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Issue 7 > Beyond barriers: flying through the 'ugh-known'.

Beyond barriers: flying through the 'ugh-known'.

Tom Terez takes a ride with Chuck Yeager and learns something about barriers.

Barriers come in all shapes and sizes, but the ones that hold us back the most are those we create in our own mind.

Such was the case 60 years ago, when advances in flight were bringing people closer and closer to the sound barrier. Many likened it a brick wall. They believed that a plane would break apart the moment it exceeded 760 miles per hour (1,223 kph). Some scientists thought the plane might survive but the pilot would not. A few predicted that the pilot would dramatically age.

As 1947 unfolded, American test pilot Chuck Yeager had been working with the newly-built Bell X-1, a tiny, orange bullet of a plane that had the horsepower to exceed Mach 1.

'We were flying through uncharted territory, the 'ugh-known' as we liked to call it,' Yeager wrote 40 years later in an article for 'Popular Mechanics' magazine. 'And as ominous as it seemed to us then, that was the whole point.'

Ominous indeed. 'What would it be like?' he wondered. 'A pebble in the road of aviation we had merely to step over? Or an insurmountable Chinese wall that would destroy the X-1—and me with it?'

October 14, 1947, was supposed to be yet another test day at speeds just short of the sound barrier. But once Yeager climbed into the aircraft—despite having broken two ribs the day before in a low-tech fall from a horse—he decided to power up. It happened in an instant. He looked down at the cockpit machmeter and caught his breath: 1.06. Through the barrier!

'I had flown at supersonic speeds for 18 seconds,' Yeager recalled. 'There was no buffet, no jolt, no shock. Above all, no brick wall to smash into. I was alive.'

The great 'ugh-known' had been pierced. The flight was so smooth that Yeager later said his grandmother could have sipped lemonade in the backseat.

Okay, so you're not a test pilot strapping yourself into a supersonic plane… but we all face barriers.

Which of these are real, and which are imagined? Power up and find out for yourself.

Tom Terez is a personal development advisor.

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