![jet breaking sound barrier jet breaking sound barrier](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/42/ac/19/42ac1932b50d62ce58db7b4278025ffc.jpg)
For it to be still balled it may have been a pilot coming in lowish and slowish and the ball didn't have time to disperse. If on a training mission chaff was used before returning to base you would recycle the system to make sure that there was no misfire that was gunna get your ground grew on the apron.
![jet breaking sound barrier jet breaking sound barrier](http://eaa701.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/photos-aircraft-breaking-sound-barrier-3-600x338.jpg)
The reason being is that the method of discharging the chaff was like a short little shotgun barrel with a shot gun like cartridge propelling the chaff shot fired electrically. As a kid driving first the Avon Sabre or CA-27, to be more correct (sorta like your Canadair Sabre Mk6 but with balls), which would only go sonic very high going down hill or lower going very, very quickly downhill, then the Mirage IIIO/E which were sonic anywhere you liked (with varying degrees of efficiency) we had rudimentary chaff dispensers (by today's standards) which were rarely armed for normal training. Aircraft countermeasures were in their infancy. Hopefully I wasn't to presumption ).Īs you said in the 60's 70's let me relate what I do know. It just seemed liked there might be some questions behind your question that you might like addressed.
#Jet breaking sound barrier skin#
Somewhere over Mach 2 is where we have to worry about the skin failing, but even then, it's not from force (which is what would create metal shavings) it's from extreme heat (like when a space craft is re-entering the atmosphere.) But we have materials that can deal with that now as well, and we have some craft that can safely go six times the speed of sound without any serious damage to the skin.Īnyway, sorry for the long rambling answer. In fact, it takes some serious speed before materials come into play at all. No material changes were actually required, the X-1 was made out of plane old aircraft grade aluminum alloy. Once that issues was fixed (as it was for the Bell X-1), the fear of an aircraft breaking up when hitting the sound barrier were mitigated. In essence, it wasn't a materials problem, it was a control surface authority problem. This could cause the plane to tumble which may, in turn, cause it to break apart. Further, fully breaking the sound barrier can then cause direct interference with an aircrafts control surfaces if they are not properly designed (Peter Kämpf's excellent answer, linked above, has all the details). In reality, the main issue most aircraft faced when they broke the sound barrier was that their control surfaces would start to lose effectiveness because the supersonic speeds caused the air to separate from the wing.Īpproaching the speed of sound will cause super sonic airflow over the front of the wing, changing the center of lift in an effect called Mach Tuck. Planes didn't break apart simply because they "hit the sound barrier". Well, the problem is that this argument would be based in a false claim. I mean, if older planes would have broken apart, perhaps newer planes are only barely surviving by simply shedding metal shavings when they break the sound barrier, right? Those rumors, I think, produced ideas like the one you state here. There are a lot of misunderstandings regarding breaking the sound barrier, including several theories, that still linger from the 40s and 50s, that an aircraft would simply break apart when it hit the sound barrier. You'll notice that none of the images show the skin of the aircraft being affected. Here is a video that shows several aircraft breaking the speed of sound, including several still images of it.