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.
