OCTOBER 14, 1947: Air Force test pilot Chuck Yeager becomes the first person to fly faster than the speed of sound, one of aviation’s most important milestones. A veteran of the Army Air Corps who flew more than sixty combat missions over Europe during WWII, Yeager became a test pilot for the post-war program to develop rocket- and jet-powered aircraft. On October 14 Yeager climbed into the bullet-shaped experimental X-1 aircraft — dubbed “Glamorous Glennis” after his wife — and was carried aloft by a B-29 bomber. Dropping from the bomber at 25,000 feet, Yeager accelerated to more than 600 miles per hour, breaking the “sound barrier” that had long frustrated aircraft designers and taken the lives of other test pilots, before landing safely on the base’s dry lake bed. Yeager’s feat was not announced publicly until June 1948. In December 1953 he set a new speed record of 1,650 miles per hour in the X-1A.