FTV: Chuck Yeager

 

     Brigadier General Chuck Yeager (born 2-13-1923, died 12-7-2020) is probably best remembered for his historic flight piloting the Bell X-1 rocket plane.  Flying as a test pilot for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA – the precursor to NASA), he became the first human to travel faster than the speed of sound on October 14, 1947.  There were strong opinions from some of his colleagues that the sound barrier would prove to be an invisible, unbreachable ‘brick wall in the sky’.  Hitting this barrier would destroy his aircraft and kill him.  He admits to having butterflies before his X-1 was released from a harness beneath the B-29 mother ship that had taken him aloft.  In the end, Yeager reached Mach 1.05 (Mach 1.0 equals 767 miles per hour in dry air at sea level) at an altitude of 45,000 feet.

     In the introduction to his autobiography co-authored by Leo Janos (Chuck Yeager – Bantam Books, 1985), Yeager recalled, “The X-1 proved them (the theories about his imminent destruction in the sky) wrong, and I breathed easier easier knowing what to expect on my second attempt to fly faster than the speed of sound.”  While the account of the flight that opened what became known as the ‘supersonic age’ is fascinating, it was Yeager’s description of the second flight he made to repeat this feat that caught my attention.  I will let Yeager tell the story rather than try to do it justice myself:  

     “‘Are you ready, Chuck?’ they asked from the mother ship.  ‘All set,’ I reply.  The release cable pops and we plunge clear from the shadows of the mother ship, a thirteen-thousand-pound load, falling fast.  I reach for the switch to ignite my engine.  It clicks.  Nothing Happens.  I try another switch.  Nothing happens.

     ‘Hey, I’ve got total electrical failure,’ I report.  My words travel no further than the cabin because my radio is powerless, too.  The ship is dead and I am dropping like a bomb, loaded with five-thousand pounds of volatile fuel, certain to blow a giant crater into the desert floor 20,000 feet below.  Without power, I can’t ignite my engines or actuate the propellant valve to blow out my fuel.  The X-1 can’t land with fuel on board;  its landing gear would buckle under the weight, and we’d dig a trench into the lakebed and blow up.

     My mind races.  I’ve got only a couple of seconds to find a way to save my airplane or risk a dangerous parachute jump.  I remember an emergency valve above and behind my seat that manually opens the jettison valve to slowly blow out my fuel.  I have no idea how long it will take and the force of gravity is relentless.  I’m down to 5,000 feet and turn toward the lakebed.  A chase plane is keeping up with me, but without radio contact I have no way of knowing whether the pilot can see the escaping fuel vapor streaming from my engine, the sign that the emergency valve is working.

     The lakebed fills my windscreen and I reach for my landing gear release, but with no internal power the only way to lower my gear is by gravity.  All I can do is rock the ship and pray.  My only chance is to come in fast and high over the lakebed, keeping the nose up and those wheels off the deck until the last possible moment.  I need time, every precious second I can manage to squeeze out of a delayed landing, to blow out that fuel.  My fuel gauge is as dead as everything else, and I can only go by feel.  We feel lighter by the second, but we’re almost out of seconds.  The ground is sweeping by as we glide in for a touchdown.  My eyes are on the ship’s raised nose,  In a moment we are going to stall;  I can sense it.

     Inches from the lakebed I feel the X-1 shudder slightly.  We’ve slowed into a stall, and the ship’s nose lowers.  Instinctively I hunker down, bracing for the impact.  If there’s still fuel in those tanks, I’m finished.  The wheels hit hard.”  

     I have read many accounts of the historic first flight to break the sound barrier, but this is the first time I have heard the tale of the second flight.  If breaking the sound barrier made Chuck Yeager an aviation hero, living through the second attempt elevates him, in mind, to ‘superhero’ status.  Author Tom Wolfe explained what made the men who pioneered both supersonic flight and spaceflight tick in his book The Right Stuff (later made into a movie of the same name).

     Wolfe’s book called whatever it was that Yeager and the other test pilots had ‘The Right Stuff’, but the phrase annoyed Chuck Yeager.  When asked if he thought he had it (The Right Stuff),  Yeager would point out, “It implies a pilot is born with ‘the right stuff’.  I was born with unusually good eyes and coordination.  I was mechanically oriented, understood machines easily.  My nature was to stay cool in tight spots.  Is that ‘the right stuff’?  All I know is I worked my tail off to learn how to fly, and worked hard at it all the way.  And in the end, the one big reason why I was better than average as a pilot was because I flew more than anybody else.  If there is such a thing as ‘the right stuff’ in piloting, then it is experience.”

     Chuck Yeager was born in Myra, West Virginia on February 13, 1923 and grew up in Hamlin, WV where the family moved when he was five years old.  His father and mother were hard working country folk who provided for their four children through the hard scrabble years before and during the Great Depression.  When Chuck was four, he and his six year old brother accidently killed their two year old sister Doris Ann when they found, loaded, and discharged their father’s 12 gauge shotgun.  Yeager said the family was devastated but dealt with the tragedy in their own way.  Shortly after the funeral, their father sat them down and told them, “Boys, I want to show you how to safely handle firearms.”  The family never discussed it again as Chuck explained it, “That’s the Yeager way;  we keep our hurts to ourselves.”  By age six, Chuck was often off on his own in the woods hunting for birds and squirrels to help feed the family.

     The Depression began when Chuck was eight but he said it didn’t really impact their family that much because, “We were already so low on the income scale.”  His father had worked on the railroad as a stoker and had gone on to work as a gas driller.  Mechanically minded, Mr. Yeager could repair just about anything, a skill my own father took out of his upbringing during the Depression.  Mrs. Yeager managed the home and with their garden, a cow, slopped hogs, and chickens, they stretched their budget enough to be able to assume the mortgage on a home large enough for the family.  The kids did their part gathering fruits and nuts from the wild while their mother pickled vegetables, boiled sorghum molasses, and thirty-gallon kettles of apple butter.  She managed the home when her husband was away working during the week but she left the disciplining to the kid’s father when he came home for the weekend.  If they were poor, Yeager never felt that way.  He was small but never got picked on as he tagged along with his much bigger older brother.

     In school, Chuck excelled in, “anything that demanded dexterity or mathematical aptitude.  My best grades were in typing and math.  But my English and history teachers had to search for excuses to pass me.”  Like other teens, he found himself rather busy when he got into high school:  “I discovered girls and between them, chores, homework, and hunting and fishing, I was stretched pretty thin.   Where I was raised remains one of the poorest counties in the state, but I never thought of myself as being poor or deprived in any way.  Like most everyone else in town, we managed to scrape by.  Kids learned self-sufficiency from their parents.”

     Politically, rural West Virginia was polarized.  The Democrats attended the Southern Methodist Church and the Republicans favored the Northern Methodist Church.  When President Truman presented Yeager with the Collier Trophy for breaking the sound barrier, his father had to be convinced to attend the White House ceremony.  His mother chewed him out royally for not shaking Truman’s hand and tried to distract from his rude behavior by trading cornbread recipes with the president.  She couldn’t help but notice the bemused looks on the faces of Air Force Secretary Stuart Symington and Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg.  “My husband is a little firm in his ways,” she explained to them as they broke up into giggles.  You can guess which church the Yeagers attended.

     When Yeager enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Forces (USAAF) in September of 1941, his age and educational background kept him from being eligible for pilot training.  At the onset of World War II, the recruiting standards were changed.  When he was accepted for flight training, he was the crew chief of an AT-11.  Chuck received his pilot wings after he graduated from flight school at Luke Field, Arizona in March of 1942.  While assigned to the 357th Fighter Group, he  trained as a fighter pilot in Tonopah, Nevada before being shipped overseas in November of 1943.  Stationed at RAF Leiston, Chuck flew P-51 Mustangs in combat serving with the 363rd Fighter Squadron.

     With one victory under his belt, Yeager was shot down on March 5, 1944 on his eighth mission.  With the help of the French underground, he escaped to Spain on March 30 after he had spent time helping them assemble bombs (a skill he had learned from his father).  When he returned to England on May 15, 1944, he was awarded a Bronze Star for helping a navigator named Omar ‘Pat’ Patterson, Jr cross the Pyrenees Mountains to freedom.  Yeager’s flight duties should have ended there as the policy then stated ‘evaders’ (escaped pilots) were not to return to combat in the fear that they would be recaptured and compromise resistance groups.  

     Yeager and fellow evader 1st Lt. Fred Glover brought their case directly to the Supreme Allied Commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, on June 12, 1944.  According to Yeager, “I raised so much hell that General Eisenhower finally let me go back to my squadron.  He cleared me for combat after D-Day, because all the free Frenchmen – Maquis and people like that – had surfaced.”  When he returned to combat, he recorded his second kill by downing a Junkers JU-88 over the English Channel.  On October 12, 1944, he became the first ‘Ace in a Day’ when he downed five enemy aircraft in a single mission.  Among his 11.5 official victories, he is credited with downing a Messerschmitt Me 262 jet aircraft.  The jet aircraft were much faster than the P-51s but Yeager happened upon one making a landing approach and was able to shoot it down.

     Yeager flew his 61st and final mission on January 15, 1945 and returned stateside in early February.  His status as an ‘evader’ allowed him to choose his next assignment so he picked Wright Field to be close to his home as his new wife who was pregnant.  With his background in maintenance and a high number of flight hours under his belt, he was brought into the Aeronautical Systems Flight Test Division under the command of Colonel Albert Boyd.  There he used his experience to serve as a functional test pilot for repaired aircraft.

     After the war, Chuck stayed with the USAAF, graduated from the Air Material Command Flight School and became a test pilot at Muroc Army Air Field (now known as Edwards Air Force Base) in California.  He was selected to fly the Bell X-1 after Bell Aircraft pilot Chalmers ‘Slick’ Goodlin demanded $150,000 to ‘break the sound barrier’ (equivalent to $2.1 million today).  A month before his flight, the USAAF became the United States Air Force.  The 24 year old Yeager flew the X-1 in cooperation with NACA’s research in high-speed flight.

     Yeager’s flight status was put in jeopardy when he was thrown from a horse and broke two ribs two days before his first attempt to break the sound barrier.  He kept things quiet and visited a civilian doctor who taped his ribs.  The X-1 pilot had to seal the vehicle’s hatch by grabbing the door with one hand and slamming the handle down with the other.  With broken ribs, Yeager knew he would not be able to perform this critical step so he enlisted fellow pilot Jack Ridley to help.  Ridley sawed off a broom handle for Chuck to use as a lever to seal the hatch.  In the movie version of The Right Stuff, Levon Helm, the late drummer and vocalist for The Band, played the part of Ridley with country boy authenticity.

     The success of the mission was not announced to the public for eight months (on June 10, 1948).  For his part in this historic event, Yeager received both the Collier Trophy in 1948 and the Harmon International Trophy in 1954.  The Bell X-1 (named Glamorous Glennis in honor of his wife) is now on display at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum.  When we visited the museum in the early 1990s, a couple of things stood out about this amazing craft.  First, it does indeed remind one of the shape of a ‘bullet with wings’.  Secondly, compared with other jet aircraft I had seen up close at K.I. Sawyer AFB near Marquette, it didn’t seem very big.  

     Yeager was in command of the USAF Aerospace Research Pilot School in the early 1960s when both NASA and the USAF were training future astronauts.  The USAF astronaut program ended when better orbiting observation satellites made it unnecessary to have astronauts doing the same job in space.  Washington was pushing to have a minority astronaut in their program so they asked Yeager to include the lone Black candidate, Ed Dwight, in the program.  Dwight had just missed the top twenty five list who were to go into training, but they repositioned him to satisfy the brass back east.  Dwight was a capable pilot and succeeded on that front with some extra help provided by the staff.  He lacked the engineering background some of the other pilots had, but he still graduated from the program.  When NASA did not select him for their astronaut program, some (including Dwight) pointed a finger at Yeager, claiming he was racially biased.  Yeager points out that he worked to get Dwight into and through his program and the last thing he expected for his efforts was to be painted as a bigot.  In the end, NASA derailed Dwight’s astronaut career, not Chuck Yeager. 

     Throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s, Yeager participated in various record breaking attempts and continued to test high performance aircraft.  The last one almost proved fatal.

In a December 1963 flight  testing an NF-104, the plane climbed to a near-record breaking altitude before the controls became ineffective.  In a flat spin, the aircraft lost 95,000 feet in elevation before he was able to eject.  One of his seat straps did not disengage and the hot rocket nozzle from the ejection seat impacted his face plate and shattered it.  The hot nozzle ignited his suit oxygen feed and the ensuing fire resulted in burns to his face which required ‘extensive and agonizing medical care’.

     Yeager recreated his Mach 1 flight on the fiftieth anniversary in 1997 flying an F-15D Eagle.  He said at the time, “All that I am . . . I owe to the Air Force.”  For the 65th anniversary, the then 89 year old Yeager co-piloted a Douglas F-15 Eagle with Captain David Vincent out of Nellis AFB.  The list of his awards and decorations is too lengthy to include here but suffice to say, Chuck Yeager’s career can be summed up in one phrase:  American Aviation Hero.  Yeager’s exploits as a combat pilot will be covered more fully in a later article.

 

Top Piece Video:  Okay, it isn’t a song about fighting aircraft, but it is about flying!  Go, Stevie, Go!