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Chasing the Demon - A Secret History of the Quest for the Sound Barrier, and the Band of American Aces Who Conquered It (Paperback)
Loot Price: R278
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Chasing the Demon - A Secret History of the Quest for the Sound Barrier, and the Band of American Aces Who Conquered It (Paperback)
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List price R332
Loot Price R278
Discovery Miles 2 780
You Save R54 (16%)
Expected to ship within 9 - 15 working days
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NATIONAL BESTSELLER * At the end of World War II, a band of aces
gathered in the Mojave Desert on a Top Secret quest to break the
sound barrier-nicknamed "The Demon" by pilots. The true story of
what happened in those skies has never been told. Speed. In 1947,
it represented the difference between victory and annihilation.
After Hiroshima, the ability to deliver a nuclear device to its
target faster than one's enemy became the singular obsession of
American war planners. And so, in the earliest days of the Cold
War, a highly classified program was conducted on a desolate air
base in California's Mojave Desert. Its aim: to push the envelope
of flight to new frontiers. There gathered an extraordinary band of
pilots, including Second World War aces Chuck Yeager and George
Welch, who risked their lives flying experimental aircraft to reach
Mach 1, the so-called sound barrier, which pilots called "the
demon." Shrouding the program in secrecy, the US military
reluctantly revealed that the "barrier" had been broken two months
later, after the story was leaked to the press. The full truth has
never been fully revealed-until now. Chasing the Demon, from
decorated fighter pilot and acclaimed aviation historian Dan
Hampton, tells, for the first time, the extraordinary true story of
mankind's quest for Mach 1. Here, of course, is
twenty-four-year-old Captain Chuck Yeager, who made history flying
the futuristic Bell X-1 faster than the speed of sound on October
14, 1947. Officially Yeager was the first to achieve supersonic
flight, but drawing on new interviews with survivors of the
program, including Yeager's former commander, as well as
declassified files, Hampton presents evidence that a fellow
American-George Welch, a daring fighter pilot who shot down a
remarkable sixteen enemy aircraft during the Pacific War-met the
demon first, though he was not favored to wear the laurels, as he
was now a civilian test pilot and was not flying the Bell X-1.
Chasing the Demon sets the race between Yeager and Welch in the
context of aviation history, so that the reader can learn and
appreciate their accomplishments as never before.
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