 On November 20th of 1953, Scott Crossfield became the first man to fly at Mach 2. Chuck Yeager followed and beat his record and hit Mach 2.44 on December 12th of 1953, on a flight that nearly killed him. I'm Amy Shearer, and today on Fated Space, we're talking about Chuck Yeager's Wild Ride in the X1A. The X1A was a second-generation X1, also built by Bell, that marked a few differences from its predecessor. Its designers predicted the aircraft could break Mach 2.5, but it was known to be unstable at high speeds, but Yeager, famed as an intuitive pilot, decided to take the plane to its limits anyways. When Yeager first took the X1A out, he only hit a top speed of Mach 1.5 on a familiarization flight. His second time in the X1A, he hit a peak of Mach 1.9. His big run to beat Mach 2 came on December 12th of 1953. Things started normally with the X1A nestled beneath a B-29 launch plane. At 32,000 feet and traveling around 210 miles per hour, the X1A fell away. Yeager lit chambers 4, 2, and 1 of his rocket engine to reach Mach 0.8. He climbed to 43,000 feet and lit chamber 3 to accelerate to Mach 1.1. Then he continued to climb and increase his speed. At his peak of 76,000 feet, he hit Mach 1.9. He hit a top speed of Mach 2.44 when the engines cut out, and here's where things started to get a little bit dicey. The plane first went into a Dutch roll, a combination of pitching and yawing oscillations. Then started rolling sharply to the right. This right roll ended when the plane was upside down, and then it started rolling sharply to the left. The violent Tumlin exposed Yeager to some intense G-forces. Inside the cockpit, he pulled as many as 8 Gs and fell a negative force of 1.3 Gs, and a sideways force of 2 Gs. It was enough that he slammed his head against the canopy and actually cracked it. The X1A lost about 50,000 feet in just 70 seconds. But at 25,000 feet, it entered into a normal roll, and Yeager was able to regain consciousness and regain control of his aircraft. No one except Yeager knew what had happened to the X1A. Chase Pilots lost radio contact with Yeager, and Yeager didn't come back on the radio until he regained control at 25,000 feet. And amazingly, he sounded fine and started cracking jokes. After that fallen roll, he said there was no need to run a structure demonstration on that airplane. Amazingly, the X1A sustained no damage in the flight, except for that cracked canopy where Yeager's head hit it and some damage to the pitch and yaw indicators. To put this context into story, check out the post on Vintage Space linked in the about box below. And for Vintage Space updates every day of the week, follow me on Twitter as AST Vintage Space. And don't forget to subscribe right here so you never miss an episode.