Friend and podcaster Paul Lathrop is a fellow Model Plane enthusiast (as in we can’t afford these babies so we just enjoy watching them) and he sent me the video of this particular aircraft: a B 29 Superfortress with the X1 under it.

And yes, the X1 deploys and flies.

The moment the first engine came to life, the theme from “The Right Stuff” started to play in my head… now I have to see the movie again. If you have never seen this movie, you are missing a great flick and possibly one of the greatest narrative intros in Hollywood history.

“There was a demon that lived in the air. They said whoever challenged him would die. Their controls would freeze up, their planes would buffet wildly, and they would disintegrate. The demon lived at Mach 1 on the meter, 750 miles an hour, where the air could no longer move out of the way. He lived behind a barrier through which they said no man could ever pass. They called it: The sound barrier. Then, they built a small plane, the X-1, to try and break the sound barrier. And men came to the High Desert in California to ride it. They were called test pilots.

And no one knew their names.”