PHOTOGRAPHS: DAN MORRISON
hour. At 68°F, which was about where the temperature
stood last October, Mach 1 would be 767.8 miles per hour.
When Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in
1947 in the experimental X-1 plane, many engineers thought the vibrations would tear his aircraft apart and
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kill him. Many were saying the same thing about Green's chances of survival. He shrugged off the dire warnings of the doubters. "We've done a five-year research program, using some new techniques that nobody's ever used before, to measure what happens to shock waves under a car that close to the ground. We've got good data on that. It's not a case of unknown, it's a case of unproven."
