Beyond Silence

One evening last week Britain's No. 1 test pilot shut himself into what was probably the most advanced piece of air machinery ever to get beyond the blueprinting stage, and took off into the darkening sky. The pilot was Captain Geoffrey De Havilland, 37, crown prince of one of aviation's few dynasties. His father, Sir Geoffrey, heads the De Havilland Aircraft Co.; his younger brother John was killed (1943) in the collision of two planes. Since 1938, Captain Geoffrey had made every first flying test of De Havilland's aircraft.

The new plane was the DH-108, a jet-propelled, tailless aircraft shaped like a sting ray. Captain De Havilland's purpose was: 1) to study problems of control in aircraft with swept-back wings (in preparation for a transatlantic airliner which is being built by his father's company); 2) to advance Britain's supremacy in aircraftsmanship by breaking the British-held world's speed record (616 m.p.h.).

The last anyone saw of this adventure was the strange machine's magnificent trajectory into the dusk--as if a match had been swept across a hot stovelid. That same evening a plane exploded above the Thames estuary with such violence that neither pilot nor much of the wreckage was found. But R.A.F. flyers concluded that scraps of wreckage they found had once belonged to the DH-108. It was possible that Captain De Havilland had made his new record (unofficially) ; and that for one fearful moment, he had experienced more of the new problems of aeronautics than is known to any living man.

One conjecture: his speed may have passed the dreaded limit of "compressibility" when the air streams pass the wing or control surfaces at the speed of sound (TIME, Sept. 23). A "standing sound wave" may have formed, clung like a yammering banshee, and torn the plane to shreds. Perhaps Captain De Havilland crossed that sonic threshold only to discover, in Hamlet's soaring words:

The undiscovered country from whose bourn

No traveler returns.

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