#testpilot

RIP - “Right Stuff” Aviation Legend Chuck Yeager

Photograph of Captain Charles E. Yeager, NARA ID 542345.

All I know is I worked my tail off learning to learn how to fly, and worked hard at it all the way. If there is such a thing as the right stuff in piloting, then it is experience. The secret to my success was that somehow I always managed to live to fly another day. From Yeager’s memoir. 

Photograph of the XS-1 in Flight, NARA 295649.

XS-1 control panel, online here.  

Legendary aviation pioneer Chuck Yeager died this week in LA at age 97. The WWII fighter ace and Air Force general was, according to author Tom Wolfe, “the most righteous of all the possessors of the right stuff.” His bio reads like a Harrison Ford/Nicholas Cage/Tom Cruise adventure film hybrid. Some highlights follow from the incredible man who:

Had only a high school education.

Got airsick his first time in plane.

Enlisted at age 18 as a mechanic, and 2 years later was a pilot.

Pilot's Notes from the Ninth Powered Flight of the XS-1, NARA ID 295644

Yeager was a fighter ace in WWII, shooting down five German planes in a single day and 13 over all.  After being shot down over occupied France in March 1944 (his 8th air mission), he escaped and helped by the French resistance.  He helped them, as well, showing them how to make homemade bombs. Read his incredible personal account here.  

Escape and Evasion Case File for Flight Officer Charles (Chuck) E. Yeager, NARA ID 305272.

Yeager became a test pilot after WWII, at what became Edwards Air Force Base. Not only did he break the sound barrier, he did so with 2 broken ribs! He’d fallen off a horse and broke two ribs the night before the flight, and went to a civilian doctor rather than risk not being able to attempt the flight.  

He made history on Oct. 14, 1947, when he climbed out of a B-29 bomber as it ascended over the Mojave Desert in California and entered the cockpit of an orange, bullet-shaped, rocket-powered experimental plane attached to the bomb bay. The plane was a Bell Aircraft X-1, at an altitude of 23,000 feet, and when he reached about 43,000 feet above the desert, history’s first sonic boom reverberated across the floor of the dry lake beds. He reached a speed of 700 miles an hour, breaking the sound barrier.

His initial response to this incredible feat? From Yeager’s memoir:

After all the anticipation to achieve this moment, it really was a letdown. There should’ve been a bump in the road, something to let you know that you had just punched a nice, clean hole through the sonic barrier. The Unknown was a poke through Jell-O. Later on, I realized that this mission had to end in a letdown because the real barrier wasn’t in the sky but in our knowledge and experience of supersonic flight.

He was the first commandant of the USAF Aerospace Research Pilot School and trained astronauts and test pilots for the Air Force. But given that he only had a high school education, he could not be an astronaut.

Original Caption: "Col. Charles E. Yeager, Commandant of the USAF Aerospace Research Pilot School at the Air Force Flight Test Center, Edwards AFB, CA. NARA ID 75539641.

Ret. Brig. GEN. Charles "Chuck" Yeager, discusses aerodynamics with Stan Barrett, the first man to break the sound barrier on land. NARA ID 6363719.

He flew 414 hours of combat time in the Vietnam war - 127 missions while training bomber pilots. He was promoted to Brigadier General in 1969.

He retired from the Air Force in 1975, but continued to work for the Air Force until 1995. President Reagan appointed him to the Rogers Commission, the body that investigated the 1986 Challenger Shuttle disaster. 

Lt. Col. Yeager Surveys Damaged Landing Gear After an Emergency Landing on Rogers Dry Lake, Edwards Air Force Base, CA, 3/18/1959, NARA ID 175539643.