Cracking the sound barrier in the X-1 marked another milestone in aviation history.

The time, October 14th, 1947.

The Plate, Air Force Flight Test Center at Murat, California.

The pilot, Captain Chuck Yeager.

With all the pilot Captain Chuck Yeager.

With all four rockets firing, Yeager climbs to 56,000 feet in less than two minutes.

And he does it, the first human to crack the sound barrier.

Captain Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier on October 14th, 1947, where people on the ground heard a sonic boom

for the first time. Since then, technology has allowed aircraft to go faster and faster,

but there's still one barrier that prevents the public from flying faster than the speed of sound

over land. Sonic booms are still too loud and too disruptive.

We began this podcast series with the SR-71,

the fastest manned aircraft.

And we're closing our first season of Inside Skunkworks

with an aircraft demonstrator that has the potential to change the accessibility

of supersonic flight.

There's two ways that you actually hear the sonic boom. One is the actual noise that you hear when you're outside.

Usually it's like a double crack, so it's like a boom boom.

And then when you're inside of a building, you actually don't hear the sonic boom.

What you hear is the windows rattling or the door shaking or what appears to be maybe the building moving. Some sonic booms have even been known to break windows,

so they can be fairly destructive as well.

This is Peter Esophetus and Craig Nicol.

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