WingFlaps wrote:
On Feb 8, 12:20 pm, Dudley Henriques wrote:

Interesting story and I can well believe he could have broken the
barrier as described. I also heard that the X1 was in fact designed by
the British and given to the Americans, along with data, due to the
expense of the British supersonic program and problems with repaying
war debt. Do you know anything about that -I once saw a old picture of
an "X1" in the UK but can't find it now.

Cheers

To my knowledge, the X1 was a request research project from the old NACA
(now NASA) to Bell aircraft for an aircraft capable of making the
attempt to break the speed of sound.
I've never heard any mention of a design from the Brits. Actually, the
design concept was quite simple. They did the entire aircraft based on
ballistic tests with a 50 Cal. bullet even to taking the canopy out of
the equation and replacing it with molded in windows.
Based on the ballistic tests of the 1/2 inch bullet, Bell designers
expected the same transonic performance from the X1 provided they could
get it up to speed.
The horizontal tail proved to be the only real issue and they changed
that to a slab tail to solve the shock issue.
The F86 prototype was having the same problems at the same time in dives.
It's interesting that North American added a stabilator to the 86 later
on in it's production run but to my knowledge George Welsh who broke the
barrier the week before Yeager had a regular tail on the prototype which
was carried through to the first A Sabre.


--
Dudley Henriques