#x-1

Publicity photo of Captain Chuck Yeager sitting in the cockpit of the Bell X-1 Rocket plane taken by photographer James Evans at Edwards AFB - May 1948

"The Bell Aircraft Corporation X-1-2 #6063 aircraft on the ramp at NACA High Speed Flight Research Station located on the South Base of Muroc Army Air Field in 1947. The X-1-2 flew until October 23, 1951, completing 74 glide and powered flights with nine different pilots. The aircraft has white paint and the NACA tail band. The black Xs are reference markings for tracking purposes. They were widely used on NACA aircraft in the early 1950s."

Date: December 15, 1951

1995 Daihatsu X-1 Concept

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I just completed “Chasing the Demon”, by Dan Hampton.  Overall, I thought it was decent enough.  I particularly enjoyed the parts about some of the Luftwaffe’s early work on jets and rockets. 

I think it would have been better if Mr. Hampton had a bit more focus on the X1 program itself.  For about two-thirds of the book, he covers some early flight history and some overview of WWII (although he tries to keep the focus on the test pilots later featured in the flight testing), which seem to take away from what I wanted to read about in greater detail. 

It’s not a bad read.  He loves Jack Ridley (for good reasons), and doesn’t seem to care much for Yeager.  Further, he really wants to give more credit to the theory that the XP-86 tests were the first to go supersonic.  So I was a little unsure about his straying into that area. 

But I enjoyed the X-1 part of the book, and it’s a quick read.  But with a much tighter focus on the X-1 development, I think it would have been much better.