<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Brigadier 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 There were strong opinions from some of his colleagues that the sound barrier would prove to be an invisible, unbreachable \u2018brick wall in the sky\u2019.\u00a0 Hitting this barrier would destroy his aircraft and kill him.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0In the introduction to his autobiography co-authored by Leo Janos (<\/span>Chuck Yeager – <\/span><\/i>Bantam Books, 1985), Yeager recalled, \u201cThe 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.\u201d\u00a0 While the account of the flight that opened what became known as the \u2018supersonic age\u2019 is fascinating, it was Yeager\u2019s description of the second flight he made to repeat this feat that caught my attention.\u00a0 I will let Yeager tell the story rather than try to do it justice myself:\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u201c\u2018<\/span>Are you ready, Chuck?\u2019 they asked from the mother ship.\u00a0 \u2018All set,\u2019 I reply.\u00a0 The release cable pops and we plunge clear from the shadows of the mother ship, a thirteen-thousand-pound load, falling fast.\u00a0 I reach for the switch to ignite my engine.\u00a0 It clicks.\u00a0 Nothing Happens.\u00a0 I try another switch.\u00a0 Nothing happens.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2018Hey, I\u2019ve got total electrical failure,\u2019 I report.\u00a0 My words travel no further than the cabin because my radio is powerless, too.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Without power, I can\u2019t ignite my engines or actuate the propellant valve to blow out my fuel.\u00a0 The X-1 can\u2019t land with fuel on board;\u00a0 its landing gear would buckle under the weight, and we\u2019d dig a trench into the lakebed and blow up.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0My mind races.\u00a0 I\u2019ve got only a couple of seconds to find a way to save my airplane or risk a dangerous parachute jump.\u00a0 I remember an emergency valve above and behind my seat that manually opens the jettison valve to slowly blow out my fuel.\u00a0 I have no idea how long it will take and the force of gravity is relentless.\u00a0 I\u2019m down to 5,000 feet and turn toward the lakebed.\u00a0 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.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The 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.\u00a0 All I can do is rock the ship and pray.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I need time, every precious second I can manage to squeeze out of a delayed landing, to blow out that fuel.\u00a0 My fuel gauge is as dead as everything else, and I can only go by feel.\u00a0 We feel lighter by the second, but we\u2019re almost out of seconds.\u00a0 The ground is sweeping by as we glide in for a touchdown.\u00a0 My eyes are on the ship\u2019s raised nose,\u00a0 In a moment we are going to stall;\u00a0 I can sense it.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Inches from the lakebed I feel the X-1 shudder slightly.\u00a0 We\u2019ve slowed into a stall, and the ship\u2019s nose lowers.\u00a0 Instinctively I hunker down, bracing for the impact.\u00a0 If there\u2019s still fuel in those tanks, I\u2019m finished.\u00a0 The wheels hit hard.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I 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.\u00a0 If breaking the sound barrier made Chuck Yeager an aviation hero, living through the second attempt elevates him, in mind, to \u2018superhero\u2019 status.\u00a0 Author Tom Wolfe explained what made the men who pioneered both supersonic flight and spaceflight tick in his book <\/span>The Right Stuff<\/span><\/i> (later made into a movie of the same name).<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Wolfe\u2019s book called whatever it was that Yeager and the other test pilots had \u2018<\/span>The Right Stuff\u2019,<\/span><\/i> but the phrase annoyed Chuck Yeager.\u00a0 When asked if he thought he had it (<\/span>The Right Stuff),\u00a0 <\/span><\/i>Yeager would point out, \u201cIt implies a pilot is born with \u2018the right stuff\u2019.\u00a0 I was born with unusually good eyes and coordination.\u00a0 I was mechanically oriented, understood machines easily.\u00a0 My nature was to stay cool in tight spots.\u00a0 Is that \u2018the right stuff\u2019?\u00a0 All I know is I worked my tail off to learn how to fly, and worked hard at it all the way.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 If there is such a thing as \u2018the right stuff\u2019 in piloting, then it is experience.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Chuck 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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\u2019s 12 gauge shotgun.\u00a0 Yeager said the family was devastated but dealt with the tragedy in their own way.\u00a0 Shortly after the funeral, their father sat them down and told them, \u201cBoys, I want to show you how to safely handle firearms.\u201d\u00a0 The family never discussed it again as Chuck explained it, \u201cThat\u2019s the Yeager way;\u00a0 we keep our hurts to ourselves.\u201d\u00a0 By age six, Chuck was often off on his own in the woods hunting for birds and squirrels to help feed the family.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The Depression began when Chuck was eight but he said it didn\u2019t really impact their family that much because, \u201cWe were already so low on the income scale.\u201d\u00a0 His father had worked on the railroad as a stoker and had gone on to work as a gas driller.\u00a0 Mechanically minded, Mr. Yeager could repair just about anything, a skill my own father took out of his upbringing during the Depression.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 She managed the home when her husband was away working during the week but she left the disciplining to the kid\u2019s father when he came home for the weekend.\u00a0 If they were poor, Yeager never felt that way.\u00a0 He was small but never got picked on as he tagged along with his much bigger older brother.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0In school, Chuck excelled in, \u201canything that demanded dexterity or mathematical aptitude.\u00a0 My best grades were in typing and math.\u00a0 But my English and history teachers had to search for excuses to pass me.\u201d\u00a0 Like other teens, he found himself rather busy when he got into high school:\u00a0 \u201cI discovered girls and between them, chores, homework, and hunting and fishing, I was stretched pretty thin. \u00a0 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.\u00a0 Like most everyone else in town, we managed to scrape by.\u00a0 Kids learned self-sufficiency from their parents.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Politically, rural West Virginia was polarized.\u00a0 The Democrats attended the Southern Methodist Church and the Republicans favored the Northern Methodist Church.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 His mother chewed him out royally for not shaking Truman\u2019s hand and tried to distract from his rude behavior by trading cornbread recipes with the president.\u00a0 She couldn\u2019t help but notice the bemused looks on the faces of Air Force Secretary Stuart Symington and Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg.\u00a0 \u201cMy husband is a little firm in his ways,\u201d she explained to them as they broke up into giggles.\u00a0 You can guess which church the Yeagers attended.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0When 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.\u00a0 At the onset of World War II, the recruiting standards were changed.\u00a0 When he was accepted for flight training, he was the crew chief of an AT-11.\u00a0 Chuck received his pilot wings after he graduated from flight school at Luke Field, Arizona in March of 1942.\u00a0 While assigned to the 357th Fighter Group, he\u00a0 trained as a fighter pilot in Tonopah, Nevada before being shipped overseas in November of 1943.\u00a0 Stationed at RAF Leiston, Chuck flew P-51 Mustangs in combat serving with the 363rd Fighter Squadron.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0With one victory under his belt, Yeager was shot down on March 5, 1944 on his eighth mission.\u00a0 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).\u00a0 When he returned to England on May 15, 1944, he was awarded a Bronze Star for helping a navigator named Omar \u2018Pat\u2019 Patterson, Jr cross the Pyrenees Mountains to freedom.\u00a0 Yeager\u2019s flight duties should have ended there as the policy then stated \u2018evaders\u2019 (escaped pilots) were not to return to combat in the fear that they would be recaptured and compromise resistance groups.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Yeager and fellow evader 1st Lt. Fred Glover brought their case directly to the Supreme Allied Commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, on June 12, 1944.\u00a0 According to Yeager, \u201cI raised so much hell that General Eisenhower finally let me go back to my squadron.\u00a0 He cleared me for combat after D-Day, because all the free Frenchmen – Maquis and people like that – had surfaced.\u201d\u00a0 When he returned to combat, he recorded his second kill by downing a Junkers JU-88 over the English Channel.\u00a0 On October 12, 1944, he became the first \u2018Ace in a Day\u2019 when he downed five enemy aircraft in a single mission.\u00a0 Among his 11.5 official victories, he is credited with downing a Messerschmitt Me 262 jet aircraft.\u00a0 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.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Yeager flew his 61st and final mission on January 15, 1945 and returned stateside in early February.\u00a0 His status as an \u2018evader\u2019 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 There he used his experience to serve as a functional test pilot for repaired aircraft.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0After 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.\u00a0 He was selected to fly the Bell X-1 after Bell Aircraft pilot Chalmers \u2018Slick\u2019 Goodlin demanded $150,000 to \u2018break the sound barrier\u2019 (equivalent to $2.1 million today).\u00a0 A month before his flight, the USAAF became the United States Air Force.\u00a0 The 24 year old Yeager flew the X-1 in cooperation with NACA\u2019s research in high-speed flight.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Yeager\u2019s 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.\u00a0 He kept things quiet and visited a civilian doctor who taped his ribs.\u00a0 The X-1 pilot had to seal the vehicle\u2019s hatch by grabbing the door with one hand and slamming the handle down with the other.\u00a0 With broken ribs, Yeager knew he would not be able to perform this critical step so he enlisted fellow pilot Jack Ridley to help.\u00a0 Ridley sawed off a broom handle for Chuck to use as a lever to seal the hatch.\u00a0 In the movie version of <\/span>The Right Stuff<\/span><\/i>, Levon Helm, the late drummer and vocalist for The Band, played the part of Ridley with country boy authenticity.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The success of the mission was not announced to the public for eight months (on June 10, 1948).\u00a0 For his part in this historic event, Yeager received both the Collier Trophy in 1948 and the Harmon International Trophy in 1954.\u00a0 The Bell X-1 (named <\/span>Glamorous Glennis<\/span><\/i> in honor of his wife) is now on display at the Smithsonian Institution\u2019s National Air and Space Museum.\u00a0 When we visited the museum in the early 1990s, a couple of things stood out about this amazing craft.\u00a0 First, it does indeed remind one of the shape of a \u2018bullet with wings\u2019.\u00a0 Secondly, compared with other jet aircraft I had seen up close at K.I. Sawyer AFB near Marquette, it didn\u2019t seem very big.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Yeager was in command of the USAF Aerospace Research Pilot School in the early 1960s when both NASA and the USAF were training future astronauts.\u00a0 The USAF astronaut program ended when better orbiting observation satellites made it unnecessary to have astronauts doing the same job in space.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Dwight was a capable pilot and succeeded on that front with some extra help provided by the staff.\u00a0 He lacked the engineering background some of the other pilots had, but he still graduated from the program.\u00a0 When NASA did not select him for their astronaut program, some (including Dwight) pointed a finger at Yeager, claiming he was racially biased.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 In the end, NASA derailed Dwight\u2019s astronaut career, not Chuck Yeager.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s, Yeager participated in various record breaking attempts and continued to test high performance aircraft.\u00a0 The last one almost proved fatal.<\/span><\/p>\n In a December 1963 flight\u00a0 testing an NF-104, the plane climbed to a near-record breaking altitude before the controls became ineffective.\u00a0 In a flat spin, the aircraft lost 95,000 feet in elevation before he was able to eject.\u00a0 One of his seat straps did not disengage and the hot rocket nozzle from the ejection seat impacted his face plate and shattered it.\u00a0 The hot nozzle ignited his suit oxygen feed and the ensuing fire resulted in burns to his face which required \u2018extensive and agonizing medical care\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Yeager recreated his Mach 1 flight on the fiftieth anniversary in 1997 flying an F-15D Eagle.\u00a0 He said at the time, \u201cAll that I am . . . I owe to the Air Force.\u201d\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The list of his awards and decorations is too lengthy to include here but suffice to say, Chuck Yeager\u2019s career can be summed up in one phrase:\u00a0 American Aviation Hero.\u00a0 Yeager\u2019s exploits as a combat pilot will be covered more fully in a later article.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Top Piece Video:\u00a0 Okay, air combat isn’t a light hearted thing – but The Royal Guardsman took Snoopy to greater heights – and oh yes, it is the wrong war but I do know my buddy Jim’s dad actually did fly in WWI – so , we will go with it anyway.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Brigadier 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.\u00a0 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-from-the-vaults"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3515"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3515\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3701,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3515\/revisions\/3701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}