Chuck Yeager, test pilot who broke sound barrier, dies at 97

[IceWizard]

Chuck Yeager, test pilot who
broke sound barrier, dies at 97







By Becky Krystal
Dec. 7, 2020 at 10:23 p.m. CST



Charles E. “Chuck” Yeager, a military test pilot who was the
first person to fly faster than the speed of sound and live to
tell about it, died Dec. 7 in Los Angeles.
He was 97.

His wife, Victoria, announced the death from Gen. Yeager’s
official Twitter account. Additional details were not immediately
available.

For his prowess in flight, Gen. Yeager became one of the great
American folk heroes of the 1940s and 1950s. A self-described
West Virginia hillbilly with a high school education, he said he
came “from so far up the holler, they had to pipe daylight to me.”
He became one of the greatest aviators of his generation,
combining abundant confidence with an innate understanding
of engineering mechanics — what an airplane could do under
any form of stress.

He first stepped into a cockpit during World War II after joining
the Army Air Forces directly out of high school. By the end of
the war, he was a fighter ace credited with shooting down at
least 12 German planes, including five in one day. Making the
military his career, he emerged in the late 1940s as one of the
newly created Air Force’s most revered test pilots.



Gen. Yeager, then a colonel, in 1962 at
Edwards Air Force Base in California.
(AFP Photo/U.S. Air Force)


His success in breaking the sound barrier launched America
into the supersonic age. While airplanes had long had the power
to achieve great speeds, changes in aerodynamic design allowed
pilots such as Gen. Yeager to overcome the problems of supersonic
air flow as they approached the speed of sound.

He later trained men who would go on to join NASA’s Gemini
and Apollo programs. Throughout his life, he broke numerous
speed and altitude records, including becoming the first person
to travel 2 1/2 times the speed of sound.


Breaking the sound barrier


His greatest breakthrough occurred on Oct. 14, 1947, when a
B-29 aircraft released then-Capt. Yeager and his squat, orange
Bell X-1 experimental craft at nearly 20,000 feet over California’s
Mojave Desert. The Bell X-1 was propelled by a four-chamber
rocket engine and a volatile mix of ethyl alcohol, water and liquid
oxygen, and Gen. Yeager named it “Glamorous Glennis” after
his first wife. Gen. Yeager, traveling at nearly 700 mph, broke
the sound barrier.




Susie Yeager plants a kiss on the cheek of her
son, Gen. Chuck Yeager, in West Virginia in 1973. (AP)




Breaking the sound barrier was an important military milestone,
said Bob van der Linden, an aeronautics expert at the
Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, where the
record-breaking plane is on display.

“You win with speed,” van der Linden said. “With the advent
of jets and rockets as well, every country was trying to push
the limits of technology.”

Van der Linden said Gen. Yeager’s flight and his dedication
to helping engineers build better planes helped pave the
way for the country’s superiority in military aircraft design
for years to come.

Because of the top-secret nature of the work, the Air Force
did not publicly acknowledge Gen. Yeager’s most significant
flight in the X-1. By December, enough information had been
leaked to allow Aviation Week to publish a story. The government
didn’t confirm the flight until close to six months later, and
even then, Gen. Yeager had been coached to reveal few details
of what happened when he reached Mach 1
(named after the Austrian physicist Ernst Mach).


Pilots, including Gen. Yeager, reported trouble controlling aircraft
as they approached the sound barrier. But, as he would say in
his 1985 memoir, once the X-1 exceeded Mach 1, the ride
“was as smooth as a baby’s bottom.”

“Anybody can fly faster than sound as long as he wants to so far
as the physical effects are concerned,” the Associated Press
quoted Gen. Yeager as saying in 1949. “The fact is, it’s no
different than sitting in your armchair at home.”

Such characteristic nonchalance — not to be confused with
overabundant confidence — may have elevated rather than
played down his achievement, considering the danger inherent
in his line of work. Famed British test pilot Geoffrey de Havilland Jr.
died in pursuit of Mach 1 in 1946, and others working for private
companies had been killed in experimental craft as well.
More perished in the years after Gen. Yeager’s flight.

Gen. Yeager refused to hold back when discussing some of his
colleagues’ deaths, attributing accidents to pilot error, lack of
experience or poor judgment. When Scott Crossfield, the man
who beat him to Mach 2, died in a plane crash in 2006 during a
thunderstorm, Gen. Yeager told the Associated Press that Crossfield
would do things, such as flying in bad weather, that
“exceeded his capability.”


Many near misses


Not that Gen. Yeager’s career lacked its frightening moments.
While he was able to pull out of at least one situation in 1953,
when his plane spun out of control for 50,000 feet, he wasn’t
so lucky in 1963 when, after reaching near space, he ejected
from an NF-104 and suffered burns that required several surgeries.

Gen. Yeager and others attributed his success as a test pilot to
his calm demeanor even in the face of death — “I’ll be back all right.
In one piece, or a whole lot of pieces,” he told Time magazine in 1949.

Gen. Yeager appeared just as unruffled after the publication of
Tom Wolfe’s best-selling 1979 book “The Right Stuff,” which
documented the heyday of test piloting and the early U.S. space
program. A popular 1983 film version, starring Sam Shepard as
Gen. Yeager, similarly lionized the test pilot for a mass audience.
Gen. Yeager had a cameo appearance as a bartender.

While Wolfe described Gen. Yeager as “the most righteous of all
the possessors of the right stuff,” Gen. Yeager claimed to be not
that enamored with the designation — “jes’ don’t mean a rat’s
fanny,” he told Newsweek in 1985. Nor was he impressed with
the interpretation of history in the film adaptation.

Not long after, Gen. Yeager’s best-selling autobiography appeared,
followed by endorsement deals that resulted in appearances in
commercials for the aerospace and defense company Northrop
and the car parts company ACDelco. He retired as an Air Force
brigadier general in 1975, although in an honorary gesture, he
was promoted to the rank of major general in 2005. In 1985,
President Ronald Reagan awarded him the Presidential Medal
of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award.


From West Virginia to World War II ace


Gen. Yeager made no secret of his preference for hunting and
fishing over the trappings of celebrity — an image not at odds
with the way he described his upbringing in Hamlin, W.Va.,
where he was born Charles Elwood Yeager on Feb. 13, 1923.

He was one of A. Hal and Susie Yeager’s five children. His father
was a gas-well driller, and the family also farmed. He enjoyed
gardening, collecting bugs, hunting with a .22-caliber rifle and
fishing in the Mud River. Although not a distinguished student,
Chuck Yeager excelled in geometry and used his talents to
become an excellent pool hustler. Like his father, he also
showed great skill in mechanics and as a teen was able to
take apart and reassemble a car engine.

From his father, he inherited a stoicism toward violent death
that became his hallmark as a pilot. When Gen. Yeager was
not quite 5, his slightly older brother accidentally shot and
killed their infant sister. Rather than erupting in hysterics,
the elder Yeager calmly told the children,
“I want to show you how to safely handle firearms.”

In September 1941, Chuck Yeager enlisted in the Army Air Forces
and trained as a mechanic before heading to flight school
and then to Europe as a pilot.

In March 1944, while on his eighth mission, he was shot down
over German-occupied France. Members of the French underground
helped him avoid German forces, eventually pairing him with
another American who had been shot down.

The two Americans set off on a grueling journey over the
Pyrenees mountain range toward neutral Spain. After pushing
their way through knee-deep snow and bitter cold, the
exhausted men encountered a cabin in which to rest.

Gen. Yeager’s companion hung his socks outside to dry, a
decision that tipped off the Germans to their presence. The
Nazis fired into the cabin, forcing the pair to jump out the
back window and into a creek. Gen. Yeager realized his
companion had been shot in the knee and amputated part
of his leg. He carried the injured man into Spain and
eventually met up with British forces at Gibraltar.

Gen. Yeager returned to England determined to fly again,
even though regulations prohibited anyone aided by members
of the underground from going back on duty. The measure
was designed to protect the operatives’ identities should
any American be captured by Germans on subsequent missions.

Pursuing a return to combat duty, Gen. Yeager climbed his
way up the military hierarchy, “being passed around among
colonels and generals” who “enjoyed meeting a very junior
officer who refused to go home,” he said in his autobiography.
With the help of a sympathetic two-star general, Gen. Yeager
secured a meeting with Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the
supreme Allied commander.

“I just wanted to meet two guys who think they’re getting
a raw deal being sent home,” Eisenhower told Gen. Yeager
and another pilot who had evaded capture in Holland,
Gen. Yeager recalled in his book.

The War Department granted Eisenhower the power to
return the pilots to the skies. For his wartime service,
Gen. Yeager received the Silver Star, the Distinguished
Flying Cross, the Bronze Star Medal, the Purple Heart
and the Air Medal.


Test pilot fame


Upon returning from the war, he married his fiancee,
the former Glennis Dickhouse, who died in 1990. In 2003,
Gen. Yeager married Victoria Scott D’Angelo, who
was 36 years his junior. In addition to his wife, survivors
include three children from his first marriage, Susan,
Sharon and Don. Another son, Michael, died in 2011.

After World War II, Gen. Yeager served as a flight instructor
in Texas before becoming a test pilot at Wright Field in Ohio.
He impressed his superiors enough to be transferred to
Muroc Field in California, later renamed Edwards Air Force Base,
to work on the coveted X-1 project.

He received the assignment of attempting to reach Mach 1
after a civilian pilot who had been testing the craft demanded
a $150,000 bonus, not to mention that the head of the
test flight division, Col. Albert Boyd, called him
“the best instinctive pilot I ever saw.”

Gen. Yeager came close to missing his appointment with
the record books. The Sunday before the flight, the pilot
and his wife, Glennis, visited the local watering hole,
Pancho’s Fly Inn, and then decided to take a late-night
horseback ride.

The adventure ended with Gen. Yeager breaking several
ribs. To avoid being grounded by an Air Force doctor, he
visited an off-base doctor, who told him to take it easy.
Instead, he confided in a colleague who helped him fashion
a broom handle that would allow Gen. Yeager to close
the cockpit of the X-1 with the least amount of pain.

And, so, armed with that implement and little protection
other than a leather football helmet, Gen. Yeager
accomplished the mission he was given.

“My feelings were immaterial; you have none,” he told
Aerospace America in January 2003. “It was your duty,
like combat. Some people are going to get killed.
You just hope it’s not you.”

Through 1953, Gen. Yeager continued testing planes at
Edwards until leaving for Okinawa, Japan, where he
flew a Soviet-made MiG captured by Americans. His
task was to evaluate the Soviets’ aviation capabilities.
Upon returning to the United States in 1957, he became
an air squadron commander and then commander of
the Aerospace Research Pilot School at Edwards in 1961.
He also commanded a fighter wing and flew combat
missions during the Vietnam War.

Gen. Yeager may have seemed a natural for the U.S.
astronaut program, but he claimed he would not have
qualified because he lacked a college degree. He added
in his autobiography years later that he had no interest
in being an astronaut, as they were “little more than
Spam in the can, throwing the right switches on instructions
from the ground.”

Long after his record-breaking flight, Gen. Yeager remained
a prominent public figure. The Air Force employed him in its
recruitment efforts. Politicians sought his endorsement,
although he shook off any notion of running for office. He
also was appointed by Reagan to the panel that investigated
the 1986 explosion of the Challenger space shuttle.

In 2002, Gen. Yeager climbed into an F-15 Eagle at Edwards
and broke the sound barrier, with the characteristic sonic
boom, for what he said was the last time
(he ended up doing it again in 2007 and 2012).

“I was probably the last guy who will get to do the kind
of flying I did,” he said at the time. “I came into the military
as an 18-year-old kid before World War II, never having
been in an airplane, never having even seen one on the
ground. It turned into quite an opportunity.”







Chuck Yeager - A True American Hero







CORRECTION:
An earlier version of this story incorrectly
referred to physicist Ernst Mach as German. He was born
in what was then the Austrian Empire. The story has been revised.