Warbird Information Exchange

Now this thread isen't ment to start a heated debate. More of the question about the possiblities of these other claims by pilots that have stated they broke the sound barrier.

The first is Hans Guido Mutke claimed to have broken the sound barrier on April 9, 1945 in a Messerschmitt Me 262. Mutke reported not just transonic buffeting but the resumption of normal control once a certain speed was exceeded, then a resumption of severe buffeting once the Me 262 slowed again.

In older us-aircraft.com threads we also discussed the possibility of P-38's doing it. But that seemed to be ruled out due to bad experiances of putting a P-38 in a high speed dive.

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Can't address the Mutke claim except to say that the general feeling among the test pilot community as I've seen it is that Mutke was simply a victim of his early pitot static system and was not actually out there as far as he thought he was.
As for the P38; or any prop fighter for that matter, I can address that issue with some authority.
No prop fighter has ever exceeded Mach 1 nor will one ever achieve that goal.
The issue is that the closer you approach mach1 in a propeller fighter the more severe the shock builds on the prop disk. The drag index is so high that propeller destruction will occur before the entire prop can get the aircraft through mach 1. The prop tips however can easily reach mach 1 as they do every day on the T6 on takeoff
You can take a Mustang, a Bearcat, or a P38 way out into the transonic range, and you can get sonic flow over specific parts of the airframe but that big prop up front will self destruct before allowing you through that magic number 1.
The 38 did have high speed dive issues. I remember Tony Levier laughing about one afternoon he was convinced he had bought the farm, and about the same from Herb Fisher who did extremely high mach number dive tests in a P47 at Wright Pat.
Both said they tried several different prop settings trying to find one that optimized the airspeed in the dive before maxing out the prop governors.
The Brits also did high mach number dive tests at Boscomb Downs after the war. Nobody got through.
I had an O2 failure once in a Mustang that resulted in me waking up with a walking stick and the nose tucking under on me. It wasn't pleasant ))
Dudley Henriques

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Dudley Henriques
International Fighter Pilots Fellowship

What about ducted fan?

Chalmers "Slick" Goodlin was the first to break the sound barrier. He made a lot of the first flights in the X-1 including working out all the bugs in the wing thickness redesign, etc., so that one of the Air Force "pretty boys" could claim the official title and credit.

I was fortunate to have a one on one conversation with Scott Crossfield one Sunday morning at War Eagles Museum. We were discussing his supersonic dive attempts in the beefed up P-51 that belonged to NACA. His comments were that he believed that some guys may have thought they did it during WWII but he said it just wasn't possible in those aircraft. He told me that during his particular NACA tests that he could see the transonic shockwave building off of the wingtip but he never was able to get through it.

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From a pure physics standpoint, consider what is happening at the prop tips as they swing through the air when approaching mach 1. It ain't pretty.

To get the force required to move the aircraft forward beyond transonic speed, how fast would the tips of the prop have to move through the air?

And don't let dive velocity cloud the issue; just going downhill isn't an advantage when it comes to thrust.