At the scene describing the test flights of the Bell X-1, they show a flight that ends with the crash of the plane. This is completely untrue. There was no such crash of any Bell X-1 plane prior to the record breaking flight by Chuck Yaeger on October 14, 1947. There were 3 Bell X-1 planes built. The first is the famous record breaker plane. It was retired on May 12, 1950. It is on display in the Air National Museum in Washington DC. The second flew until October 23 1951 when it was rebuilt as X-1E. The third X-1 started flights only on July 1951 and blew-up on the ground on November 9, 1951. See more...
The bar man in Pancho's Happy Bottom Riding Club called Fed is in fact Chuck Yeager. He was on set as an adviser and was given a cameo role. See more...
Comments made in brackets are corrections from other visitors. As such, any aggressive/abusive corrections (and I get quite a few) written as if they're comments I've made myself will be ignored. To submit your own corrections for mistakes, just click the edit icon under an entry, then choose "correct entry". Some entries have "duplicated entry" after them - these are entries which were already listed on the main page, but were submitted again. I occasionally leave these online for a while, just in case they were moved in error, so don't worry about pointing them out to me.
When Yeager hits Mach 1 and the X1 is vibrating, the windscreen cracks. Very dramatic, and totally untrue; nothing of the sort happened. At that altitude the cockpit would have explosively decompressed if the windscreen had given way. [The film does not show the canopy breaking during the X-1 flight when he breaks Mach 1. Gauges crack, But the canopy remains intact. However, during his X1a flight he did, in fact, hit his head on the canopy and broke it. This is depicted correctly in the film.]
When Sam Shepard is dropped from the B-29 mothership he hits four switches to fire the rocket engines that are all right next to each other. The real X-1 had the switches for each rocket engine located far more apart from each other making it impossible to throw them all at once. [http://www.dfrc.nasa.gov/Gallery/Photo/X-1/Medium/E49-00010.jpg - The four switches in the lower left (2 are hidden) are the ones in question. It looks like they got it right.]
Astronauts demand a window in Mercury capsule. When they are inside the capsule the window is trapezoid but when we see an external view of Mercury-Redstone on the launchpad just before the launch, the window is circular. [The window is rectangular. The circular window you make reference to is the astronauts' periscope optics view.]
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