Stephen M. Welch

In an ironic twist, shortly after Yeager commemorated the 50th anniversary of his feat on October 14, 1997, by replicating the flight in an F-15 Eagle at the age of 73, the Air Force Times reported that a week before Yeager's XS-1 mission, the sound barrier had been broken by George Welch in a prototype P-86 Sabre. This feat was kept secret for even longer than Yeager's, at least originally, because it involved the capabilities of what was soon to become America's front-line fighter (which would in a few years dominate the skies in the Korean War), and also because Welch's supersonic flight had been unplanned and unintentional. All this was apparently forgotten as Yeager's reputation soared. Yeager was an active duty Air Force officer while Welch was a civilian employee of North American Aviation, but considering how soon after the war as all this had taken place, Welch presumably still retained a reserve commission and would have been eligible for the Medal of Honor under the same criteria by which Charles Lindbergh received it. Unfortunately and sadly for George S. Welch, he had been dead for over four decades by the time his feat became public knowledge; he was killed in 1954 in a crash while testing a prototype of the F-100 Super Sabre, which would become the last operational fighter in North American's Mustang-Sabre line of evolution