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- Chuck Yeager died Monday at the age of 97.
- His death was announced on his Twitter account by his wife, describing him as the best pilot in the United States.
- Yeager is survived by his four children and his wife, Victoria Scott D’Angelo, whom he married in 2003.
Chuck Yeager, the steely “Right Stuff” test pilot who brought aviation to the gates of space by becoming the first person to break the sound barrier more than 70 years ago, died Monday at the age of 97.
Yeager’s death was announced on his Twitter account by his wife, Victoria.
“It is with deep sadness, I must tell you that the love of my life, General Chuck Yeager, passed away just before 9 pm ET. An incredible life well lived, America’s greatest pilot, and a legacy of strength, adventure. and patriotism will be remembered forever. “Victoria Yeager said in the tweet.
Yeager, an unlikely candidate to become one of the most famous aviators in history, joined the US Army Air Corps in 1941 only to work on aircraft engines, not to fly them. His first plane trip made him vomit.
Yeager was ignored by the burgeoning US space program because he never went to college, but it didn’t break his heart not to become an astronaut. He considered them mere passengers “flipping the correct switches following instructions from the ground.”
Author Tom Wolfe was so impressed by the demeanor of the rugged man from Hamlin, West Virginia, that he made Yeager a prominent character in “The Right Stuff,” his 1979 book on the early days of the space program.
Wolfe said Yeager was blessed with “the right things” that made him a legendary test pilot, but Yeager said it was more a matter of luck, better than average vision and in-depth knowledge of his aircraft.
Those attributes served Yeager in World War II. Flying a P-51 Mustang named Glamorous Glennis in tribute to his girlfriend, Glennis Dickhouse, he was credited with 12 German aircraft “kills”, including five in a single dogfight.
After the war, he became a test pilot and was assigned to Muroc Air Force Base in California as part of the secret XS-1 project, which aimed to achieve Mach 1, the speed of sound.
Yeager was a 24-year-old captain who tested a dozen planes a week when he first beat sound on October 14, 1947 on the bright orange Bell X-1 ship.
Not deterred by broken ribs
He had broken two ribs in a riding accident a few days earlier, but did not tell his superiors for fear of punishment. Due to pain, he had to use a sawed-off broom to close the X-1’s cockpit before takeoff.
A B-29 bomber carried the X-1 7,925 m over the Mojave Desert in California and let it go. Neither Yeager nor the aviation engineers knew whether the plane, or the pilot, would be able to handle the unprecedented speed without breaking down. But Yeager flew the 10-meter X-1, powered by liquid oxygen and alcohol, at Mach 1.06, about 1,162 km / h at 13,000 meters, as if it were a routine flight.
Then he calmly brought the craft, which was also named after Glennis, who was by then his wife, gliding down to the bed of a dry lake, 14 minutes after it was released on a flight that was a significant step toward space exploration.
Yeager said he had noticed a Mach 0.965 reading on his speedometer before it jumped off the scale without a bump.
“I was stunned,” he wrote in his 1985 autobiography “Yeager.” “After all the anxiety, breaking the sound barrier turned out to be a perfectly paved race track.”
Yeager was unfazed by having a job that brought him to the brink of death with each departure, such as the 1953 flight in which he safely landed his X-1A after hitting Mach 2.4 and then losing control of the aircraft for 51 seconds.
“It is your duty to fly the plane,” he told an interviewer. “If you get killed in it, you don’t know anything about it anyway, so why bother?”
Charles Elwood Yeager was born in Myra, West Virginia, on February 13, 1923, one of five siblings. When he was a schoolboy, he was fond of math and could write 60 words per minute, an indication of hand-eye coordination that would serve him so well in the booth.
Yeager had no interest in airplanes when he was young; He didn’t even see one until he was 18, when he joined the United States Army Air Corps to be a mechanic.
After his heyday as a test pilot, Yeager commanded combat squadrons and flew 127 combat missions during the Vietnam War.
In the early 1960s, he was in charge of astronaut-style training for Air Force personnel, but that program ended when the United States government decided not to militarize space. Still, 26 people trained by Yeager went into orbit as NASA astronauts.
Yeager rose to the rank of Brigadier General and 1997 marked the 50th anniversary of his historic flight by taking an F-15 beyond the speed of sound. Then he announced that it was his last military flight.
Yeager became something of a social media sensation in 2016 at age 93 when he began answering questions from the public on Twitter and responding curtly and sometimes curmudgeonly. When asked what he thought of the moon, he replied, “It’s there.”
Yeager and Glennis, who died of cancer in 1990, had four children. He married Victoria Scott D’Angelo in 2003.
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