“they took mercy on my academics.” In June 1947, Colonel Boyd made one of the most important decisions of his career when he chose one of his most junior test pilots to make the attempt to become the first person to exceed the speed of sound in the rocket-powered Bell X-1. He chose Yeager because he considered him the best “instinctive” pilot he had ever seen and he had demonstrated an extraordinary capacity to remain calm and focused in stressful situations. The X-1 program certainly promised to be stressful; many experts believed the so-called “sound barrier” was impenetrable. Yeager and the rest of the small Air Force test team met at Muroc in late July.