydroplane walks a tightrope between either plowing into the water or somersaulting backwards, and the risk is only worth the effort for racers. The sea is mostly given over to giant container ships, oil tankers, aircraft carriers, destroyers and submarines. The Soviet Russians did once try to build something enormous and fast. Using the phenomenon of 'ground effect' they built a giant prototype vehicle called the 'Ekranoplan' that floated along a few feet above the ocean rather than in it. Ground effect is the build up of high pressure air underneath a wing creating a 'cushion' effect underneath it and is something that pilots will only notice when landing their planes. The Ekranoplan was designed to take advantage of ground effect to 'fly' heavy cargoes across water. The biggest example - nicknamed "The Caspian Sea Monster" by intrigued American intelligence services in the 1960s - was nearly 100 metres long, had ten jet engines, and could fly to over 300 mph. But while it was technically interesting and incredibly impressive gliding low over the water like a giant bird of prey, it was of little practical use. As the name suggests it was based on the shores of the Caspian Sea in the south of the eastern region of Russia, and could only patrol across the level surface of the inland sea. While it was much faster than big ships, it wasn't nearly as quick as big jet planes and never found a useful role.



When it comes to ultimate speed aeroplanes have always had their importance to the military and to commercial travel to drive them forwards. In the earliest days, when aircraft were very basic devices, each new better plane would probably set a speed and distance record or two. Naturally the pioneering Wright brothers held the early benchmarks but within a few years were being joined by many others. The French in particular took up the early lead in speed. After Louis Bleriot (of English Channel crossing fame) came his right-hand man Alfred Leblanc pushing the Bleriot planes faster than his mentor, then the engineer Edouard Nieuport aboard his own eponymous planes that would be made in large numbers during the Great War. The first through the 100 mph mark was Jules Védrines, another Bleriot-trained flyer. Védrines flew in the Deperdussin Monocoque, the plane that can claim to be the first speed machine of the air. It's most distinctive feature was it's monoplane construction. Nearly all planes at the time were biplanes, and for reasons of durability and maneuverability the biplane would continue to be the de-facto layout for small planes for another twenty years. The Monocoque made the most of it's 160 horsepower engine by being slippery through the air and with only two wings, rather than four, it had much less drag. It was light too; about half the weight of the average modern car. The construction method was far ahead of it's time. At the time the standard way to build a plane or a car was to build a wooden framework and cover it with an outer body. The Monocoque plane was built like a boat, with a laminated wooden shell and supporting ribs inside. The shell was part of the structure, there was no outer 'skin'. The Great War drove huge advances in aero engine power, more than doubling the output in a few years. The Deperdussin was soon overtaken by much less slippery planes with much more powerful engines. Mass production during the war meant that the complicated laminated wooden construction of the Monocoque did not replace the traditional way of doing things.  Well into the 1920s planes were still built with wooden frames covered in doped fabric and the monocoque shell only became ubiquitous when all-metal construction started to appear in the 1930s. Race cars only started to become lightweight monocoque chassis in the mid-1960s.

After the First World War the need for speed began to separate from ordinary plane making. Different types began to appear; fighter trainers, bombers, transporters. Seaplanes too, and flying boats, taking advantage of the water to land instead of needing runways. In 1912 the Schneider Trophy for seaplanes had begun, a rich international contest with national pride at stake. After the war the Schneider Trophy races became the premier air races in the world, the proving ground for a whole new generation of planes and designers. Names like Curtiss, Supermarine and it's designer R.J. Mitchell, and the Italian Macchi company. The carnage of the Great War had left many repelled by humanity and eager for more enlightened times. Many dreamed of the same mechanised technology that had led to the wartime slaughter could instead be used for good. Industrial design, combining art and functionality became more popular; there were new home entertainments like music records and radio broadcasts. In the air, instead of lethal dogfights, there were stunts; aerobatics, wing walking, 'barnstorming', and the "Flying Circus". Aviators and aviatrixes became the biggest celebrities of the age. More practically there were more and more air mail routes, and passenger flights. The greatest American hero, after his Atlantic flight in 1927, Charles Lindbergh, had begun on the air mail routes. Even more impressive, terms of distances flown, was the Australian Charles Kingsford Smith, the first man to fly across the Pacific Ocean non-stop. The German aviatrix Elly Beinhorn may have been even more famous in the Reich than her husband, Bernd Rosemeyer, the ill-fated racing driver.

The 1920s and 1930 were a golden age for the record breakers. For many years planes and cars were neck and neck in the speed tables. They were very similar after all; a huge piston engine at the front (often the same aero engine), slippery streamlined bodywork and a brave driver or pilot sat at the back. While extremely exciting for the watching pubic, there was a sinister undercurrent to all the bombast. Everyone pretended it was healthy competition, but everyone also knew that if - or when - the next war came, the country that could build the fastest most powerful machines would have the advantage. It was a time for great national heroes; Henry Segrave and Malcolm Campbell in Britain were both knighted for their efforts. Segrave was first, his 200 mph run in 1927 was followed by a record setting run at 231 mph in 1929 at Daytona Beach in the 'Golden Arrow' - a huge golden painted streamliner, powered by a Napier 'Lion' aeroplane engine. The Arrow got it's air piercing shape from it's lack of radiators. For cooling the large side pannier tanks were filled up with ice. Opposing the cheery, rakish Segrave was his rival Campbell, driving his 'Bluebird' cars. Campbell had a stern, sober appearance, and his attempts to smile for the newsreel cameras looked more like a grimace, but he was more prolific than Segrave. From his first Bluebird, a Sunbeam racing car, he built ever larger and faster cars, setting his first record at 146 mph, setting the last record on Daytona Beach at 276 mph, and being the first record breaker to try for a land speed record the Bonneville Salt Flats on the great salt lake in Utah, USA. On the salt he set his last record at 301 mph, only eleven years after his first. The last incarnation of Bluebird had greatly improved aerodynamics and a new Rolls-Royce aero engine that was much more powerful than the 1920s Lion engine. The car was smooth, with a bluff rectangular body, wheels that were nearly enclosed fully in the body, and a stabilising tail fin. The product of science rather than educated guesswork.

Having set records on water both racers also coveted the water speed record. This brought them into competition with the American power-boater Garfield 'Gar' Wood. The Iowan son of a ferryboat man, Gar Wood was a Detroit businessman in his forties but had the rugged complexion and sun-dazzled squint of a man who'd spent a lifetime on a mid-western farm. Like most of the speed record breakers of the time Wood was designer, driver and fundraiser for his efforts. Where the British racing drivers had started at the Brooklands race circuit and the beaches of Pendine Sands in Wales, before branching out into speedboats, Wood, who lived in Detroit, was only focused on the water. He used the nearby Detroit River and Lake St. Clair as a his own racetrack, driving an ever-larger series of boats to higher and higher speed records. Starting out with one aeroplane engine in his first speed craft, he eventually ended sitting perched behind four aero engines and racing to 124 mph. As well as records he could race circuit races and dominated The Harmsworth Trophy - a British boating trophy that, as was the tradition of the time, was kept for a year by the country that won it, and therefore ended up almost permanently housed in America with it's holder. The British had several tries to get it back, most dramatically in 1931 when Kay Don raced Wood on the Detroit River in front of a giant crowd on the riverbanks. Don was driving 'Miss England II' the boat with which Henry Segrave had set a new speed record in the year before, only to hit floating debris on the lake and overturn. Segrave died from severe internal injuries soon after learning he had set a new record. The boat was righted and repaired, only for Don to overturn it rounding a bend in the 1931 race, without the dire consequences of the previous year. Unexpectedly the winner turned out to be Gar Wood's younger brother George, driving one of his brother's older boats.



The fastest racers of the 1930s were to be found in the Schneider Trophy, which after quiet beginnings in the shadow of the Great War had become a fierce battleground of it's own when the real hostilities ended. In the war most of the fastest planes had been powered by rotary engines. These engines looked like an ordinary aircraft piston engine with a circle of pistons surrounding the propeller. The difference from a normal internal combustion engine is that the pistons stayed still while whole engine block spun around with the propeller. The thought of a huge mass of metal bolted to the front of a small wooden plane, spinning around at thousands of revs per minute might seem somewhat ridiculous, but the rotary engine did have the advantage of simplicity - with the whole engine spinning the pistons didn't need lots of complicated joints and moving parts - and also their compact size - they were hanging onto the front of the fighters like the spare tyre on a camper van. The disadvantage was self-evident. They could only get so big before they flew off their mountings, and even if that didn't happen the pilot would find it impossible to turn in the opposite direction that the engine was spinning.

The Schneider Trophy seaplanes in the 1920s went back the original way of doing things with a basic straight bank of cylinders cooled by radiators. The in-line engine is the main reason why most fast planes and cars of the 1920s and earlier were usually so massive. An in-line engine is long and has some huge cylinder capacities, and since seaplanes didn't have to concern themselves with landing on grass fields with flimsy landing wheels they could have gigantic heavy engines. In 1922 the Italian team had won the last two Schneider Trophy races, held over the lagoon in Venice, and one more win would let the have the first trophy for keeps. They would be thwarted by a British pilot, Henry Biard, in a Supermarine plane. Nobody at the time would have believed that this win would begin a dynasty of British planes that eighteen years later would provide a pivotal part of the defense of Britain's very existence - and that the Italians would be on the side of the aggressors. The exciting 1922 race, with it's tactical dicing, would give a boost to a competition that was in danger of dying out from lack of interest and organisational problems (the 1919 race had been voided when fog rolled in the course in Bournemouth, UK). The Americans were in the starting field at the Isle of Wight in 1923, and they had three planes, and pilots who had trained especially for the occasion. The British winner in 1922 had 450 horsepower under the cowling - one of the American planes a year later pumped out 600. That kind of power increase had been the total power output of the Deperdussin Monocoque ten years before. The American's walked it with a one-two finish, and this result, especially on home ground did not go over well with a British press and public to whom coming second in a competition was not expected. To rationalise their disappointment they huffed and puffed that winning with government backing and paid pilots was not the gentlemanly way to approach things.

After one thrilling year the contest almost came to grinding halt again since nobody was ready to fly against the Americans in 1924, but things got back on track in 1925. With the absolute speed record race hotting up - by 1924 it was up to 278 mph, far ahead of the land-based speed demons below - the British and Italians failed to unseat the Americans that year but were ready in 1926. Amateur gentlemanly ideals had been quietly forgotten in favour of Royal Air Force pilots from Britain, and Mussolini's pots of lire in Italy. The Italian Aeronautica Macchi company had been present in the Schneider races since 1920 and for 1926 they rolled out their M.39. The M.39 was a huge prize-fighter of an aircraft, it's blood-red bodywork concealing an 800 horsepower V-12 engine. Ever improving technology allowed the creation of the 'V' engine, effectively doubling-up the in-line engine on the same crankshaft and nearly doubling the power. The big V-12 would be the standard power plant for the racer and fighter until the advent of turbojets, and would provide the sonorous roar, and bulging engine cowlings, that are so evocative of the age.

Two of the Macchi M.39's did not make the finish of the race in 1926, but one held together to win, and for good measure set a new speed record a few days later. Poor reliability would be the bane of the Italians; there were three more Schneider Trophy races after 1926 but mechanical failures thwarted the red planes in every one. They met their match in the figures of Reginald J. Mitchell and Supermarine, who had made the most of their military backing and built their own monster. The Supermarine S5 did not look quite as brutish as the Macchi planes, but it made up for it's lack of presence with ingenious design. Chief among the advances was the all-metal fuselage made from aluminium alloy called duralumin, a major element of the German airships of the time, duralumin was light and was strong enough could to cope with the torque generated by the latest Napier 'Lion' engine in the nose - the same engine as found in the record cars of Campbell and Segrave. The British never lost another Schneider Trophy; they won in 1927, 1929 and 1931. After five years away the race went back to Venice but the local crowds were disappointed to see the Macchi's all drop out and the win go to the British, who as well as having very capable planes also had skilled pilots who could take the three turns of the course very fast and low, without losing speed. Few in the crowd that day would have thought much about what it all meant. These were still the "Roaring Twenties", a time of relative innocence, before the full force of Benito Mussolini's cult of personality and fascist police state would be imposed on the Italians, and before the rise of his allies the Nazis in Germany. Lindbergh had just flown the Atlantic, and the coming economic disaster of the Great Depression was totally unsuspected. The creator of the Trophy, Jacques Schneider, died the next year, and though his competition had provided great technical improvement, and countless exciting anecdotes, it had been more to the benefit of military flying than his original hope of the development of seaplanes.

Losing at home didn't sit well with 'Il Duce', and the Macchis got plenty more of Mussolini's money in 1929, but again it was for nought. The British had taken the obsolete Lion engine out of their racers and dropped in the new Rolls-Royce 'R' engine. The 'R' was still a V12 but had an air compressor device called a 'supercharger' on the front, and since this blew far more air into the engine the 'R' made what went before look puny. The 1929 Supermarine S5 had a stupendous 1,900 horsepower, putting it well past three hundred miles per hour. Over in Italy the Italians had a something similar, in the shape of the new Macchi M-67, but they couldn't get it ready in time, and a fatal test crash on Lake Garda that killed one of their top pilots, Captain Motta, set them back further. The M-62 did not have a supercharger, but instead got it's power by being a 'W-18' engine with a third bank of cylinders. Just like an old Great War rotary plane the new seaplane racer suffered from the torque generated by the monster under the cowling - pilots found it harder and harder to take off from the water as the floats, even though they were full of petrol and should have been buoyant, were shoved down into the surface under the power of the engine running. The Italians turned up to race the British at Southampton in 1929 even though they knew they would be beaten. And when they were they turned around and headed home doubly determined to win the 1931 race. Unfortunately for Lieutenant Monti, their brave pilot who battled both the British and his own plane's radiators blowing up in his face in the 1929 race, the new Macchi MC-72 would take him with it when it crashed, once again at Lake Garda.

Monti crashed because the double propeller on the MC-72 malfunctioned and broke apart, but after this initial setback the MC-72 seemed to be the favourite for the 1931 Schneider Trophy. Then suddenly it seemed like it would have to be a pretty hollow victory as the parsimonious British Government decided that two wins was enough for them and stopped funding the Supermarine S-6 team. The 1929 Wall Street Crash and the Depression had finally hit home for the racers, and even if the money could be found the RAF pilots were now under orders to not compete. Salvation came in the unlikely form of a seventy three year-old pensioner; Lady Houston, the wealthy widow of a Conservative MP, and emphatically not a supporter of the Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald. Lady Houston put up the money to build a 'B' model of the S-6, on the condition that the government rescind their ban on the RAF pilots flying in the race. The conservative-leaning parts of the media put the boot into the PM, declaring him 'unpatriotic' and calling on the public to send in the money that their government did not want to put up. The pressure paid off and the S6B, now with a 2,000 horsepower Rolls Royce engine, was ready for the 1931 race. Alas it would not have much competition as, in an ironic twist to the tale, while the British dithered the second MC-72 had also crashed, and then so did one of the older S6's, leaving just one of the newest British planes in a race against itself. Not that this mattered to the crowd on the shores of the Solent  who flocked in to watch the S6B flown by Flight Lieutenant Boothman zoom around the course at speeds near 400 mph. That would be that for the Schneider Trophy race; seaplanes were no longer the wave of the future and the races no longer relevant. The technical breakthroughs from Supermarine and Macchi would find their way into land-based fighter planes. Mussolini, no doubt understanding what the future held, still kept writing cheques for Macchi's seaplanes, and the Italians did get a consolation prize in 1934, when Officer Francesco Agello screamed along in another MC-72 - now with a fifty litre, 3100 horsepower V-24 engine, at 440 mph. A record for a piston powered seaplane that the sleek red giant, sitting quietly today in the Italian Air Force Museum, still holds.

In America the National Air Races, and the two most prestigious events the Thompson Trophy and Bendix Trophy, provided a public proving ground for the creation of ever faster planes. The Thompson race was a shorter circuit race; like in the Schneider Trophy the competitors flew around a course marked out with pylons; the Bendix Trophy was a point-to-point cross country race. The city of Cleveland in Ohio became the focal point of most of the races, perhaps because of it's central location in the country, on the edge of one of the Great Lakes made it a good location for the country's flyers to congregate. The races attracted a great variety of planes the most memorable of which were the 'Gee Bee' racers, built by a tiny company in Massachusetts. The Gee Bee planes are probably the most well recognised yet obscure vehicles ever made. Made by the Granville Brothers company (hence the 'GB' name), the small red and white planes with cartoonish proportions are instantly familiar yet few people could name their builder. Without exaggeration the Gee Bee 'Sportster' can be described as a huge Pratt & Whitney piston engine with a seat at the back. For maximum speed the wings were tiny stubs on the side and the wheels were housed in streamlined pods underneath. The pilot peered through a window barely the size of his crash helmet and hung on. The stubby wings meant there was little margin for error in a Sportster and the huge bulbous nose ahead of the pilot made landing a matter of informed guesswork. They were quick though; in 1932 a sportster was the fastest land-plane in the world - only the seaplanes of the Schneider Trophy were quicker. Getting close to 300 mph was not without hazards. A year before experienced pilot Lowell Baynes had tried for a speed record at the Detroit airfield. On it's first of the two required passes the Gee Bee's right wing suddenly folded in and in a moment the plane smashed into a ditch at the edge of the field and exploded in a huge fireball. The newsreel cameras captured the crash and secured the legend of the fast-but-deadly Sportster. In only a few years the Granville Brothers were out of the aeroplane business and most of their tricky planes were lost to crashes. The continued popularity of the plane's iconic look has led to several replicas being built over the years.

If the Granville Brothers planes were an exciting flash in the pan then the next upstart American plane builder with dreams of speed records had rather more ambitious and expansive plans. Howard Hughes, a young industrialist who had inherited his family's business when both of his parents had died within a few years of each other, moved to Los Angeles in the late 1920s intent less on making a success of his business than on world domination. He became a movie producer and real-estate developer, invested in manufacturing and entertainments, as well as expanding his original business in oil drilling. He also managed to find time to woo most of Hollywood's leading ladies, a veritable Who's-Who of the time; Bette Davis, Ginger Rodgers, Ava Gardner, Katherine Hepburn et al. Though Hughes liked the ladies, his real passion was planes. After making a huge profit on a spectacular movie set during the air battles of the Great War called "Hell's Angels", which involved massive restaged air battles, Hughes set to work on the real thing. The Grand Central Air Terminal had been built at Glendale in the epicentre of wealthy Los Angeles. A focal point for the fifty five other airfields in the greater Los Angeles area the Grand Central boasted a large runway, lots of hangars and a stylish control tower and terminal in the Art Deco style. Hughes rented space in a hangar, hired some of the country's best plane engineers, and the windtunnel at CalTech in nearby Pasadena. The end result of his money-no-object approach was the Hughes H-1. If the Gee Bee Sportster looked like a cartoon plane then the H1 looked like it had flown from the pages of a comic book. Long, thin and silver, it went as fast as it looked - the wind tunnel model tests and Hughes own fanatical insistence on the quality of the fit and finish led to a very slippery plane. In the nose pulling the craft along sat a 1000 horsepower engine. The wheels folded away flush with the wings - another radical feature. It didn't take long for Hughes to break the speed record for land planes - he did it on his first flight. Though it was a qualified success; 567 kph was a long way short of the Macchi seaplane. And he had to land the H1 hard into a field when he ran it out of fuel, bending the propeller.

Hughes went on to set a transcontinental American record in the H1, taking himself from Los Angeles to New York city's neighbour Newark in just over seven hours without any stops. Although he couldn't know it when he touched down in New Jersey, Howard Hughes was the last real 'privateer' to build a record breaking plane. The golden age of air racing would be over very soon; from the late 1930s the government and military would take over almost entirely. The Hughes H1 should have provided a perfect blueprint for the Americans to base new warplanes on but it was very slightly too early. In 1935 most of the world's air forces still used bi-planes and even though the next great war would only be four years away high speed monoplanes had only just begun to roll out of hangars, and even then they were only prototypes. On an spring day in March 1936 a light blue Supermarine plane, code number K5054, was publicly unveiled. A year before the new Hawker Hurricane monoplane had rolled out, and had been thought the cutting edge of fighter planes, but this new R.J. Mitchell penned creation made it look rather ordinary. Some of the Schneider-Trophy lineage was visible in lines of the body and the nose. The plane shared the new Rolls-Royce 'Merlin' V12 engine with the Hurricane. The Merlin had been troublesome in development - it's cylinders couldn't handle the heat in the engine and warped. But these problems were fixed, and just in time as the world situation was deteriorating by the time the new Supermarine fighter was ready to fly in service in 1938.

The plane had been given the official name "Spitfire", a name that it's designer disliked, but sadly he wouldn't see it in service. R.J. Mitchell died in 1937 aged forty two after five years of treatment for cancer. His plane's distinctive elliptical wing was very thin for it's time, much more so than the Hurricane, and allowed exceptional performance. In hindsight the plane had another virtue; for all it's performance it was easy to fly and generally forgiving, and for the ranks of young recruits who would fly the Spitfire in the Battle of Britain that and beyond that proved welcome characteristics in the heat of battle. Only one other plane of the Second World War could match the Spitfire for inspiring looks and performance - the Lockheed P-38 "Lightning". The P-38 had two 1200 horsepower engines, linked by a long thin wing, with the two tail booms linked by a second wing. The pilot sat in a small pod in the middle with an uninterrupted view ahead, and could rocket along at up to 400 mph. The Lightning was penned by Lockheed's young lead designer Clarence 'Kelly' Johnson, and like the Spitfire had been designed just in time to be ready for the outbreak of war in Europe, and it's exceptional abilities gave the Allied air forces a major asset when the Americans joined the war in 1941; with five guns poking out of the nose, it could shoot down other planes, sink destroyers, and nothing could keep up with it's top speed. The USA's top fighter ace of WW2, Major Richard Bong, flew a Lightning, and was never shot down, surviving air combat only to be killed crashing one of the new P80 Shooting Star jet planes in 1945 on the same day as the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Though his demise made headlines he wasn't quite the most famous Lightning pilot of the war. In the Pacific in 1944 the P-38 gained an unexpected, but welcome test pilot; one Charles Lindbergh. "Lindy", now in his forties, toured the world consulting for aircraft firms and in New Guinea he took the Lightning up for trials, offering feedback with improved flying techniques for the plane. Appropriately for the old 1920s air mail pilot his major contribution was in eking out more fuel from the big engines.

With America entering the war Howard Hughes tried to get his young company in on the action. He'd been inexplicably snubbed despite the obvious capabilities of his H1, but when the opportunity came up to build a reconnaissance plane Hughes jumped at the chance. Reconnaissance was the original role for planes when they first went to war in 1914, before bombing and fighting, and it was still vitally important. It called for a high flying, very fast, and reliable plane. And the small but highly capable Hughes company came up with just the ticket. Their XF-11 looked like a very large Lockheed Lightning, but with a much bigger cockpit, with excellent visibility, and two pairs of contra-rotating propellers on the engines. Unfortunately for the war effort the design of the XF-11 took so long that the war was almost won by the time it was ready. The post-war climate would definitely be needing a spy-plane however, but that plane would not be the Hughes XF-11. Like with the H1 racer the fastidious Hughes insisted on taking the first flight himself, and just as before he had to ditch the plane. But this time he didn't walk away unscathed. Hughes took his new spyplane up for it's first flight over greater Los Angeles, and it was a flawless flight until his left engine began to splutter and fail. Rather than head straight for a runway Hughes tried to work the problem in mid-air, but soon ran out of time and altitude. He tried to land on a golf course but with his plane wallowing around with a failing engine he didn't make it and smashed across the roofs of several homes before careering to a halt in a ball of flame. The size of his steed and it's sturdy design probably saved him from being killed on impact, and the heroic efforts of a passerby who pulled him clear certainly meant he made it to a hospital with a chance of survival. Though the crash kept Hughes in hospital for a considerable time it was the cost of his XF-11 that killed it's chances rather than the spectacular crash into a Beverly Hills neighbourhood. Recovering from the disappointment of seeing the XF-11 amount to only two prototypes, Hughes instead focused on his controlling interest in Trans World Airlines (TWA). His increasingly large aerospace company became a dominant player in world industry but it's creator gradually descended into his infamous reclusive existence living alone in a Las Vegas penthouse - the same obsessive nature that led Hughes to success eventually consumed him. He never set any more records in the air, and passed away in 1976 - the same year the Blackbird would set a new benchmark for the record that he had once held.



During the war the Spitfire got faster and faster. It's versatile design - in modern parlance we'd call it"future proofing" - meant it could get more powerful, and could handle being powered along ever faster. By the end of the war it could get up to over 600 mph in a dive and was reaching what was called the 'transonic' zone. This was close to the speed of sound, when parts of the air over the plane's wings were travelling supersonic. Sound is pressure disturbances in air. The speed of sound is how fast these waves travel (or, more scientifically, are 'propagated') through air - around 678 mph at 30,000 feet. All objects create disturbances in the air, and large objects like planes and cars create lots of air disturbances. So as a craft begins to reach the speed sound travels it starts catching up with it's own shockwaves. There is no "warning" to the air ahead so a barrier of pressure builds up an invisible wall ahead of the craft. All the molecules of the air stay completely unmoved until they are all blasted out of the way in one sudden shock; this creates the famous "sonic boom", the thunder-like crack as the object blows apart the surrounding air, literally knocking a hole in the sky. Since the nineteenth century physicists had been aware of theoretical problem of the sound barrier, but they were also aware that there was a ubiquitous object that travelled past that barrier all the time; the bullet. Rifles and revolvers clearly fired bullets that travelled supersonic, and the bullets just as clearly survived their trip through the sound barrier. Unfortunately for those Victorian-era physicists the new technology of photography could not possibly hope to capture a bullet in flight and see just what was going on in the air around it. By the 1880s camera technology had finally advanced enough to be fast enough to photograph a bullet. An Austrian physicist named Ernst Mach made good use of the improved photographic technology, producing comprehensive studies of the shockwaves around bullets. Mach gave his name to the "Mach number", the standard measurement of supersonic speeds, and Mach 1 became the standard scientific name for the speed of sound.

This was all very well, but aeroplanes had a little problem in the way of breaking Mach 1. The problem was, quite literally, in the way; the propeller. Propellers could never fly a plane supersonic because the tips of the prop would hit the shockwaves far before the plane itself did, and the propeller would disintegrate. The speed of sound also demonstrably slowed down with altitude, meaning high flying fighter planes like the Spitfire and Mustang would encounter the sound barrier sooner than if they had been flying just above the ground. The German wartime V2 missile rocket showed that a large vehicle could go supersonic if it had a rocket engine. A rocket had enough power to reach high speed and could simply sit in the tail, out of the way of the shockwaves. Basic rockets had been around for millenia, dating all the way back to the battlefields of ancient China. These were just like a modern firework; a tube filled with explosive gunpowder and fitted with a stabilising tail. They were not controllable however; it took until the heroic efforts of the American Dr. Robert Goddard in the 1920s to create a flyable rocket engine. A physicist, Goddard pioneered liquid-fuelled rockets, and did so mostly off his own back, usually in local fields with prototypes built in his university workshops. Liquid fuel, unlike gunpowder, could be turned on and off like a tap and thus add a throttle to any rocket engine. Goddard also realised that the rocket could be steered by moving the tail exhaust, and would work in very thin air or even a complete vacuum. Famously, a New York Times editorial of the time scoffed at this thought. Without air to push against, it helpfully pointed out, the rocket couldn't move. Had Sir Isaac Newton been alive to comment he perhaps could have written them a polite letter informing them that it was the action of the exhaust material leaving the rocket that moved it forward, not the 'push' against the air. The Times happily retracted their infamous criticism with the first moon landing in 1969, proving that even their own actions could sometimes have an equal and opposite reaction.

The Nazi rocket engineer Werner von Braun was greatly influenced by Goddard; fortunately his devastatingly powerful V2 rocket came far too late to change the course of the war. When the Americans launched their secret Operation "Paperclip" to sweep up as many German scientists as they could with the war's end, and install them in jobs in America's military, Von Braun was high on their list. Also near the top was the aircraft engineer Alexander Lippisch, creator of the Me-163 "Komet" interceptor. The Komet was a tiny rocket propelled plane with swept wings, designed to fly up on very short missions into the heart of Allied bombing groups. An early prototype smashed the world speed record in 1941, blasting close to the sound barrier, but the whole project teetered right on the edge of technical viability. So many new ideas were being tried that it was a near-impossible task for the designers, engineers and pilots to make the Komet into a practical war machine. The engine was incredibly potent but at full power lasted around four minutes. It could get the Komet up to 9,000 metres in that time, then the pilot had to make sure he was aligned for the glide return to base, if he had managed to hit a target or not. Pilots had to be trained in altitude chambers to be ready to be subjected to such a rapid climb and descent. The pilot ideally wanted to land with little fuel, since the Komet had to land on a small ski instead of landing wheels (it took off on a detachable dolly that the pilot jettisoned after takeoff), and the fuel was almost unimaginably volatile. The two parts were called "T-Stoff" (or hydrogen peroxide) and "C-Stoff" (hydrazine hydrate, methanol, and cupracyanide). These were as dangerous as they sounded. Komets could, and did, explode with only the tiniest impact, or fuel leak. The fuel was also corrosive; pilots and crew risked awful burns if exposed to it.

The Komet demonstrated dramatically yet another problem with very high speed flying, a problem that would affect all planes no matter what engine was powering them. When it closed in on it's top speed, deep in the transonic region, it's control surfaces simply stopped working properly. The building up of shockwaves over the wings as the plane accelerated gradually made the ailerons, tail elevators and rudder ineffective. The thickness of the wings was a problem too; air would accelerate faster over thicker wings and head towards supersonic speeds sooner. The air at the back of the wing was moving faster than at the front so the back of the wing was making more lift. The plane would start to lurch forward and pitch down. The shockwaves over the wing could also completely detach the vital airflow and the wing would lose a huge proportion of lift. Pilots of Spitfires, Mustangs, and P38 Lightnings would encounter the frightening, and sometimes fatal, results of this. If a pilot of one of these planes was forced into a fast dive they could soon find themselves sitting aboard a plane with the wings and tail violently shaking and unless they pulled out of the dive in time, all control would lost. They also had to contend with the counter-intuitive hazard nicknamed "Mach tuck", the phenomena where pulling back the control column, and thus pulling the elevators up, would accelerate the air further over them and cause even more catastrophic control loss.

With the end of the war, focus shifted from making fighter planes en masse to solving the control problem that would allow a pilot to safely fly through the sound barrier and return safely. Designers had the engines; both the turbojet or liquid rocket engine were already powerful enough to do the job, and the shape; the Americans planned to model a research plane around a machine gun bullet, a shape that was proven to work. The cash-strapped British industry still had an interest in pushing forward in high speed research - they had powerful new turbojet engines after all - and the small Miles Aircraft Company came up with a supersonic prototype. The Miles M52 was built around a large jet engine, complete with a new feature called a reheat that pumped extra fuel into the hot exhaust of the engine, turning the exhaust into a crude rocket engine for extra thrust. The engine inlet surrounded the entire nose cone, with the cockpit shape deflecting the nose shockwave around the intake, keeping the air flowing into the jet's blades slow enough to allow the engine to work. On the tail the problem of Mach tuck was solved by making the entire horizontal tail plane move up and down, a "stabilator" rather than an elevator. The Miles's design work and research was impressive, impressive enough for the British government to share it with the Americans in a gesture of goodwill as the war ended. The Americans declined to return the favour with their data, but it was a minor snub for the Miles team, who felt that the M-52 was sure to take a British pilot past the speed of sound first.

Then, with the first Miles M-52 nearing completion, the British Government decided that the supersonic plane was one extravagance too many and pulled the plug. Considering that this was the same government that had already given much of their work to America without receiving compensation, and that many other companies were being given free reign to develop other new jet planes, the Miles engineers could have been forgiven for feeling hard done by. What happened next only rubbed their faces in the dirt. In America the government had set up the National Advisory Council on Aeronautics (or NACA) and commissioned New York's Bell Aircraft Company to build their flying rocket bullet. The project was top secret of course, and nobody outside of those in-the-know would see the plane for many months. When eventually the Miles engineers first saw the Bell "X-1" in action, they could not help but notice the stabilator on the tail. Had the Americans come up with this innovation on their own? Perhaps, but it was too late to feel aggrieved. The Miles blueprints had been handed to Vickers, who eventually built their own remote controlled, scaled down version of the M52, and promptly flew it supersonic.

Not everybody on the American side was convinced by the NACA high speed rocket plane. The US Air Force was the driving force behind the X1, but the US Navy wanted more emphasis on jet planes - rockets would not be of much use on aircraft carriers, they reasoned. So two lines of development began, on the one side the Air Force with it's need for speed and Buck Rogers rockets, on the other the Navy with a more conservative approach. The giant Douglas company, makers of the ubiquitous DC-3 airliner and Dakota military transport, gave the Navy the Douglas D558 "Skystreak". Inside was a General Electric jet, one of the first American efforts at jet power. As befitting the military might of the USA, it was a monster; three quarters more powerful than the Rolls Royce engine in the British Gloster Meteor interceptor, with the American take on the exhaust fuel-burning reheat, an 'afterburner'. The whole contraption was essentially the giant engine with two wings, a tail and a seat on top. In the summer of 1947 the Skystreak was officially timed as the fastest plane in the world, and also broke the Komet's unofficial wartime mark. The Skystreak took off from the ground under it's own power, whereas the X-1 was to be sky launched from a B-50 bomb bay. Whatever the Air Force might do the Douglas engineers and Navy pilots thus considered themselves to be flying the fastest 'proper' plane in the world, rather than a be-winged rocket missile. Their view was probably strengthened by the problems the X-1 would have with it's landing gear, which was so rudimentary and fragile that it collapsed several times during the plane's flying life.

The X-1 was ready shortly after the end of the war and first flew in 1946. Charles 'Chuck' Yeager was the lead X-1 pilot, although it took both a death and a dispute to get him there. Bell aircraft's head pilot Jack Woolams, the first to fly the X1 in 1946, had been killed in an air race event in
Cleveland later that year, leaving the way open for others. Yeager, born in West Virginia, he had enlisted in 1941 and flown for the air force over occupied Europe. By war's end he had thirteen targets destroyed, including a jet Messerschmidt 262. He'd also been shot down over France, and made his way back to England by way of the assistance of the French resistance and an undercover stay in Spain. In other words, his had been an eventful war, and he was only twenty four when became the x1 pilot - on his regular Air Force salary. This last point became a bone of contention when another Bell company pilot Chalmers 'Slick' Goodlin resigned from the program supposedly after he demanded a substantial bonus from Bell Aircraft to take the plane supersonic. Goodlin always disputed this, claiming that Air Force had simply wanted him out of the way so their pilot (Yeager) could do the mission, and the minor pay dispute had been their excuse. Bell had started their work on the X1 in 1944, but finding contractors to help build the plane itself was not easy during wartime. Much of the design work had to be done to estimates as there was only limited data to work from. The plane was finished before the rocket engine and was glide tested  - with ballast in the tail to simulate the weight of the engine - by Jack Woolams over Florida in early 1946. When the rocket engine was ready the project moved on to the deserts of California and Rodgers dry lake, high up in Mojave Desert.

Seventy miles north of Los Angeles, in the desert on the far side of the San Gabriel mountains, Rodgers dry lake, adjacent to the small settlement of Muroc, was the perfect place to for the US armed forces to test planes during World War Two. It was dry and sunny, and had almost limitless space for runways. During the war mockups of Japanese battleships had been put up on the desert floor for bomber crews to practice on. It was also the place where the first ever American jet plane -Bell's "Airacomet" took it's first flight in 1942. The name "Muroc" came from the family who originally settled the site in the early twentieth century, the Corums. When the time came for a post office to be built in the small hamlet, the Corum name was rejected by the authorities because there was already a Coram, California. So the local residents reversed the name and were promptly accepted. Muroc Air Force Base would be given the name that became known around the world in 1949, when it was named after Air Force Captain Glen Edwards, who perished along with his crew when his Northrop YB-49 Flying Wing prototype crashed in the desert. Even when the planes were flying Edwards Air Force base in it's earliest days was a very quiet place, with wide open spaces, a few tin huts, large tents, hangars and facilities for the planes. And nearby a watering hole called Pancho's Fly Inn, where the wall was adorned with pictures of test pilots - just as long as they had already "bought the farm" in the sky. There were lots of pictures on Pancho's walls.

Chuck Yeager may have been young but he proved adept at test flying the rocket plane, even if his enthusiasm occasionally raised eyebrows among his superiors. On his first powered flight in the X1 he rolled the plane. This maneuver had been performed in glide tests and showed the plane's excellent stability, but under power it caused the engine to cut out momentarily. With that minor scare out the way Yeager then put the plane in a dive and "buzzed" the Muroc control tower, before blasting back to up to the altitude where he was supposed to be flying straight and level. Upon landing his bosses politely asked for an explanation for his unplanned antics; Yeager wrote back apologising simply stating that the X1 had felt easily within it's limits the whole time. Not long afterwards he took a horse ride in the desert brush with his wife, and cracked two of his ribs when the horse threw him. This really was serious. There was no way he would be allowed any further flights with a medical problem, and he knew it would be 'Game Over' for his chances of flying into history if those higher up the chain of command found out. Unable to go any of the Muroc Base doctors he confided in a local veterinarian, who strapped up his side the best he could.

The improvised bandaging looked like it had saved Yeager from having to stand down, with one small problem. With his side taped up his middle was immobile and he could not reach down to lock the X-1's cockpit hatch. His flight engineer friend Jack Ridley came up with a solution; a length of wooden broom handle to reach down and push down the hatch lock. This was not the first ad-hoc solution in the project. They had already found that a good coating of 'Drene' women's hairspray was an excellent way to stop frost building up on the inside of the screen during a flight. Yeager may have been a bit wild at times but he had excellent piloting skills, and, perhaps even more importantly, could give good feedback to the engineers on the ground. Although from this distance in time nobody can really say if the American engineers had 'borrowed' the stabilator idea from the British Miles M52 data, the chances are also good that, with Yeager's feedback, they did come up with their own version independently. Yeager was aware of a worrying deadening to the controls as he gradually worked up to supersonic speeds. This was a concern as the X1's razor-thin wings were supposed to have been designed to avoid this problem, and yet here it still was manifesting itself as if the plane was a Spitfire or Mustang. But with the all-moving tail installed Yeager could work out a procedure to adjust it as the speed built up and maintain control.

After lots of trial runs the day arrived for the X1 to fly through the famed "Sound barrier" and go supersonic. Not that anyone outside of Muroc would be told about it for many months, such was standard cloak of paranoid secrecy around any military project in the United States. If the flight succeeded of course; though there were now two X-1s in operation in the event of one being lost it was a practical inevitability that the pilot would go with it. Not only were the speeds so great that busting open the hatch would not be the work of a moment but any exit out of that hatch would lead directly into the leading edge of the wings. Maybe it was for good luck that the buttoned up test program managers had allowed one flourish. The X-1 now had a name and a little nose art - not quite the paintings of buxom blondes or grinning shark teeth of wartime bombers and fighters - the motif "Glamorous Glennis", after Yeager's wife, was painted down the nose by the cockpit hatch. On October 14th 1947 Glamorous Glennis was loaded into it's B-50 carrier plane. A slightly awkward process that involved rolling the little rocket plane into a specially designed pit, and rolling the big bomber over the top. In the next few years they would come up with a system of giant hydraulic jacks to simply lift the larger plane precariously up on it's landing gear. Once they reached launch altitude Yeager lowered himself down the bomb bay into the cockpit, using the wooden broom handle to push the hatch lock closed, and after a few minutes of systems checks was ready to go.

Flanked by two P-80 "Shooting Star" chase planes the X1 dropped away from the B-50. With a flick of a switch it's pilot turned it from a falling orange bomb into an aircraft as the four rockets fired into life. Immediately leaving the carrier plane with the rest of the crew far behind, Yeager switched off two of the engines, and with the jet fighters in pursuit, accelerated across the empty desert sky. Closing in on the sound barrier he lit up all the engines once again, and held on as the controls began to buzz and oscillate, and the ride got rougher and rougher. Then, in a moment, everything was smooth. He was up at 13700 metres, flying 1,100 kph, and was thus going Mach 1.07; supersonic. On the ground they heard the boom as the X-1 blew apart the air and sent shockwaves out across the desert. After about thirty seconds supersonic Yeager cut the engines and began to slow. A sharp jolt as he re-entered the transonic region was his only cause for concern. Everything had gone exactly to plan and probably explains why he gave the little orange craft a celebratory roll, captured by a movie camera for posterity in one of the chase planes.

Certain qualifiers have been put on the mission. It is very likely that pilots did break the sound barrier before Yeager, but these pilots were always in dives, whether it was inadvertently because of war time combat or intentionally. During the war a German Me-262 jet pilot called Hans Mutke reported passing into a zone of severe buffeting that suddenly abated during a dive in combat. His plane was badly damaged by the experience. Other war time fighter pilots who may have gone supersonic did not come back from their experience to tell about it. Not long before Yeager a North American Aircraft company pilot called George Welch took a jet fighter prototype - the YP-86 - into a steep dive and allegedly went supersonic. He did it again in 1948, after the X1, and this time with plenty of official witnesses, but again this was in a dive, not level flight. That was the key point of the X1 flight; it was entirely level and under full control. As with so many other speed record breakers coming back safely and in one piece was just as important as getting to the record. The history books are full of the names of those who went fast but never came back. The fate of Geoffrey de Havilland Jr a year before in the British DH-108 experimental plane that had become so unstable as it neared Mach 1 that it literally shook itself apart showed that a level supersonic flight had not been as easy as Yeager and the X1 team had made it look. Following the record flight the programme continued. Belatedly, Yeager would eventually gave the original X-1 a single ground launch to prove to the world, and the Navy Skystreak team, that it could be done.

The X1 had a rather curious look with it's bullet-like shape and rocket engine combined with the straight wings of an earlier age. This despite the increasing research into the aerodynamic benefits of sweeping back the wings. With the X1 programme the Air Force were sticking with the philosophy of "walk before you can run". The X1 had been conceived purely to go fast in a straight line and although the straight wings were less aerodynamic, they were more predictable and stable. This design feature continued with the follow-up X1-A, an updated version intended to fly up to twice the speed of sound. The now-broken "sound barrier" had been around 1200 kph; double that was 2400 kph, or nearly 1500 miles per hour. In order to acheive this the designers had been hard at work on a prosaic problem; the window. In the original X-1 the pilot had to look through an ugly grid of braces placed across the glass to hold it together, in the new plane they got a proper cockpit canopy. However they were not necessarily flying the quickest plane any more. By the turn of the decade into the 1950s there were high speed swept-wing planes ready to fly. The X1-A had a new cousin, the X-2, and the Skystreak a successor, the Skyrocket. As the name suggested the Skyrocket was fitted with the same rocket engine as the X1, although it could also be fitted with a jet engine as per Navy requirements. It was a deceptively simple looking beast. A pure white tube, with two swept wings, and a t-shaped tail. The X-2 looked much the same, but was tiny; the pilot would climb down from the B-50 carrier plane into a cockpit right in end of the nose, and had a tight squeeze into the tiny aperture. In the quest for speed the X-2 was made even more minimal than it's relative; the pilot had to gingerly land the expensive contraption on retractable skids under the wings rather than wheels.

It is perhaps a measure of how much military spending had pushed flying ahead of most other technologies that the Skyrocket and it's like were born into a world that barely had television, where a computer was the size of a room, where infectious diseases like polio and tuberculosis were widespread even in rich countries. Even other high speed technology of the era looks primitive next to the high speed test planes. A cutting-edge Grand Prix car of the 1950s looks a little like a farm tractor. Most high speed trains in Europe were still steam engines. In November 1953 the Skyrocket powered past twice the speed of sound piloted by Navy pilot Scott Crossfield, a good speed for a military plane ever since. A good-natured if fierce rivalry had developed between the Navy and Air Force pilots flying in the test pilot corps. In the 50th anniversary year of the Wright brothers first powered flight both sides wanted to be first to claim the record for doubling the sound barrier. The Air Force crew with the X1-A were frustrated to be trumped by Crossfield and the Navy but soon were ready with their response. Three weeks after the record was set the Air Force sent Chuck Yeager up in the X1-A. Yeager smashed the Navy record by 600 kph but it was nearly his last flight. As he was de-accelerating from maximum speed the X1-A unexpectedly snapped out of control and Yeager plummeted from the sky, spinning and tumbling over and over. As in the original X1 there was no ejector seat; Yeager had to regain control or perish. One violent tumble sent his helmeted head into the canopy, smashing it, adding to the confusion. After a minute of total disorientation Yeager finally caught his bearings and managed to wrestle the craft into a 'normal' spin, the kind that all fighter pilots are trained to recover from. Eventually, after falling over 15000 metres over the desert he got back under control and came in for a landing; an act of skill and level-headedness that had far outstripped his much more famous sound-barrier breaking run. On his final approach he radioed back dryly that had he had an ejector seat he would long since have gotten out.

When the world's most famous test pilot nearly ends up at the bottom of a smouldering crater in the desert thanks to a completely unforseen problem, it goes without saying that the high speed test flying business was an extremely dangerous and complicated business. Flying an orange scaled-up bullet of a plane through the shock waves at the speed of sound in straight and level flight was only the beginning of a very complicated set of interconnected problems that the engineers and pilots had to wrestle with throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Yeager's terrifying plunge in 1953 happened after the danger had seemingly subsided and he was slowing down to head back in to base. The problem he had encountered soon gained a name; 'inertia coupling', or, in very basic terms, when the inertia of the plane's fuselage became too much for the skinny wings and stabilisors to cope with. To get to very high speeds the aircraft had thin, short, wings and thus the aerodynamic forces acting on the control surfaces could easily be overcome by the shifting weight of the body. The physics of this involved horrifically complicated mathematics in an age where computers were only basic number-crunchers not sophisticated simulators, and there were precious few large wind tunnels. The only real way to find out whether the calculations were correct and worked in full-scale was to send a pilot up. Not that the pilot's lives were taken for granted. Knowing that ejector seats were not yet able to deal with such high speeds the designers of both the Skyrocket and X2 had introduced an escape capsule system, where in the event of trouble the pilot could jettison the entire nose section, ride it down on a stablising droge parachute, then jump clear can come down safely on their own personal chute.

There were other dangers too for the pilots to dwell on in their down time between flights. Just as with the Me163 Komet before them one of the greatest of these dangers turned out be the fuel. Several crew were injured by explosions on the ground and one pilot and a crew member was lost not at high speed and altitude but when the fuel system was being tested in the carrier plane. The rocket engines were fed by liquid oxygen and hydrogen peroxide fuel, both extremely volatile liquids that had to handled very carefully - tiny traces of dust in the fuel tanks or system could cause explosive reactions. To stay liquid the oxygen had to be cooled and stored at very low temperatures, and with each generation of plane the tanks got larger to allow higher and higher speeds. Four of the early "X-planes" were lost to fuel explosions. The third of the first X1's exploded on the ground after it's first test glide flight, badly injuring the pilot and several ground crew, and destroying the carrier B-50 bomber. A few years later the X1-A's fuel tank ignited while aloft inside the bomb bay of it's B-50 carrier aircraft. Fortunately pilot Joe Walker was able to escape out of the cockpit and climb back up into the B-50, and the larger plane was able to land, though the badly mangled rocket plane had to be jettisoned to the desert floor far below. An almost identical situation had already destroyed the new X1-D plane, also without injury to the pilot or crew. But the worst incident occurred to the first of the X-2 planes. When it exploded, again when tethered in it's carrier plane rather than at high speed, it was with unprecedented violence; pilot "Skip" Zeigler, and crew member Frank Wolko were both killed instantly, and the exotic new craft was completely destroyed. The cause of these incidents was a mystery for a while, but extensive investigation eventually tracked down and found the culprit. Amazingly the four state of the art test planes had all been lost because of the thin leather gaskets in the fuel system. By sheer unlucky co-incidence the treatment coating of the leather happened to react with the fuel in such a way that all it took were tiny jolts to cause violent explosions. The leather gaskets were removed and with one tiny change the problem went away completely.

The X-2 plane did not have a happy life. Only two were built and neither survived for long. After the first was lost to the fuel explosion in 1953, barely into it's planned life, the second continued
test flying for a further three years before it too was lost in a crash. The plane had been conceived both to test the aerodynamics of supersonic flying and also how to overcome the extreme heat generated at high speed. The 'thermal barrier' was nearly as large of a problem as the sound barrier; flying above twice the speed of sound the air resistance would cause the plane to start heating up alarmingly. Not only would heating up above 120 degrees Celsius cause damage, the metals of the plane's body would expand in unpredictable ways, complicated by the intensely cold ambient air temperature at high altitude; the nose and leading edges of the plane could be white-hot, while nearby air was still a perishing minus-50 celsius. Anticipating this the X2 was built of heat resistant stainless steel and nickel-copper alloy. In 1956 Captain Iven Kincheloe flew the remaining X2 to a record height of 38 kilometres, deep into the stratosphere. Although it was still a long way to the official edge of space the media at the time lauded Kincheloe as the "space man". A few weeks later the same plane successfully broke three times the speed of sound, travelling at 3300 kph (2000 mph), but the record breaking flight ended in disaster when pilot Mel Apt suffered the same inertia-coupling problem that had affected Chuck Yeager three years earlier. Although Apt was on his first flight in the X2 the "rookie" flew the planned profile perfectly and seemed set for a heroic return to Edwards to celebrate the new record milestone. Nobody knows why, even though he had been briefed about the danger of deviating from straight flight at such a speed, he then began to turn for home and spun out of control - the best guess is that he feared he had flown too far from Edwards and would be unable to glide home to base, hence his turn. This time the pilot did have the option of ejecting and, after futile attempts to save the plane, Apt did just that. But when rescuers reached the nose capsule of the X2, smashed into the desert floor, they found to their dismay that the pilot, probably from incapacitate from the extreme g-forces, had not escaped the shattered capsule. Apt perished minutes after becoming the fastest person in the world, and after thorough inspection the broken pieces of the second, and last, X2 were destroyed.

The 1950s and 1960s were truly the era of "The Right Stuff" - the phrase made famous by Tom Wolfe's seminal book and later movie adaptation of the times. The public watched on in awe as test pilots and the other record breakers pushed the limits of speed. In the case of test pilots the excitement was added to by the general secrecy and mystery to what they were doing. All that the average person would really know of the test pilots was what was allowed to be released to the press, in America this usually meant the colour prints in the pages of Time or Life magazines. The newsreels would be the only place to see film of the test planes in action, although in 1956 a feature length, technicolor movie called "Toward the Unknown" was released, starring William Holden as a test pilot, and was the first feature film to be allowed to film at Edwards AFB with the X-planes. This was more than just a bit of fun for kicks, the importance of speed records was tied directly to national prestige, military power and global influence, and the arrival of the jet age, and nuclear weapons, had made speed even more important than ever before. High speed research data and technology was some of the most important information in the world, and every speed record was hailed not just as a personal triumph for those involved but a matter of national importance.

In 1952, when John Cobb set up base at Loch Ness to trial his jet boat he was visited by the Queen Mother  who officially passed on the good wishes of the British people. This was not just a gesture for publicity, the monarch's mother visited the cold, grey shores of the remote Scottish lake because Cobb was a national icon, pushing for another record that would add to British national prestige. To modern eyes the Crusader project can seem foolhardy and meaningless - what, after all, would be achieved by creating a boat that could run at 200 mph, other than an exciting roll of film and a line in a record book? But, at the time, the sky was indeed the limit. Had Cobb's boat worked as intended he would surely have been back with a faster model - perhaps the Royal Navy would have been interested in a high speed jet boat, perhaps the boat would be developed into a plane, or the design become the basis of a jet record car. Such was the excitement around the project that "Boys Own" magazine printed a profile of Cobb's boat after the deadly crash, and a published a detailed cut-away drawing of the Crusader even though it was lying destroyed in thousands of pieces at the bottom of Loch Ness. In retrospect, perhaps Cobb's sudden end did spell the very first glimmer of the end of an era when speed records mattered purely for their own sake. The ever-faster supersonic aircraft, and the sudden prospect of impending spacecraft, was making all other speed records look like very small fry. Though John Cobb wouldn't know it, his land speed record from 1947 would not be beaten until the 1960s, and then that record had gone from being matter of supreme international importance, to a private contest on one dried out salt lake.

In Britain there were no great empty lake beds or deserts where the test flights could be hidden away. Though there were no more Schneider Trophy races, the public could still come and look on in wonder at extraordinary new planes. This time the stage was the Farnborough Airshow, where the British air industry demonstrated it's new planes every year. The show provided a rare chance for the test pilots to show off without the need for the serious stuff. In fact, showboating was part of the sales pitch to those on the ground watching. These were company men after all, and what most of them lacked in public speaking skills and movie star charisma - to a man they all steadfastly maintained stoic, battle-hardened "stiff upper lip" demeanours  -they more than made up for with their skills and bravery in the hot seat. Though the crowd loved the rolls, loops, and the sonic booms there was a clear message behind the antics; the better, more maneuverable planes could do more tricks, and the sonic booms showed that they could go supersonic with ease. By 1952, only five years after Yeager had first gone past the sound barrier, several British companies were demonstrating supersonic jet fighter prototypes at the Farnborough show. These were military planes that could finally outpace the Me-163 Komet of the war, and were far more practical than the Nazi rocket plane. Vying for the world's attention that year were the Supermarine Swift, Hawker Hunter, de Havilland DH-110, and Gloster Javelin. The crowds responded in turn, flocking to see the exciting new jets. The DH-110 was the most interesting of these craft; for one it was larger and had two seats, a new breakthrough for such a quick plane, and was aimed at being the first supersonic Royal Navy plane. It looked the part too; taking the twin tailfins of de Havilland's first jet, the Vampire, and sticking a huge rear wing between them. To add to the dramatic effect the plane at Farnborough was painted black, to give it the look of a night fighter. Unfortunately for the crowds at Farnborough on the Saturday it seemed as though the DH-110 would be out of action that day with technical problems. Unbenownst to the crowds pilot John Derry - a war ace, the first Briton to fly supersonic, and de Havilland's chief test pilot - headed to back fifty miles by road to the company base to pick up a second DH-110.

Later than planned the crowds at Farnborough were to be treated to the sight and sound of a DH-110 overhead after all - albeit a less developed, unpainted silver version. Derry blew by the runway smashing straight through the speed of sound, sending a sonic boom across the field, and headed into a long climbing turn. Then, the noise stopped. Looking up the crowd could see that the wing and h-shaped tail, minus the nose, was sinking down like a giant metal kite. The plane's wing had failed, the two jet engines had come loose and were falling like bombs straight towards crowds. Twenty nine members of that crowd were killed by the falling engines and shrapnel. Derry and his co-pilot observer stood no chance. Still photographs captured the forward section exploding on the ground in unrecognisable pieces. While ambulances and rescuers attended the shocking scenes in the packed crowds, the show resumed. Derry's fellow test pilot Neville Duke heading up in the Hawker Hunter, and sending yet another thunder-clap of sonic boom across the show. Such was the attitude of the time; the disaster was a terrible shocking event, but not reason to stop Britain's most important annual show of technology early and send everyone home. Though in the future British air shows set safer flying routes so pilots no longer flew directly over the spectators. Perhaps the Brits knew they were up against it in the long run. They had to make do without an Edwards Air Force base of their own, without the expanses of still, empty desert sky to fly around in, without the unlimited millions of Government money that allowed the Americans to fill every niche with different jet planes. So when terrible disaster struck at Farnborough that year, they willed themselves to carry on, as it was all they could do.

A couple of years later the British had a new hero to look up to and pin their patrotic hopes on. Donald Campbell, the son of the great pre-war record chaser Sir Malcolm Campbell, had made good with his plans to build new record breaking craft. His new jet-boat, Bluebird 'K7' made the speed machines of his father's generation look like something from prehistoric times. K7 was a three pointer hydroplane, in the opposite layout to Cobb's deadly Crusader boat, with the outriggers at the front, and a covered over canopy like a jet fighter. The small blue hydroplane oozed confidence and design ingenuity, as well as being an object of almost feminine beauty skating ethereally across the water seemingly with very little effort. Bluebird barely needed testing to set a new speed record of 202.32 mph on Ullswater, Cumbria on 23rd July 1955. Four months later, seeking more speed, they went across the Atlantic to Lake Mead in Nevada, and went 216 mph. The next year back in the UK at Coniston Water in the English Lake District, Campbell went 225 mph, and would be back four times during the rest of the decade adding another forty mph on top of that, all with scarcely the hint of any setback. Far from being the overshadowed son of the old patriotic hero, he had carved out his own records and was able to attract huge backing for a record breaking Bluebird car. It was to be built around a Bristol Proteus jet engine, driving four giant wheels, all clothed in a lozenge-shaped blue body.

Up above in the sky the British were pushing forwards despite the Farnborough disaster. The small Fairey company, maker of many of the unglamorous workhorses of the wartime fleet - the Firefly U-Boat bomber, the Barracuda torpedo launcher, and the awkward Fairey Battle (a plane that did not live up to it's name and was dropped after only a year's wartime service) - built the super fast Fairey Delta. This was a very long silver arrow of a plane, so long in fact that the pilot could barely see past the lengthy nose sticking out ahead. The company came up with an ingenious solution; the nose hinged down at lower speeds. It was fast too, and the company wanted to have a go at the American Supre Sabre's jet speed record, but official indifference proved to almost as big a barrier as the technical challenge. In 1956 the Fairey Delta flew up to 1,132 mph (1,811 kph), almost completely out of the company's own pocket, and made pilot Peter Twiss the first jet pilot past 1000 mph and coincidentally the first jet pilot to fly across the sky faster than the Earth was spinning on it's axis. It would be the last time a British plane and pilot would hold an air speed record, and only two Fairey Delta planes were ever made. The triangular delta wings allowed high speed as the triangular shape kept the leading edge out of the supersonic shockwaves, and the shape had excellent maneuverability. The Convair B-58 Hustler nuclear bomber, being built for US Strategic Air Command late in the 1950s, showed dramatically how quick, and large a delta jet plane could be. The Hustler was the size of a medium airliner like the DC-5 or Lockheed Constellation but could take it three crew members past Mach 2, all while carrying up to four nuclear warheads in a massive underslung pod.

The Hustler had two smaller relatives, the F-102 Delta Dagger and it's upgraded replacement the F-106 Delta Dart. In America the high speed X-plane research data was being put to good use in these, the second generation of jet fighters. They became known as the "Century Series", and were numbered from the F-100 Super Sabre, to the F-106. The Super Sabre replaced the subsonic Korean War-era Sabre Jet in 1953. George Welch, the early supersonic trailblazer for the North American company, was chief pilot, but was lost in 1954 in a Super Sabre crash. North American tried to make the F-100 into a fighter bomber, but their F-107 prototype was passed over in favour of the F-105 Republic Thunderchief, the largest supersonic plane so far - it was longer than the wartime B-25 Mitchell bomber. The Fairey Delta's speed record was beaten in 1957 by the McDonnell F-101 Voodoo. The F-101 had a brief time at the top, a year later it's speed record was beaten by the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter. The Starfighter, with a giant jet engine, tiny trapezoid wings and a big stabilator tail was the nearest thing to an armed X-plane yet seen. It could hit Mach 2 but it's real party-piece was it's ability to climb up to it's maximum height in a mere sixty seconds. The Starfighter quickly gained a reputation for being dangerous and a "widowmaker". A slightly unfair label considering the historical records show the plane was not unduly dangerous considering it's role and inherent capabilities. The German Air Force particularly found that the plane, developed in the dry, flat deserts of America, was not well suited to flying in more temperate weather and over rolling terrain. The plane also had some high profile casualties; the famed 1950s "Space man" Iven Kincheloe was killed in a Starfighter crash at Edwards a few years after his altitude record; test pilot Joe Walker, the man lifted from the burning X1-A in 1955, was lost nine years later in a collision with one of the two XB-70 Valkryie supersonic bomber prototypes; astronaut trainee Major Robert Lawrence another victim of a crash at Edwards; Chuck Yeager himself was badly burned bailing out of a crashing Starfighter when the ejector seat collided with him and his face and hands were sprayed with the seat's rocket propellent - the first time he'd had to bail out since being shot down over France in the war.

Across the Atlantic the former aviation powerhouse of France was waking up after it's long wartime occupation and, as well as developing nuclear weapons, was producing it's own high speed planes. The most extraordinary, and bizarre, of these were the Leduc ramjet series of test planes, the Leduc 0.10, 0.20 and 0.21 models. The Leduc's looked a bit like the Miles M52; a silver tube, with straight wings, and the pilot sat in the needle-like nose, right in the middle of the air intake. On the first Leduc the pilot's cockpit was barely visible, on the later models the nose cone became so thin, and the cockpit so tiny that the whole outer skin around the pilot's seat was made transparent, so the pilot could see where he was going. A ramjet is a jet engine without the compressor, the shape of the intake does all the compressing of the air. Without the compressor fan blades the ramjet could potentially fly very fast - up to six times the speed of sound - but without the moving fan blades it would only work when already travelling at high speed and could not take off from stationary. The Leduc planes had to be carried aloft piggybacking a carrier plane and then released. Another French company built the Nord Aviation 1500 Griffon, a more conventional looking ramjet plane (it even has hints of the Eurofighter forty years before that plane came into service), but ramjets never caught on for planes. Though fast they were not doing anything rocket missiles couldn't do already. So the Leduc's ended up in museums, offering future generations a view of arguably the most frightening looking pilot's seat in any machine, where any failure of the front landing gear would've led the pilots to be squashed flat into the jet intake, though no pilots were ever lost test flying the bizarre machines.

The main driving force behind the French resurgence in the 1950s was the large Dassault corporation, first with the straightforward Mystere jet fighter, followed by the delta-wing Mirage, the name that became synonymous with the front line of French jet fighters ever since. On a much smaller scale the Swedish Saab company came up with their own delta plane, the Draken. Since the Swedes were sat in between Britain and Russia, they had good incentive to come up with a quick interceptor plane in case the Russians had any ideas about adding parts of Scandinavia to the Eastern bloc. The Draken looked the part, a bit like the big American Thunderchief bomber, but with it's own arrow shaped double-delta wing allowing high performance with better low speed handling. I
Britain the ill-fated de Havilland DH-110 had become the Sea Vixen Navy jet, while the Hawker Hunter, the Supermarine Swift and Gloster Javelin had been comprehensively blown away by the English Electric Lightning. The name was apt; the Lightning was indeed electrifying, consisting of two Rolls Royce jets stacked on top of each other, and a seat on top of that. Though the British hot-rod jet couldn't match the Starfighter at climbing - nothing else could - it was a bit more useable, and popular than the American jet, and the deafening 'rocket ship' Lightning takeoff became familiar at air bases in many parts of the British commonwealth. All these Western jets were in a development race against the might of Soviet Russia, and the enormous sphere of influence where the Communists wealded power. The Western countries knew that any new Soviet jet fighter would soon end up in the hands of the Chinese, the North Koreans, and the Eastern Bloc European nations. The Russians had not been hanging around after the Korean war, the MiG 15 became the MiG 21, in all likelihood the most mass produced jet plane in aviation history. The 21 would become the scourge of the Americans in Vietnam, and the Israelis in the 1967 Six Day war with Egypt.



On a lighter note, the jet age was making it's way to the less serious, but still competitive world of land speed record breaking. After a decade when planes had dominated the record books while John Cobb's land record stayed unbroken, the land speed record chase suddenly burst to life for a few exciting years. After a few years of work Donald Campbell had finished his massive turbine-powered CN7 "Bluebird". When he turned up to race it at the Bonneville Salt Flats in 1960 he faced an unexpected crowd of rivals - the assembled ranks of America's amateur hot-rodders, keen to make use of military surplus parts and to ride into the record books on a fraction of the budget of Campbell. The setting was the old stage from the 1930s, the Bonneville Salt Flats on the great salt lake of Utah. Unlike the Mojave desert, or the southern wilds of New Mexico, the salt lake had survived the second world war without being pushed into military use, and was not the kind of out-of-bounds government-owned territory that would have been off limits for the record breakers. Campbell's mammoth team dwarfed the efforts of the various Americans, who ranked among their number a Mormon mechanic, a medical doctor, and a Californian hot-rodder. The confrontation of all these teams in the summer of 1960 yielded several crashes, one fatality and no new record.

Salt Lake City mechanic Athol Graham had built his record car in his garage. To begin with the 'Spirit of Salt Lake' was a very crude device, a wartime B-29 drop tank cut in half, with a centre section covering a huge V12 Allison aero engine, of the type used in the Mustang and Lightning fighters in the war. Graham also purloined an old Mustang canopy for the cockpit. Underneath was Cadillac suspension, and a diesel truck torque converter instead of a transmission. When Graham began running his car up to respectable speeds on the salt flats at the end of the 1950s he attracted a little sponsorship, including STP oil additives who painted the plain silver car bright day-glo orange, and gave Graham the money to beef up his car's road car running gear. Similar to Graham, but a whole lot more sophisticated was the Californian drag racer Micky Thompson with the "Challenger". This car had four supercharged Pontiac engines pumping out 3000 horsepower and was handsomely packaged in a sleek, rectangular body with the driver sat right at the back under an aerodynamic canopy. Thompson's car looked a little like a stretched version of the thirties Mercedes-Benz 'Rekordwagen', but he was aiming for at least 130 mph more than that car. He was well prepared with many test runs completed in the Challenger as he developed the car, he had even talked his way into being allowed to run down a runway at Edwards Air Base. Like Graham, Thompson had attracted a little sponsorship from Goodyear, Champion spark plugs and Mobil 1. Even at this early stage the automotive companies were jumping back on board the record breaking bandwagon that had seemingly been forgotten about in the post-war years. The next contender was Dr. Nathan Ostich's "Flying Cadeceus", built around a ten-year old J-47 jet engine - the engine that powered the Sabre jet in Korea - and looking like a plane fuselage with large wheels on each corner. This 'car' worked more like a plane too, with the jet thrust providing all the forward movement. Also present with a car was a drag racer from Ohio, Arthur 'Art' Arfons, driving his "Anteater" racer. Unlike the others Arfons had little realistic expectation setting any record in the crude Anteater; it was really just an old wartime piston aero engine and with a seat on the front between the front wheels.

Graham went first in his City of Salt Lake car. It was his first official attempt at the speed record that year, and it ended in a 300 mph crash that it's driver did not survive. Nobody was entirely sure what had happened to cause the car to skid sideways and flip onto it's top. Whatever Graham had or had not done, the same happened to Donald Campbell in Bluebird shortly afterwards. Campbell survived his crash with a fractured skull, but only because his car had been much larger and stronger than Graham's garage special. The two crashes showed that driving at such high speeds, even in a straight line on an empty salt flat, was not a straightforward business. City of Salt Lake was left in flattened and twisted pieces, and Bluebird CN7 sat with it's four wheels shorn off - the pride of Britain wasn't going anywhere until it's driver could be discharged from hospital and rebuild his car. While recuperating the Utah hospital received an official 'Get Well Soon' message to Campbell from the Queen. He later asked Mickey Thompson in all sincerity if the President had been in touch about Thompson's record quests. Campbell, a greatly patriotic man, was genuinely surprised to learn that nobody from the United States leadership had sent their heroic representative any official support. Thompson, and the rest of the hot-rodders represented quite a different segment of their society than Campbell and the Old Boy's Club from Britain. Thompson was set for an official record in his Challenger having topped 400 mph on one first run effort but then heartbreakingly his drive shaft broke on the return leg and he too had to fold his hand for the year. The weather would be undoing in his next try in 1962 and he never made it onto the Land Speed Record roll of honour.

After his quiet experimental runs in 1960 Art Arfons came back in 1962 with his own J-47 jet car. The "Cyclops", like the Anteater, was very simple in design - except this time the driver sat infront of a jet engine intake, much like in fighter plane. Except Arfons couldn't afford a canopy so he sat behind a windscreen in the open, just like any other racing car. Unlike other racing cars, Arfon's jet car had a large inverted wing over the cockpit to push it down onto the ground. This form of downforce had been tried on occasions in motor racing but it would take another few years before racing car designers fully grasped the advantage of using the air to push the wheels down into the ground. Arfons was far ahead of the game, something that may seem surprising for someone from the backwaters of rural Ohio, but the "Junkyard Genius" had spent most of his thirty years building and repairing farm machinery and had spent the wartime years as a Navy mechanic. Unfortunately for Art Arfons, the same applied to another of his fiercest competitors; his older brother Walter. Walt Arfons had, by 1962, built his own jet car, and attracted sponsorship from Goodyear tyres to take a shot at the Land Speed Record. His "Wingfoot Express" (named after the Goodyear logo) was similar to his brother's car, but had a sleek cockpit canopy design created by his design partner, an engineer called Tom Green, and an engine equipped with an afterburner.

Goodyear were also putting money into the "Spirit of America", a scheme being headed by Californian hot-rod racer Craig "Breedlove" Bowman. Early drawings of Breedlove's 'Spirit' envisanged something that looked much like an F-101 Voodoo plane but with wheels on outriggers rather than wings. The handsome young California kid was a marketers dream and both Goodyear and Shell Oil plowed money into the project. By 1962 Breedlove's car was ready to run for the first time on the Bonneville salt, but as in 1960, nobody could put two good runs together to break John Cobb's record from 1947. They all faced the same problem as Campbell and the late-Athol Graham in 1960; stability. Despite their crashes showing the necessity of a stabilising tail-fin on the car, the contenders in 1962 still didn't fit them. Another challenger, the chrome-finished 'Infinity', took the jet car to it's minimal limits. The "Infinity" really was just an engine with wheels attached to the corners and the driver, Glenn Leasher, sat in the engine nose cone. Leasher never made it to the end of his first run; the Infinity tumbled to pieces at high speed just as Graham had two years earlier and the result was tragically the same. Breedlove was more circumspect and realised that for all it's sophistication - aluminium forged wheels, wind-tunnel tuned aerodynamics - and financial backing his 'Spirit' needed more work to avoid a similar fate. The Flying Caduceus was back in 1962 too, but it couldn't go faster than 350 mph and it eventually had to be withdrawn when it sheared off a wheel in a high-speed spin. It's driver decided to throw in the towel after that near miss and returned to his day job in medicine.

All of these 'cars' faced a problem if they could set a new speed record over two runs - it wouldn't count. The world governing body counted a 'car' as a vehicle with a least two of it's four wheels directly driven by the engine. Donald Campbell's Bluebird CN7 counted as a wheel-driven car even though it had a turbine engine because the turbine drove the driveshaft, much like in a helicopter engine. The other jets simply pushed the vehicles along with exhaust thrust. Breedlove's 'Spirit of America' had the additional complication of having only three wheels. In the eyes of motor racing's governors, this made it a tricycle, not a car. Playing the rule-makers at their own game, Breedlove registered to the world motorcycle racing body to have his jet car be officially reclassed as a jet trike, and was accepted. In August 1963, with a tailfin fitted among other improvements, Breedlove blasted past John Cobb's sixteen-year old record on the Bonneville Salt Flats... but it only counted in the motorbike record books. Nearly a year later Donald Campbell set the new "official" record in a vastly improved Bluebird at Lake Eyre in Australia. The fact that Campbell hadn't actually broken Breedlove's speed from the year before got the rule makers to act and reorganise the record books for the jet-age. The absolute land speed record became open to all forms of power, and number of wheels, and a separate wheel-driven record was created. With the goalposts reset and the door open to American jet cars Campbell's record didn't last long. Tom Green stepped into the driver's seat of Walt Arfon's "Wingfoot Express" and beat both Campbell and Breedlove's 1963 record.

In the meantime, Art Arfons had found himself in possession of a J-79 jet engine. This was the same engine that sat in the back of the F-104 Starfighter, and on the wings of the Convair Hustler supersonic bomber, and soon after buying the engine he found Air Force officials knocking at the door asking him what he thought he was doing with the latest military engine in his back yard. He replied that the engine was damaged and he'd bought it legitimately from a scrap trader. Unable to find any loophole through which to get the engine back the Air Force officials had to relent and let Arfons keep his engine. Though he now had the J-79, he still had to fix it, and without the manual since that was still classified. That he managed to do so in his own yard showed the depth of his mechanical skills. The fact that he then strapped it to some trees and managed to blow down much the rest of his yard testing the afterburner also showed the devil-may-care attitude that was required to think it was a good idea to build his new car around the thunderous engine. The new record chaser was light-years ahead of his previous two experiments. The "Firestone" logos on the side provided one clue as to why; the other American tyre giant wanted to one-up their big rival Goodyear and stuck their money with Arfons to see both his brother and Breedlove upstaged. When he was drag racing Arfons had given the name "Green Monster" to his cars and he revived the name for the new car. Rather than copying fighter planes, for his Monster he came up with a new layout. The driver sat to the side of the engine in a tubular frame pannier chassis, with a matching cockpit on the other side for weight and aero balance. The jet intake dominated the front of the car, and he fashioned a bluff fibreglass fairing for it, and a long needle probe for the front. He kept the front wing from the Cyclops, and put a tidy tailfin on top of the engine. Then he trucked his creation to the salt flats.

Tom Green's record aboard 'Wingfoot Express' lasted a whole three days before the Green Monster smashed it by nearly thirty miles per hour. Scarcely had the Arfons team finished celebrating their record then Craig Breedlove was back at Bonneville powering the Spirit of America to 468 mph. He was just warming up; two days later he blew by the timing traps at a barely conceivable 526 mph. The record wasn't the only thing he blew past. With the amazing new record set Breedlove's support team were surprised to see that the 'Spirit' wasn't stopping. The drag parachutes that were supposed to deploy were nowhere to be seen and the car was still racing along at 200 mph when it reached the end of the salt lake course. Breedlove tried to miss a row of telephone posts that ran across the salt but clobbered one with one of the rear wheels, then he plowed into brine lake before going over a bank and nose first into a deep ditch. Despite the ominous feeling he must've felt when it was clear his chutes weren't working Breedlove had kept cool enough to unlatch the hatch over his head and submerged in murky salt water this move allowed him to swim out. His relief to be in one piece was tempered by the sight of his ruined car poking tail-first out of the water. Then to rub more salt in the wounds, Arfons wound the Green Monster up a few weeks later and broke the record by another 10 mph. In one extraordinary year the record had gone up by 140 mph, but the hot rodders weren't finished yet.

Goodyear, Firestone and Shell were enjoying huge publicity from the speed battles - The Beach Boys had even cut a song called "Spirit of America" about fellow Californian Breedlove - and happily cut their two intrepid pilots cheques to keep on racing at Bonneville into 1965. For Breedlove this meant building a new car, and a J-79 engine like Arfons. By now the Air Force were a little more accommodating to the idea and the new Spirit, ambitiously sub-titled "Sonic 1" took shape. Where the first had looked like a jet fighter the Sonic 1 seemed to have more than a little spacecraft in it's DNA. It had four wheels this time, and was much larger. The driver sat at the front but not in a precarious little cockpit but underneath a hatch and a thin strip of purposeful smoked glass - as if the craft would soon be headed into space. Along with the big rectangular air intake above the driver, the tapered 'coke bottle' contours of the bodywork, and the dark navy paint job rather than plain metal, it looked an altogether more sophisticated machine it's predecessor. Breedlove could have learned one lesson from Arfons though - the wing on the front. Early runs showed the new car had an unnerving tendency to get a little light at the front, and small trim wings were added to sides of the nose. In November 1965 Breedlove regained the record at 555 mph, but Arfons wasn't going down without a fight. He fired back five days later at 576 mph. Again, Breedlove countered - this time taking "Sonic 1" through 600 mph, thus making him the first to break through 400, 500 and 600, even if the 1963 run never officially counted as a two way record. Art Arfons, unable to resist one more try, trucked the Green Monster back to Utah from Ohio in 1966. This time it was one run too many for the junkyard jet car; at over 600 mph one of it's wheels gave out under the strain, seizing the wheel bearing and sending the car rolling across the salt lake. It was the fastest car crash ever, and amazingly, Arfons survived. Strapped into his tiny outrigger cockpit he was protected from serious harm as the huge engine tumbled down the course sending wheels and shrapnel flying. The Monster was finished, and so was the great speed record duel. Despite it's name, the Sonic 1 was not going to be able to get to the sound barrier on land, and without a rival there was no more reason for Breedlove to keep risking his neck. Both men retired from record breaking to a (slightly) quieter life.



While on the ground Americans were smashing speed records, it was a heady time up above them. Russia, lagging behind the Americans in high speed aeroplane research, had pushed ahead when it came to ballistic missiles. This put the Western powers on even higher alert than before, and began to spell the move away from developing giant supersonic bomber aircraft and into missiles. A new name began to enter the world's vocabulary; the 'ICBM', or Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile. The US Air Force had commissioned a supersonic bomber, the XB-70 "Valkyrie", but were having second thoughts about it's viability almost from the moment it's design was revealed. Russian anti-aircraft defenses were intimidating, and the threat of ICBMs looked like making the impressive craft a big white-painted, delta winged elephant. Already the big B-58 Hustler bomber was looking like an expensive and complicated way of delivering America's nuclear weapons compared to missiles. And no sooner had the world woken up and learnt the name 'ICBM' then there was another new word on everyone's lips; Sputnik. The name, meaning "fellow traveller" in Russian, was given to a small metal sphere, with four transmitter aerials sending out a simple radio signal. Sputnik had been placed inside a capsule atop a booster rocket and launched into Earth orbit. To do this the rocket had to launch Sputnik 2,000 kilometres high, at 26,000 kph, nearly eight times as quickly as the ill-fated last flight of the Bell X2 had flown the year before. Had Dr. Robert Goddard been there to see it (he died in 1945) he would have undoubtedly been impressed to see the basic rocket design he invented launching a satellite into orbit. But Sputnik left many of his fellow Americans dumbfounded. The popular opinion in the United States in the 1950s was that the Russians had gained so much military power through brute force and repression of their people's freedoms. In the space of one day this certainty had been rocked to it's foundations. The fact that the USA had been so completely beaten by a country of downtrodden Communist labourers was practically unthinkable.

The launch of Sputnik sent seismic ripples through American thinking. NACA became NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and immediate plans were made for sending men into orbit atop rockets. Project 'Mercury' began to find these Spacemen, initially with plans to scour the whole country for anyone with the suitable physical conditioning for the rigours of space flight, but for practicalities sake the search was soon narrowed to the military forces. Meanwhile a US Navy Vanguard rocket was prepared to send the first American satellite into orbit. The mission took flight in December 1957, two months after Sputnik, and managed to fly an entire 1.2 metres before toppling over into an expensive and supremely embarrassing fireball. "Kaputnik", as one of the unflattering nicknames that the media dubbed the launch, rubbed salt into American wounds, but within a few months they were back on track, thanks mostly to the team led by the former Nazi rocket engineer Werner von Braun. Von Braun, working in America ever since the end of the war, developed the wartime V2 over the years and with the full resources of the US Government, ended up with the 'Redstone' ICBM ready to fly in 1955. Two years later another American rocket, the Atlas, was also ready on the launchpad. A version of the Redstone called the 'Juno' launched the first US satellite, Explorer 1, in 1958. The Navy Vanguard also launched a satellite that year, 'Vanguard 1', a much smaller satellite than Sputnik or Explorer but also a very long lasting satellite. The tiny space "grapefruit" (as Soviet Premier Khrushchev mockingly referred to it) was still orbiting the Earth at the end of the century, along with the top stage of the Vanguard rocket that launched it, and is predicted to continue to do so for several hundred more years. The concept of 'stages' was the key to creating rockets that could reach space; just as how the X planes were launched from a carrier plane, the bottom stage rocket would fly up to a certain height and speed, then drop away while the second stage fired, and already travelling at great speed and without the weight of the first stage, it could accelerate even further and faster.

While the engineers were creating rockets, Project Mercury was busy recruiting it's new space travellers. To start with the officials at board of the newly-formed NASA were not quite sure what to call them; Spaceman? Spacepilot? They settled on an Ancient Greek derivation, "Astronaut", from Astron (star) and Nautes (sailor).Hundred of pilots from around the Air Force, Navy and Marines applied, but many other pilots were not convinced they were signing up for the best job in the business. After all the first space traveller had already been launched into orbit by the Russians on Sputnik 2, and it was not a human but a dog called 'Laika'. And if a dog could be launched in the space capsule it showed that the occupant would just be along for the ride, and not have a great deal of input. "Spam in a can" some of the test pilots called it, and there was a very good chance they would be dead meat too. Laika had not returned from her voyage, and had never been intended to. While the pilots accepted that to a large extent they were supposed to the expendable part of the equation, they also were dead-set against the idea of meeting their fiery end sat impotently in an automatic capsule. When the "Mercury Seven" were finally chosen and set to their training, they too had the same ideas. They told NASA bosses that the Mercury spacecraft would have to have a manual control system, and also a window in the hatch. Having passed the barrage of physical and mental tests required to make the final seven, the new astronauts might have been expected to be circumspect and willing to do anything ordered of them, but their new status had conferred huge fame and publicity on them and they realised that collectively they had some clout. They demanded manual control and outside visibility - not features the designers had particularly thought necessary - and got them.

The new world order of the "Space Race" had pushed aside many of the old guard of test pilots. Chuck Yeager, an obvious choice for the space program given his experience, was not considered for NASA as he did not have a college degree. Others who did not meet initial requirements for Project Mercury included one Neil A. Armstrong, already a NASA test pilot therefore not a military pilot, and James Lovell, the future commander of Apollo 13. However the aerospace game had not totally been given over to space flight and ICBMs; as well as the high speed jet fighters and interceptors, there was still the crucial field of reconnaissance. Though the age of satellites that could overfly enemy territories had begun, these small radio beacons were still only of limited use. Nobody in Russia or the USA really knew what was going on deep into each other's territory. And without much knowledge it was natural for each to fear the worst, even if it wasn't entirely deserved. In late 1960s the Americans could see the MiG-25 interceptor in spy pictures, and seeing a huge fearsome jet caused great concern. Only years later did they discover that while the MiG 25 was large and had huge engines it was also very overweight, and their own F-15 Eagle was more than a match for it. They could also see the amazing "Caspian Sea Monster" Ekranoplan in it's dry dock, without knowing that it was an expensive white elephant that wasn't going anywhere fast. One thing they could not see clearly in the early 1960s was the inner workings of the Russian space programme, and the mysterious rocket mastermind known only as "The Designer" who had already run rings around the US space programme. In 1961, the Soviets trumped the Americans yet again. Already first in space, the Russians sent up an exceptionally brave army lieutenant called Yuri Gagarin aboard the Vostok 1 spacecraft. Gagarin blasted off atop the same type of rocket booster that had launched the Sputnik satellite, and made a complete Earth orbit before re-entering the atmosphere and parachuting to a safe landing in the Russian farmland. On landing the boyish twenty-seven year old, standing in a bulky orange pressure suit and white helmet emblazoned with "CCCP" talked with the local farmers who saw him parachute down and reassured him that he was a fellow earthling too.

Only after his sudden early death in 1966 was "The Designer" unveiled by the Soviet authorities as Sergei Korolev, an aeronautical engineer and former enemy of the state who had been sent to the gulags by Stalin in the 1930s, but pardoned and brought back into the senior position in the space programme by the 1950s. Without the interference of Russian politics the genius of Korolev could probably have made even greater strides, but after a few years of Soviet pre-eminence the Americans and NASA began to catch up. The Mercury program started slowly; the first two American astronauts, Alan Shepard and Virgil 'Gus' Grissom, made sub-orbital ballistic flights atop Redstone rockets into the realm of space, but the third, John Glenn, flew atop the huge Atlas booster into Earth orbit. By 1962 the Mercury astronauts grabbed all the headlines and the glory, but working in secret, behind the scenes, were a group of engineers who would soon create something just as astonishing as the spacecraft, and represents arguably American aerospace's finest hour. But in the mid-1960s only a few people knew about it's existence. In public the most prominent American aircraft was the proposed XB-70, the former Air Force Valkyrie bomber, no longer of use in it's intended role and passed on to NASA. By the time it was ready to fly the XB-70 had gone from being a front-line bomber to an experimental research plane, and only two were ever built. Although outmoded strategically by ICBMs the great white machine was still a fantastic piece of technology, and no-more dramatic looking plane has ever flown. To later eyes it would be described as looking like the Concorde, but the supersonic airliner would come later than the XB-70, and would not be as fast. Only one of the two Valkryies survives today, still looking like something from science fiction. The other plane met a different end.

Danger can often come from unexpected places. Before Yuri Gagarin's flight, another Russian cosmonaut had been killed in a fire in a training exercise. The first NASA Apollo lunar mission crew also perished on the ground due to a fire in the space capsule during simulation runs. And back in the X-plane's heyday in the 1950s many of the craft had been blown up by their leather gaskets. Yet no disaster was as needless - as stupid - as one of the two XB-70s being lost, not in high speed maneuvers, but in a photoshoot. The plane had four General Electric jet engines and the engine manufacturer asked Air Force commanders if they could fly it in formation with the four fighter plane types that also used GE engines. So, after a regular test flight over the California desert, the five planes lined up in photogenic formation, with the XB-70 flanked closely on both sides by the four fighters. Suddenly, in the blink of an eye, one of the planes, a Starfighter piloted by NASA's Joe Walker, was caught in the large wash of turbulent air roiling off the XB-70's right wing and was thrown over it's rear, smashing it's two tail fins off. Walker's Starfighter fell in a blazing wreck, while only one of the two XB-70 pilots ejected before it crashed. This was in 1966, and the remaining plane kept flying with NASA for three more years before being retired. It could reach Mach 3, the same speed that had been reserved for the tiny X-2 rocket ship only ten years before, but had already been overtaken by a dramatic new pacesetter; the SR-71 Blackbird.

After the great success of the P-38 Lightning during World War Two, Lockheed and designer Kelly Johnson were held in high esteem by the military and were tasked with building an operational jet fighter in 1943. The P-80 Shooting Star was created very quickly by military standards, using the design from the British turbojet engine.The P-80 development team worked out of the "Skunk Works" -  the nickname came from the smell that permeated the group's first offices, an odour that came from a factory next door. When the war ended, the Skunk Works team carried on their work, and by the late 1950s were building a spy plane prototype for the US Central Intelligence Agency (The CIA). They had already created a super-high altitude spy plane called the 'U-2', but that plane was not nearly as fast as military chiefs thought should be possible. What the Skunk Works came up with was a one-seater plane called the A-12 that in it's two seat upgraded form would become the SR-71 'Blackbird'. While designing the A-12, Lockheed were then called up by the Air Force to build something to replace the F-106 Delta Dart. North American Aviation had already designed a prototype called the XF-108 "Rapier" - in basic concept a smaller XB-70 - but this was canned just like it's bigger cousin. Instead the Air Force asked Lockheed to make an interceptor version of the planned A-12 spy plane. This third version of the plane would be called the YF-12. However it was known, the A-12/SR-71/YF-12 was an extraordinary design. The plan called for the plane to be able to fly at speeds above Mach 3, where the temperatures would heat parts of the airframe up to six hundred degrees celsius. A plane made from steel and aluminium would begin to distort and lose strength at such temperatures, so the decision was taken by the Skunk works team to build the whole thing out of titanium - an unprecedented design, so much so that the Lockheed engineers first had to design and build the machines, tools and moulds to work with titanium since nobody else had them. The expansion and contraction caused by extreme heating and cooling led to some curious design features. For the first time since the Ford Trimotor of the 1920s a plane was given corrugated wings. In the case of the Trimotor it was to give the primitive metal plane some extra strenthening, in with the Blackbird it was to allow the wing surfaces to expand and contract. When the plane was fuelled up on the ground in pre flight the ground crew had to accommodate some of the fuel leaking straight out again - the Blackbird's fuel tanks didn't fit properly on the ground, again to allow the structure to expand in flight. They also had be careful not to burn themselves on the hot skin after a mission, and not to stick their foot through the thinner parts of the fuselage.

There was another obvious problem with trying to get a large turbo-jet plane past Mach 3, as opposed to trying with a rocket or ramjet. The speed of the air into the air intakes and across the turbine could not possibly be so fast and needed to be slowed down, and this needed to happen across a few metres in the air intake. The basic solution had been around ever since the post-war days of the Miles M-52; the shock cone on the front of the engine. But Mach 3 was a whole different world to Mach 1 and the Blackbird's engines were far more complicated than anything that had come before. Like in previous designs the long needle-spiked shock cone deflected the most of the shockwave around the intake. Inside the engine was where things became more interesting. The cone narrowed back again to reduce air pressure and slow the air down. Some of the shockwave also carried on into the intake, and the intake cone was designed to gradually retract as the plane passed through Mach 1.6 to hold the pressure front in the middle of the engine and stop it from crashing back into the turbine blades. That wasn't the end of the ingenuity; some of the air in the intake was sent through vents called 'shock traps' and either vented out of intake to maintain the correct pressure in the engine, or directed around inside of the engine casing to provide cooling. Another set of vents (the Bleed vents) pulled out air from the surface of the intake spike to stop the turbulence on the surface from building up. To get up to Mach 3 four tubes would open, funnelling compressor air straight into the afterburner, bypassing the turbine and acting just like a ramjet. The end result was a unique new engine, the "Turboramjet", with the vast majority of the power coming from the compression of air outside of the turbine, and as an added bonus the engine actually getting more fuel efficient at it got into it's higher speeds.

Just like it's ancestor, the P-38 Lightning, there were two of these engines on the Blackbird. Despite their monstrous looks and power both engines were in fact engaged in a supremely delicate balancing act, and occasionally in flight the balance would be lost. They called it an "Unstart" - when the pressure wave at the inlet suddenly suffocated the engine and caused it to lose power. With two engines this would cause a major handling problem for the pilots as one engine choked and the other kept happily thundering along. The plane's autopilot computers were programmed to try their best to keep the plane flying but the technology of the 1960s could only do so much. At least one Blackbird crew experienced the full force of an engine failure at Mach 3, both being thrown bodily from their aircraft, in their pressure suits. Only one of the two man crew lived to tell the tale of how the engine had an unstart, the plane yawed right and disintegrated. The navigator in the rear seat was killed instantly, but the pilot fell partly conscious on his automatic parachute system and lived. Just like Yuri Gagarin had, he startled a local farmer; this time it was a rancher with a small helicopter, who could fly the downed pilot to a nearby hospital for checkups. Pilot Bill Weaver experienced the fastest bail-out from a plane in history, except it wasn't really a bailout, the plane simply disappeared around him and his pressure suit and parachute saved his life.

There was a new word coming into the lexicon of flying; stealth. Ever since the first British RADAR networks were revealed to the world engineers had been puzzling over how to make planes harder to detect with radio signals. The basic solution was to make the shape of the plane reflect back less of the radio waves to their source. The A-14/SR-71 was designed with the wings, fuselage and engines all blended smoothly together, not just for aerodynamics to make it faster, but to reduce the number of solid edges for radar signals to bounce off. The engineers also came up with composite materials for the leading edges of the wings specially tuned to absorb radar frequencies. The finished Blackbird came out at over thirty metres long yet had a radar 'return' less than small fighter jets. But it's main form of defense was simply how high and fast it could go - three times the height of airliners, and faster than any anti-aircraft missile or other interceptor plane. When it went into service, flying reconnaissance missions over some of the most volatile warzones in the world, the pilots faced the unusual position of knowing that enemy air defenses would light up on seeing them coming, but also knowing there was not a great deal that could be sent their way. Indeed, during the 1967 six day war between Israel, Egypt, Syria and Jordan, the crews could see the Israelis shooting at the plane too. Although the project had been publicly unveiled in 1964, the missions themselves were of course highly classified and America's allies were not let on in any way where the Blackbirds would be flying, and "friendly fire" was an expected problem. Another problem was a little closer to home. This was an era of increasing paranoia at home in America. The Blackbird was a product of the secret Groom Lake facility in remote Nevada, a place that was becoming known by some more popular names; "Area 51"; "Dreamland". In the mid-sixties after the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963 the American people were consumed by doubts about their own government, as well as inundated with with a popular culture filled with stories of Unidentified Flying Objects "UFO's", aliens, and international espionage. The US Air Force had been used to being the 'good guys', but now they had to be careful of the snoopers at home who wondered aloud if there wasn't more than met the eye going on at "Area 51". The secrecy around project such as the Blackbird didn't help their cause. When an A-14 prototype crashed in the Nevada desert officials flat-out lied; it was an F-105 Thunderchief that had crashed, the press were told, and all civilian witnesses in the area were told to keep quiet or go to jail.

The main priority for the crew was getting the plane's camera systems to get the photographs, and keeping fingers crossed that the plane did not suffer a mechanical problem in enemy airspace. These stresses led to the introduction of the two-seat US Air Force SR-71 to replace the CIA's A-14. In the SR-71 the pilot and engineer sitting behind could both concentrate on their respective jobs. Neither could see each other; both were cocooned tightly in-line, with a heavy bulkhead between them, and only the minimum possible windows for visibility. The Blackbird was not a place for claustrophobia - the crews went through essentially the same training as the NASA astronauts, and wore similar pressure suits and helmets. The suit kept them cool; the temperature on the cockpit window could reach 300 celsius, and the air conditioner pumped some of that heat into the engine compressors. The darkened visor on the helmet was essential; given the speed of the craft they were easily outpacing the sun across the sky and might possibly see it rise and set several times on a long mission. Not that the engineer could see much, with only a tiny windows to the side and the plane's distinctive flared out fuselage underneath (another feature for stealth). After around ten years service the air of secrecy around the SR-71 began to be loosened very slightly and the plane was sent out for some flights to set a few records and to beat the Soviet MiG-25's existing records. In 1974 an SR-71 flew from New York to London, heading for the Farnborough airshow, in one hour and fifty four minutes, including time spent slowed down for in-flight refuelling from a tanker plane. Then on the way back, the SR-71 flew from London all the way to Los Angeles in three hours and forty seven minutes, with two refuels. It averaged 2932 kph/1822 mph on the outward leg, and 2316 kph/1439 mph coming back. It had travelled in total 14336 km/8908 miles in 341 minutes. At that speed the SR-71 could theoretically have circled the equator in about sixteen hours, although the stresses on the plane meant it could not have flown so far without needing maintenance. The West to East crossing of the Atlantic in under two hours compares with the three hours of the just-introduced Concorde, the six of the average jet airliner, the fourteen of a 1950s prop airliner, and Charles Lindbergh's thirty three hours aloft from New York to Paris in 1927. The absolute air speed record for a jet plane - the record the SR-71 still holds - was set July 27th 1976 at 3367 kph (2092 mph) on a flight from one of the plane's home bases, Beale Air Force Base in California. This beat the ten-year old record set by the YF-12 interceptor prototype - a plane that, in the end, never entered production and ended up with NASA as a test plane. The Blackbird also beat the MiG-25 speed record over a 1000 kilometre distance, and the world jet altitude record for good measure.

The Blackbird has a nobility, and attracts admiration, in a way that few other military planes do. Perhaps it's because it never dropped bombs on people, never shot down another plane with a gun or shot missiles at a target. Unlike so many others it's beauty and design genious does not have to be tarnished by destruction it wrought. The SR-71 wasn't a bully. It won battles by being better than the opposition. By being faster, higher, and smarter than the enemy, rather than by shooting them down. None were ever lost to enemy fire. It remains the fastest ever jet aeroplane to have been built, but it wasn't the fastest ever manned plane. That honour remains with the the North American X-15 rocket plane, designed in the 1950s, and flown until 1968, during which time it was the first plane to break through Mach 4, Mach 5 and Mach 6. In 1967 Major William 'Pete' Knight flew the X-15 to a speed of 7274 kph (4520 mph), or over twice as fast as the Blackbird, and set a speed record for a piloted craft that has not been beaten since. Only astronauts returning from space have travelled more quickly in the Earth's atmosphere than Pete Knight in the X-15. The plane could outrun the Blackbird by such an amount because it was so much smaller and intended for brief flights, and because it was a rocket plane, with no need to worry about managing the air into the intakes. Even though Project Mercury had become the dominant program when NACA became NASA in the late 1950s the X-plane programs had continued on in the deserts of California and Nevada, and the X-15 was proof how much progress had been made in the years since the breaking of the sound barrier.

While the heroic Mercury Seven astronauts and the exciting Land Speed Record breakers dominated the pages of magazines and newspapers, the test pilots kept quietly pushing the boundaries of speed. Mercury had replaced an Air Force initiative called, rather awkwardly, "Man in Space Soonest", that would have used similar missile boosters to Mercury. But the Air Force still had ideas about space travel, and they found allies at the Pentagon who were already asking the question; "how do we make space travel more practical?". Placing astronauts in a capsule at the top of a rocket would get them into space, but it was expensive, time consuming, noisy, and dangerous. Given the capabilities of the rocket-propelled research planes the obvious question arose; why not simply fly into space and then glide back? After all, orbital flight was nothing more complicated than the craft falling around the Earth balanced by speed and gravity. The complicated parts for a space plane would be maintaining control until getting to orbit, and resisting the tremendous heat build up from the craft smashing back into the atmosphere. The white-hot re-entry to Earth was a major incentive for using small capsules for early space flights. A little capsule could be coated on it's base with a thick heat shield and the pilot inside just had to hold on as it dropped to the Earth before deploying parachutes. A plane would have to have a much more complicated heat shield, and be controllable enough to glide in for a runway landing. The X-15 was the first part of solving this puzzle. North American Aviation had missed three opportunities with the F-107, XB-70 and the never-built "Rapier", but they struck gold with the X-15. The small black rocket craft had little stubby wings like the Lockheed Starfighter, and large slab-like tail fins, with the rear stabilators making the tail resemble a giant dart.

Next up after the X-15 was planned to be a craft nicknamed the "Dyna-Soar", Dyna-Soar was intended to test the idea of the "Boost glide", yet another idea that never quite came to fruition from Nazi German scientists. They had proposed to build rockets that could bomb America by sending a small plane up on top of a giant V2-type rocket, maybe launched from a ship, and the pilot could overfly the US in a suborbital flight and land in friendly Japanese territory. It was a total pipe dream of course, and even the inventive and increasingly desperate Nazi generals were not interested. But the concept lived on as the same German rocket scientists took up residence in America. As the X-15 streaked across the skies above the western deserts other designers drew up plans for planes that would be so-called lifting bodies; planes without conventional wings, but created as one-piece fuselage/wing body that could fly, and be fitted with heat shielding on the underside. The X-15 was piloted by many of the Man in Space Soonest pilots, (Neil Armstrong among their number) and some of these pilots were earmarked for Dyna-Soar. Flying a plane back from space at very high speed would require some skills to be practiced. One of these was the 'flare' on landing; pulling back the controls hard at just the right moment to slow the plane and let it drop dramatically. It was while practicing such a maneoveur that the Air Force astronaut-nominee Major Robert Lawrence crashed his Starfighter fatally in 1967. The X-15 was also used to test heat-shielding materials - on some flights the pilots had no visibility at all, with their window covered in heat ablative coatings, and had to fly the whole mission on instruments. Twice in it's working life the X-15 flew into space... just. Joe Walker flew twice above the officially defined edge of the atmosphere 100 kilometres up in 1963.

The history books record Joe Walker as the first American non-government astronaut for his two X-15 flights, but at the time there was little fanfare for the achievement. This was a year after John Glenn had flown a Mercury ship into orbit and two years after President Kennedy had vowed to get an American on the moon before "the decade was out". And although he didn't say it in his address the other implication was clear enough, and vice-President Lyndon Johnson had already stated that no American wished to look up and see a "Communist moon". So the 'Space Race' that began in 1957 was becoming a sprint, and anything that didn't usefully contribute was being put to one side. Dyna Soar was canned in 1963, and the Air Force's plan for a space station was quietly dropped in 1969 just as former NASA X-15 pilot Neil Armstrong was setting foot on the moon. The three X-15's carried on with great success throughout the 1960s, with only one fatal incident blotting it's record in thousands of flights. Major Michael Adams was killed in a crash in 1967 when the craft spun out of control at Mach 5. The pilot recovered from the spin but then fell into a fatal dive , possibly due to vertigo and disorientation. When it was retired in 1968 there was no replacement. All focus was on the Moon shot, and dramatic NASA budget cuts were to put in when the moon had been reached. In 1969 humans reached their highest ever speed; 39,897 kph (or 24,791 mph) for the three occupants of the Apollo 10 command module returning from their mission to orbit the moon. That would be it for the foreseeable future, no more records could beat that, though in 1969 another craft first took flight that promised to bring supersonic speeds to paying customer for the first time.

The first flight of the Concorde supersonic airliner in 1969 was the end result of an incredible feat engineering and political cooperation. The plane had been built and designed by British Aircraft Corporation and Aerospatiale of France. The grim reality that Britain and France could not match the Russians or Americans any more had led to the treaty to create an Anglo-French Supersonic Transport (SST) in 1962. The French were also influenced by their own lack of suitable engine power for such a craft. The British had engine expertise, and thanks to planes like the Fairey Delta, lots of experience with the high speed delta wing design everyone knew was the only viable way to build such a large aircraft. Indeed the same record setting Fairey Delta plane became the BAC 221 (after the company was amalgamated into BAC) and was modified to test the shape of Concorde's wing. Like with the SR-71 the plane's design addressed the need to slow the air into the jet engines, on Concorde the engine intakes were fitted with a complex system of ramps and vent doors. Concorde also had the same heating problem, only with an airliner the problem was much greater as the occupants would not be wearing pressurised suits and helmets. The design had to incorporate huge air conditioners, and to use the fuel in the wing to absorb much of the heat from the cabin. The danger of depressurisation was much greater given that Concorde would fly twice the altitude of conventional jetliners. The planes had a large emergency air supply to pump into the cabin while the pilots rapidly descended. Concorde also borrowed the moving nose idea from the Fairey Delta, again so the pilot could see where they were going at slow speed.

In 1969 the future looked good for the SST, and especially for Concorde. A suspiciously similar looking Russian imitator, the Tupolev TU-144, had appeared a year before Concorde had flown, but it was altogether an inferior design with a less refined wing shape and a shorter range since it couldn't fly supersonic without using it's afterburners. Outside of the Soviet Union there was much less interest for "Concordski" (as it was soon nicknamed) compared to Concorde. Many airlines signed up for Concorde, from PanAm, Eastern, TWA and United in America, to Air India, Japan Air, Air Canada, Lufthansa and Sabena. Naturally Air France and BOAC (later British Airways) would have Concorde too. There looked like being hundreds of Concordes by the 1980s. But in the six years between the first flight of the prototype and plane being ready for service in 1976 the price of aviation fuel rose alarmingly. While the SR-71 was snooping on the Middle East during the war between Israel and several Arab nations in 1973 that same war was leading to an oil export embargo from the Arabs. In consequence the price of oil quadrupled in months and most of the potential Concorde customers got very cold feet about the whole idea of a plane with four military turbojet engines. American aircraft companies too began to reconsider. Boeing and McDonnell-Douglas abandoned their SSTs when they were still only models in a wind-tunnel. When Concorde did arrive in service the US Congress initially declared that it would not be allowed to fly to America because it was too noisy and the sonic booms it generated were not tolerable. They soon relented but by then the only Concordes were in the hands of Air France and British Airways and the only American cities they looked like regularly visiting were New York City and Washington DC. In the end, there were sixteen Concordes made, making it rarer even than the SR-71. The two airlines made it work for them by simply charging enough money to cover costs and thus kept the SST the preserve of the well-to-do and the retiree with savings to spend, but everybody else still had to take the regular subsonic jet plane. The Tu-144 amounted to even less. A few came into domestic Russian service briefly in the late 1970s before being quietly retired in 1978 after only a few months work.

Over in the United States the whole country was settling into a post-moon landing malaise, as everyone wondered what NASA was to do next. What they did was belatedly pick up the reusable space plane concept that had been forgotten in the rush to the moon. Work done with the X-15 and the abandoned Dyna-Soar provided the back bone for the Space Shuttle project. The original plans for the Space Shuttle envisioned a fully reusable booster rocket carrying the orbiter vehicle piggyback style and gliding back to a runway. This evolved into a more conventional rocket booster with the orbiter attached to the top, as in the Dyna-Soar idea. As the early 1970s passed NASA budget cuts bit into the shuttle and cost saving alterations were imposed. To start with the totally reusable booster was dropped and replaced with a disposable fuel tank and booster rockets. For further cost savings it was decided to make the boosters solid fuel rockets rather than more expensive liquid rockets. Giant metal fireworks, in other words, working in almost exactly the same way. Meanwhile the shuttle orbiter got fatter as military and business interests demanded larger and larger payload carrying capacity. This larger shuttle couldn't sit on top of the booster but would have to be hung off the side. By 1977 the first space shuttle prototype was ready to be tested in glide flights. The shuttle "Enterprise" (named after the USS Enterprise of Star Trek fame) never flew into space, but did all the preparatory work as the test bed for the engines and aerodynamics. A NASA Boeing 747 carried the Enterprise aloft on it's back before releasing it to glide, or perhaps more accurately, plummet back to the runway. The finished shuttle was big, much bigger than had been envisioned many years earlier. Work done with the tiny X-15 on heat shielding could only help so much. The Shuttle needed a totally new heat shield design based on thermal insulating ceramic tiles, hundreds of thousands of them, glued onto the skin.

1981 marked six long years since the United States had sent an astronaut into space, and nine since the last Apollo moon landing. The 1975 co-operative mission between NASA and the Soviet space agency was the last flight with the Apollo hardware, where the American Apollo command module docked with the Russian Soyuz spacecraft and the crews symbolically met in space and seemed to signal the final end of the space race as well as a thawing in hostilities between the two arch enemies. After that there was nothing public going on except the testing of the Enterprise shuttle. In 1977 the two "Voyager" space probes were launched heading to photograph and measure the outer planets of the solar system. This seemed to be more the way of the future; automated robotic spacecraft that could be controlled remotely from mission control by radio signal, and flying where humans could not. Automatic drones had already been tested for military use. In the 1960s one ill-fated Lockheed A-12 had been turned into a carrier craft for a computer controlled jet drone, but that program had been abandoned when the drone crashed into the A-12 on a launch. By the time the first Space Shuttle stood on it's launch pad in 1981 automatic satellite rockets were already making it look redundant as an orbital delivery truck. Indeed the Russians were so suspicious of it's lack of obvious purpose that they started evaluating their own shuttle system, just in case the Americans had sinister military motives for the space plane. Still it was an amazing piece of technology, and could be used for other big projects, like a planned space station, and a huge space telescope, among other ideas. One thing was certain as the former Apollo astronaut John W Young, and one-time test pilot Robert Crippen climbed aboard shuttle 'Columbia' on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida; this was the first time a launch system had made it's first flight with a crew aboard. All the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo craft had flown on automation first. The shuttle was heading into uncharted territory with two men at the controls.

Twenty years to the day after Yuri Gagarin had flown on into orbit in the tiny spherical Vostok 1 capsule, Young and Crippen blasted off aboard a giant space plane - part airliner, part space rocket, part container ship. The watching world held it's breath as Columbia, the giant fuel tank, and the two solid rocket boosters flew skyward. After a few minutes, flying at 5km high the boosters separated and fell back to earth leaving the Shuttle and it's tank to continue out of sight. Two days, and thirty seven laps of the Earth later, the big ship reappeared in sight of those on the ground again, touching down successfully at Edwards base. It wasn't quite the pristine Shuttle that had left the pad; noticable numbers of the insulation tiles on the top side had fallen off during the mission, and the front landing gear had been damaged by heat. Nevertheless Columbia had succeeded in flying into space and returning safely. The shuttle made several more test missions with small crews before being put into working service. Up to seven people could board the shuttle, several on the flight deck and more down on the lower level. NASA had planned to do several shuttle missions every month but the early cost saving decisions began to catch up with them. Turning around the shuttle to fly again was not like turning around an airliner, or even an x-plane. The highly complicated heat shield needed it's tiles re-laying after every flight, the rocket boosters needed rebuilding, and the whole launch stack needed assembling just like the Apollo Saturn 5 rocket once was. They even did the job in the same building. There were other complications too. Engineers at the rocket booster's manufacturers were alarmed by how badly the rubber seals in the rockets had degraded when launches had happened in very cold conditions. They passed on their concerns to management, and when the second mission of 1986 was set to launch at the end of January in the coldest conditions yet seen they convened a late night conference call to discuss the problem. The engineers recommended no launch until the problem could be tested further. The managers, under pressure to get the shuttle running to it's expected schedule, overrode the recommendation.

What happened next is seared into the history books. When the second shuttle, Challenger, took off on January 26th the frozen cold conditions had solidified the rubber seals in the booster rockets. When the rockets were lit on the pad the seals were vapourised, but disaster on the launch pad was averted when the rubber debris plugged the gap in the rockets. As the shuttle climbed higher high winds sideswiped the machine and knocked out the accidental plug. Tongues of superheated rocket fuel leaked out of the gap in the booster and burnt into the strut attaching it to the fuel tank - had it been a more sophisticated liquid rocket then the leak would undoubtedly have been noticed on the shuttle's instruments, and the boosters could have been jettisoned. But the solid booster had no such measures and moments later the tank gave way and ruptured. From the ground nobody quite knew what had happened. The shuttle disappeared in a large white and yellow cloud. Only when the booster rockets emerged flying crazily loose did it seem clear that something terrible had happened to the shuttle and the seven people aboard. The headlines read that the shuttle "exploded". The crew were mourned, and especially Christa McAuliffe, the New Hampshire school teacher who had won selection from thousands of candidates to fly on the mission and teach lessons via video link from orbit. The shattered pieces of Challenger were raised from the Atlantic ocean and painstakingly examined. As the days passed NASA had to admit the uncomfortable truth; switches had clearly been moved in the cockpit, and the auxiliary air supply switched on. There was every likelihood that the crew had survived the breakup of the craft and in fact perished when the cabin smashed into the water. The shuttle hadn't "exploded" but been torn into several pieces by the high speed forces as the fuel tank failed. In the first few missions of the shuttle the two pilots had ejector seats if needed during launch. As the crew got larger they were abandoned and no viable escape method was designed in. The photographs clearly showed Challenger's crew cabin in one piece falling from the sky. Had the crew all had full pressure suits and automatic parachutes, there would have been plenty of time to open the hatches and jump clear. As one SR-71 pilot could attest, with the right protection survival from such a dramatic situation was more plausible than might be imagined. More fundamentally, had the shuttle been smaller, and mounted above the boosters, as had once been the plan, it could have flown completely clear.

The subsequent investigation made things worse for the space agency. The full extent to which managers had ignored their own engineers warnings about the deadly problem came to light. The Nobel-laureate physicist Richard Feynman, on the board of the government investigation, humiliatingly demonstrated the simplicity of the problem by surreptitiously sticking a piece of rocket seal in his ice water during a press conference. When he pulled the rubber from the water it had frozen solid. NASA was chastened by the official report and was radically restructured. The shuttle flew again two years later and continued with no further major problems for fifteen years. Then in 2003, the first shuttle, Columbia disintegrated during it's re-entry from orbit, taking another seven crew with it. Again, investigations were convened, and again investigations found another foreseeable problem; a piece of the fuel tank insulation had fallen off at lift off and hit the shuttle's wing. Mission control was fully aware of the strike and studied the footage of the launch to ascertain what action to take. They concluded there was no danger. In fact, the insulation block had punched a suitcase-sized hole in the shuttle's wing leading edge. In the blast furnace of re-entry searing hot gases had burnt through the hole. This time no escape system could rescue the crew as the shuttle fell to pieces at thousands of kilometers per hour and rained down in red hot pieces across much of Texas and the nearby states.

Though the five operational shuttles - Columbia, Challenger, Atlantis, Discovery and Endeavour - flew one hundred and thirty five missions into orbit, from a practical perspective they never really left the testing phase. The orbiter vehicle was the most remarkable aircraft ever built, but the launch system that got it to space was the victim of cost cutting and compromises. Had a been a little smaller and a little cheaper to operate, it could have achieved the goal of routine space transport. But like Concorde, the Tu-144, the X1, the X-15, the Gee-Bee, the Bluebirds, the Spitfire, the BAC 221, the XB-70, the Starfighter, the Mercedes Benz Rekordwagen, the Komet, the Leducs, Vostok 1, and the Mercury and Apollo caspsules, it is now a museum piece. Even the SR-71 Blackbird became too expensive for the Air Force. Refitting it's corrugated wings, moulding it's distorted nose back into shape, and keeping all the specialised equipment ready was all too much work compared to using spy satellites. Concorde had a similar problem; maintaining a few ageing planes was simply too much extra complication for an airline in the 21st century. And from a technological point of view both planes had become very primitive. Behind the glitzy facade of the two supersonic planes was a cockpit that was a sea of clunky switches and dials, noisy and fuel guzzling engines, and positively ancient computers. The Blackbird may have been able to do Mach 3, but it took it's photos on film cameras that had be offloaded and developed in darkrooms. By the time it was finally retired in 1999 the shops were full of cheap digital computer cameras that could upload photos to the internet. Likewise, Concorde allowed London's business travellers to get Stateside in three hours, but the internet meant they didn't even have to go in the first place, they just had to flick on a computer.

If people could travel back in time to the 1960s they doubtless would notice much that was different, and much that was familiar. They might marvel at the sight of ranks of RAF Lightning jets lined up at air bases, at the speed records in the skies of America or on the Bonneville Salt Flats, and the spectacle of the space launches. But the overwhelming thing they would notice is the lack of computers, and not just tablet screens, laptops and office desktops, but mobile phones, washing machines, television remote controls, barcode scanners, printers, photocopiers, speakers, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, cookers... They are all computers in different guises. Then there's the overall impact of computers, in hospitals, factories, banks, and entertainment. The great speed machines of the 20th century were mostly designed on drawing boards, with pencils, rulers, and brainpower. Computers, when they did arrive, mostly did the number crunching. Only with the greater processing power in the 1970s and 1980s did computer-aided-design start to become a practical reality. And the computer in the design office could also be the computer in the cockpit. A 1950s era computer relied on large valves and switches, and could never have been squeezed into a small fighter plane, but the invention of microprocessors and transistors in the 1940s and 1950s changed that. By the 1970s computers could help design a plane that was much more complicated and capable than before, and those same computers could then fly that plane in a way that no unassisted human could. In the 1960s planes like the Starfighter were condemned by some for being tricky to control and too unforgiving - by the 1980s making planes unstable and impossible for a human pilot to fly was becoming the norm. The pilot would control the machine, but the computer would actually fly it. Performing millions of calculations a second a computer control system could constantly adjust the control surfaces in a way that a human pilot never could.

The outright quest for speed gave way to maneuverability, stealth, and versatility. In America the brutal, noisy, Century Series planes gave way to a new generation of multi-role fighter-bombers, computer-designed planes intended to be good at everything; the F-111 and Navy F-14 Tomcat, both with movable'swing-wings' for optimal performance, the F15 Eagle, the F-16 Falcon, F-18 Hornet, the "Tank Buster" A-10 Warthog, a fighter jet with straight wings - something unheard of since World War Two - but with a huge semi-automatic cannon and protected with almost impenetrable armour. With computer design and control even helicopters could be fighters; neither the 'Apache' gunship or Sikorsky 'Black Hawk' were breaking any speed records but that did not matter. In Vietnam in the early 1970s the main use of helicopters was for transport, rescue and armed support. Bell Aircraft, one time builder of the X-1, made the ubiquitous Iroquis - or 'Huey' - the helicopter that would feature in every movie or TV show about the Vietnam War, but the Huey was a sardine can compared to the Apache. In Vietnam a gunner would hang out of the side of the Huey firing from the open door. The Apache didn't need a man hanging out of the side; with computer controls the pilot could aim the cannon with a turn of their head. The computer tracked the pilot's crash helmet and aimed the gun where it detected the pilot was looking. Compared to this, making the SR-71's engine move a few parts correctly at Mach 3 was child's play. The X-plane program, having conquered high speed, in the 1980s began to expand into more experimental areas. The NASA X-29 plane was built with wings swept rakishly forwards; the X-31 looked fairly normal... except for it's removable tail fin. In both cases the designers were deliberately trying to see what their computers could handle.

Decades after the Edwards Air Force Base had been re-named in honour of the commander of a crashed Northrop XB-49 'Flying Wing' test plane the concept returned in the 1980s in the shape of a stealth bomber project. The XB-49 had been buried in the early 1950s by political manoeuvering - Jack Northrop believed it because he wouldn't accept an offer to merge his company with Convair - but with more advanced computerised technology the idea of the tailless flying wing stealth bomber came back into fashion and eventually became the B2 bomber. The Lockheed Skunk Works came up with the angular F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter, an angular collection of sharp triangula surfaces that could never have flown without computer control. The F-117 bridged the gap between the 1970s designs and the prototypes that started appearing in the 1990s, prototypes that were intended to be even more versatile than their predecessors. The 1990s F-15 replacement, the F-22 retains much of the smoothed out stealth look of the Blackbird, but in a all-purpose fighter plane rather than a high-speed spy plane. The F-22 design informed much of the Lockheed Martin F-35 "Joint Strike Fighter", the trillion-dollar ultimate development of all that has come before. Put simply the 'JSF' was created to replace everything that came before and bring all the different strands of technology together - one single basic design that can do high speed, be launched from aircraft carriers, perform vertical takeoff (VTOL), use the jet thrust 'vectoring' technology pioneered in the tailless X-31, and have a radar-deflecting stealth shape. In two generations of development the older planes; the fighter-bombers, the swing wing planes, the Harrier'Jump Jet', the A-10 Warthog, even to some extent the F-22; will all be replaced by the F-35 platform. Just as in previous decades the latest American military plane has been sold all around the NATO allied countries, but by the turn of the 21st century the 'American' F-35 had a great amount of input from other countries, especially Great Britain's BAe Systems - the major inheritor of most of the old names from Britain's flying past. In a ironic conclusion to the story of high speed fighter planes the descendant of Supermarine, de Havilland, Hawker, English Electric and others, is collaborating with their one time transatlantic rival Lockheed to build planes for RAF and US Air Force.

In the 1960s and 1970s the British had carried on building aircraft and cars, but it was an era of mergers, cost saving and far less excitement that there had once been. Concorde was the great white hope of the age, but while British politicians plowed ahead with the SST they just often went for the cheaper American option rather than continue pushing ahead with other projects. The elegant TSR-2 high speed bomber, for example, was cancelled in favour of American F-111s. Even the Harrier Jump Jet struggled against the odds at times before it's potential was realised. This was a drastically changed Britain from only a few years before. When the great British speed chaser Donald Campbell came back from his belated success with his turbine car at Lake Eyre with plans for building a rocket Bluebird that could break Mach 1 on land, nobody was interested. The British automotive industry was occupied with consolidation, rationalisation and money saving rather than building record breakers. Already, cargo ships with Japanese imports - Toyotas, Datsuns, Hondas - were trickling into Britain, and an ominous future beckoned for the British motoring heartland that had gladly churned out the parts for Bluebird CN7, just as they had for the 1920s Bluebirds. By 1967 Donald Campbell was a man out of time - a man in his middle age who still called people "Old boy" and held true to the patriotic "Why climb Everest? Because it's there!" axiom of George Mallory. But when warplanes were flashing overhead at Mach 2, and astronauts in America were performing ground tests on lunar spacecraft, Campbell's brand of record breaking looked a little quaint.

Without support for his rocket car, Donald Campbell pulled out his old jet boat, K7, installed a new engine, refined the bodywork, and trucked it off to his old stomping ground; Coniston Water in the English Lake District. As in 1960 and 1964 he seemed jinxed - it was deep in winter, just past the turn of the year into 1967. Those from the media that did come to find the faded hero asked questions about risk and reward. Campbell was blunt, the reward would be a record past 300 mph, and the knowledge that it was a British boat that had done it. He did not mention himself, except in terms of how much he was aware of the dangers and that his jet boat always scared him. Courage, he said, was "Not being fearless. Courage is overcoming and smashing through fear". On January 4th 1967, Donald Campbell, with good weather and under the watching eyes of his support team, set out across the lake to try for a 300 mph record. His first run was good; 297 mph. Just a little more was needed. He turned around at the southern end of the lake and headed back. Bluebird K7 sped faster than it ever had, past a the small island on the lake, and headed towards the timing beams. In a moment the little blue boat began to rise. "I've got the bows up..." radioed the skipper to his team watching from each end in small boats on the water. Next came a muffled "I've gone!" as the boat somersaulted backwards before nose diving into the water. The team rushed to the crash site but Bluebird was already sinking below them - the floating lifejacket provided false hope; it was empty. Campbell's teddy bear mascot was found floating on the water, and so was his empty crash helmet. The rest of his team stayed for several hours, in the sudden deafening silence of the the picturesque lake, but there was nothing else to be done. The newspapers all printed the terrifying image of Bluebird rearing from the lake, and it's driver was eulogised as a brave, if perhaps foolhardy daredevil. A few weeks later the Apollo 1 capsule was consumed in fire on the test launch pad at Cape Kennedy, Florida, but few decried the NASA space programme and the deadly capsule filled with pressurised pure oxygen that claimed astronauts 'Gus' Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee. In time, Campbell's legacy grew, and he became an even more heroic figure than when he had been alive - the man who embodied a lost spirit of British gallantry and modest courage, his name mentioned decades later in a James Bond movie as the man who wasn't scared of facing death. A team of enthusiasts raised his boat was raised from Coniston in 2001, followed shortly after by his remains. He was buried at the churchyard at the north end of the lake, a few miles beyond the point where his boat crashed.

Three years after Campbell's death the land speed record of Craig Breedlove was broken at Bonneville by an elegant rocket car - The 'Blue Flame'. It was built by several drag racing enthusiasts at the Chicago Institute of Gas Technology, under the auspices of their subsidury "Reaction Dynamics" company. This was a third way of record breaking; not with government money, or under the command of a charismatic team leader and driver, but a band of smart technicians pursuing a pet project. They were following in the footsteps of Frank Whittle - the RAF officer who had created the turbojet but who had to endure staggering official indifference to his idea - by creating an engine independently. Reaction Dynamics built a natural gas rocket (hence the 'Blue' part of the the Blue Flame) of very compact size, and great technical ingenuity. Their engine, that made 13,000 pounds of thrust - or around 35,000 horsepower, was barely over six feet long and could be packed into the rear of a long cigar-tube chassis. There were hints of the first Spirit of America in the design, but the Blue Flame was much lower and longer and the driver sat lower, in the middle - like a racing car rather than a fighter jet. The driver was Gary Gabelich, a former North American company test pilot, a member of NASA's Apollo programme, and frequent drag racer. He may have been an understudy astronaut but bohemian Gabelich was no crew-cut square; he wore love beads, and his long hair peaked out from under his beanie hat. Just as with Chuck Yeager's roundabout journey to the X1 pilot's seat, Gabelich wasn't the first choice for the Blue Flame driver job. Craig Breedlove was approached but asked for a larger pay cheque. Another top drag racer was on the list but was killed in a race before he was offered the job. So Gabelich was the man to drive the white and powder-blue rocket across the Bonneville salt in October 1970 at 622 mph. It was the last time an American held the record, and the last record at Bonneville. The Reaction Dynamics team were interested in keeping going to build a Mach 1 car, and Breedlove, a friend of Gabelich, wondered aloud if they could on day have a 700 mph head to head drag race for the record, but money and interest was not forthcoming, and their car eventually found it's way to a museum in Germany.



One of the ironies of the modern world in the 21st century is that the countries that suffered the most from the schisms of the 20th century and were once overshadowed first by the British Empire, and then by the two Cold War superpowers have come to the fore. The Japanese and South Koreans dominate the world of electronics, the Germans and French have large manufacturing and automotive industries, and China is simply so large that as it industrialises it has become a huge world power simply through clout. France, Germany and Japan in particular have created a new form of speed for the people; the high speed train. In the speed-obsessed 1920s and 1930s trains briefly enjoyed a resurgence of commercial interest as streamlined locomotives and luxury expresses were all the rage in Britain, America and Germany, but the war put an end to such adventures. When the war ended the car and the passenger plane were on the ascendant, and trains had to take a back seat until 1964, when the Japanese opened their "Shinkansen", or as English-speakers came to nickname it 'The Bullet Train'. The plane-like train could go 125 mph - far slower than planes - but importantly it could set off right from central Tokyo rather than out in the suburbs, and it could stop often along the way. The French picked up the idea for their own 'TGV' (Train a Grande Vitesse), opened in 1981, followed by the German's ICE (Intercity Express) late in the 1980s. Meanwhile the British, the inventors of railways and the one-time trailblazers of the sky and road, struggled with embarrassing failures like the 'Advanced Passenger Train' - a train that was cancelled so early into it's life that made the Soviet TU-144 supersonic airliner look like a great commercial success. In America they didn't even get that far. Long-distance passenger trains nearly died off entirely in the 1960s, and high speed trains were ignored for decades.

So by the turn of the millennium the dream of the 1960s - with supersonic airliners, space stations, cars driving on great elevated highways - had not quite turned out as expected. Instead using Concorde to get around people took a Boeing 747, or an Airbus, or a TGV. Astronauts and cosmonauts were still the only people going regularly into space, and the speed records of the 20th century still stood. But while the 1970s may have been the end of the story for 'manned' high speed craft, the quest for speed has in fact continued ever since planes like the Blackbird were retired, just in unmanned vehicles. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, 'UAVs' have pushed their own air speed record up to 13,201 mph (21,245 kph) - or Mach 20. This was achieved by the American Hypersonic Technology Vehicle, another product of the Lockheed Skunk Works, a black arrow shaped rocket, with a curious resemblance to an prehistoric spear head, over the Pacific from California in 2010. The ramjet has a successor, Supersonic Combusting Jet, or Scramjet. The NASA X-43 scramjet UAV is the fastest unmanned aeroplane in the world, tearing along at 7,546 mph, 12,144 kph, or three thousand mph faster than the X-15. The applications of such technology are currently a little unclear, but the fact that NASA and the giant military funded corporations are performing such research on UAV's is an indicator of how much private enterprise has taken over when it comes to the realm of machines that carry a crew. The need for speed is being reawakened it seems in many technology companies around the world.

In 2004 another reusable space plane took it's first flight, but it was not a space shuttle, it was the "SpaceShip One", made by a company called 'Scaled Composites' and doing much the same as the X-15 once did in the 1960s; flying from a carrier plane resembling a stretched out private jet, the little rocket craft became the first private spaceship - even if it was 'only' a suborbital jaunt, it still won it's makers a ten million dollar prize. The Anzari 'X Prize' was the spiritual successor to the old Schneider Trophy, or the Orteig Prize paid to Charles Lindbergh in 1927 - it seems as though in the 21st century, with help from computer aided design, construction, and simulation, the age of smaller companies pushing speed boundaries is returning. Getting from the computer screen to real life still involves risk and costs - as the crash in the Mojave Desert of the larger SpaceShip Two in 2014 showed - and just like the X-planes of the 1950s, the journey from a test plane to a working passenger plane may still take a few years yet, but the desire to see it happen is clearly still there. Even that old challenge, the Land Speed Record is still a target. Road cars have crept ever higher in speed since the 1980s - now the 200 mph barrier is something some regular executive saloons can break, while the top hypercars push past 250, and headed to 260 and 270. The first supersonic land speed record was set in 1997 - RAF squadron leader Andy Green, in an echo of the days when such pilots would be breaking plane speed records, piloted Richard Noble's Thrust SSC car to 763 mph. Noble himself had broken the mark set by Gary Gabelich in his Thrust 2 car in 1983 - a car that had been festooned with commercial advertisements to pay the cost, a cost that nearly became too much when rain forced Noble and his team to postpone runs in the Nevada desert in 1982 and come back the next year. The fact that the Thrust 2 team had to scrape together the money they needed from any available sponsor showed how far Britain's interest in world record speeds had fallen by the early 1980s. The large 'Turbo' logos on the side of the car's jet engine cowling were not a reference to motoring - it was a brand of aftershave. It took Noble another ten years to drum up support for his SuperSonic Car and his team's achievement merited him an OBE, but not a knighthood as had been expected in the days of Campbell and Segrave. But by the time of the turn of the millennium and his 'Bloodhound SSC' - a hybrid jet and rocket car aiming at a 1000 mph record - official interest had returned and the UK government gave support as part of a scheme to attract engineering students in schools and colleges. It was not quite the X-prize, but it was a start. And a second SpaceShip Two is being built, again in the colours of Richard Branson's Virgin 'Galactic' spaceline, even though it is a long way to it's first fee paying flight. Maybe the next century of speed will in fact turn out to be eventful as the last after all.