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Chuck Yeager, the first pilot to break the sound barrier, died at the age of 97.
The exploits of the American fighter pilot of World War II were recounted in Tom Wolfe’s book “The Right Stuff” and in the 1983 film that it inspired.
Retired Air Force Brigadier General Charles “Chuck” Yeager was a 24-year-old captain when he flew a Bell X-1 rocket plane at over 660 mph to break the sound barrier on October 14, 1947.
He later said that the plane could have gone faster if it had carried more fuel.
Yeager said in 1968: “Sure, I was worried
“When you’re playing with something you don’t know much about, there has to be apprehension. But you don’t let it affect your work.”
Yeager nicknamed the rocket plane and all of his other planes “Glamorous Glennis” after his wife, who died in 1990.
Chuck Yeager is seen next to the Bell X-1 plane that he used to break the sound barrier in 1947
His feat was kept a top secret for about a year when the world thought that the British had broken the sound barrier first.
The pilot commemorated the achievement sixty-five years later to the minute of October 14, 2012, when he flew in the back seat of an F-15 Eagle as it broke the sound barrier more than 30,000 feet above California’s Mojave Desert.
Yeager, who was born in the small West Virginia town of Myra in February 1923, enlisted in the Army Air Corps after graduating from high school in 1941.
He later regretted that his lack of a college education kept him from becoming an astronaut.
Yeager said he could have flown faster if his plane had had more fuel
Yeager flew the Bell X-1 aircraft at 660 mph to break the sound barrier
Yeager started out as an aircraft mechanic, and despite suffering severe seasickness during his first plane ride, he enrolled in a program that allowed soldiers to become pilots.
It shot down 13 German aircraft in 64 missions during World War II, including five in a single mission.
Yeager was once shot down over German-controlled France, but escaped with the help of French partisans.
He became a test pilot starting at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, after the war.
Yeager, photographed here in 2011, was a World War II hero
Yeager is seen at an event in Texas in 2018
Yeager returned to combat during the Vietnam War, flying several missions a month in twin-engine B-57 Canberras, carrying out bombing and strafing over South Vietnam.
President Harry S. Truman awarded him the Air Collier Trophy in December 1948 for breaking the sound barrier.
He also received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1985.
Yeager had retired from the Air Force in 1975 and moved to a ranch in Cedar Ridge, Northern California, where he continued to work as a consultant for the Air Force and Northrop Corp.
The pilot and his first wife Glennis Yeager had four children before her death from ovarian cancer.
Yeager married Victoria Scott D’Angelo, 45, in 2003.
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