Chuck Yeager, first pilot to break the sound barrier, dies at 97

Retired Brigadier from the Air Force. General Charles “Chuck” Yeager, the ace of WWII fighter pilots and test pilot par excellence who proved he had “the right things” when in 1947 he became the first person to fly faster than him. sound, he had died. He was 97 years old.

Yeager died Monday, his wife, Victoria Yeager, said on her Twitter account. “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. “

Yeager’s death is “a tremendous loss to our nation,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in a statement.

“General Yeager’s pioneering and innovative spirit advanced America’s skills in the sky and lifted our nation’s dreams into the jet age and space age. He said, ‘You don’t focus on risks. You focus on risks. results. No risk is too cool to avoid getting the necessary work done, “Bridenstine said.

“In an age of media heroes, he’s the real deal,” Edwards Air Force Base historian Jim Young said in August 2006 at the unveiling of a bronze statue of Yeager.

He was “the fairest of all those who had the right things,” said Maj. Gen. Curtis Bedke, commander of the Edwards Air Force Flight Test Center.

Yeager, from a small town in the West Virginia hills, flew for more than 60 years, including piloting an X-15 at nearly 1,000 m / ph at Edwards in October 2002 at age 79.

“Living to old age is not an end in itself. The trick is to enjoy the years that remain,” he said in “Yeager: An Autobiography.”

“I haven’t done everything yet, but when I’m done, I won’t have missed much,” he wrote. “If I go (crash) tomorrow, it won’t be with a scowl. I’ve had a great time.”

On October 14, 1947, Yeager, then a 24-year-old captain, pushed a bullet-shaped orange Bell X-1 rocket plane at over 660 mph to break the sound barrier, at the time a daunting milestone in the aviation.

“Sure, I was worried,” he said in 1968. “When you’re playing with something that you don’t know much about, there has to be apprehension. But you don’t let that affect your work.”

The modest Yeager said in 1947 that it could have gone even faster if the plane had carried more fuel. He said the trip “was nice, like traveling fast in a car.”

Yeager nicknamed the rocket plane and all of his other planes “Glamorous Glennis” after his wife, who died in 1990.

Yeager’s feat was kept top secret for about a year when the world thought that the British had broken the sound barrier first.

“It wasn’t about not having planes flying at speeds like this. It was about keeping them from falling apart,” Yeager said.

Sixty-five years after the minute, on October 14, 2012, Yeager commemorated the feat, flying 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.

His exploits were recounted in Tom Wolfe’s book “The Right Stuff” and in the 1983 film that it inspired.

Yeager was born on February 23, 1923 in Myra, a small community on the Mud River deep in a hollow in the Appalachians about 40 miles southwest of Charleston. Later, the family moved to Hamlin, the county seat. His father was an oil and gas driller and a farmer.

“What really amazes me looking at all those years is how lucky I was, how lucky, for example, to have been born in 1923 and not 1963, so I came of age just as aviation entered the modern era. “Yeager said. in a December 1985 speech at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.

“I was just a lucky kid who took the right path,” he said.

Yeager 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.

He started out as an aircraft mechanic and, despite suffering severe seasickness during his first plane trip, he enrolled in a program that allowed enlisted men to become pilots.

Yeager shot down 13 German aircraft in 64 missions during World War II, including five in a single mission. It was once shot down over German-controlled France, but escaped with the help of French partisans.

After World War II, he became a test pilot starting at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.

Among the flights he made after breaking the sound barrier was one on December 12, 1953, when he flew an X-1A at a record speed of more than 1600 mp / h (2574 km / h). He said he had gotten up at dawn that day and went hunting, catching a goose before his flight. That night, he said, his family ate the goose for dinner.

He returned to combat during the Vietnam War, flying several missions a month in twin-engined B-57 Canberras, carrying out bombing and strafing over South Vietnam.

Yeager also commanded Air Force squadrons and fighter wings, and the Aerospace Research Pilot School for military astronauts.

“I have flown 341 types of military aircraft in every country in the world and logged about 18,000 hours,” he said in an interview in the January 2009 issue of Men’s Journal. “It may sound funny, but I’ve never owned a plane in my life. If you’re willing to bleed, Uncle Sam will give you all the planes you want.”

By the time Yeager left Hamlin, he was already known as a daredevil. On subsequent visits, he often visited the city.

“I live across the street from his mother,” said Gene Brewer, retired editor of the weekly Lincoln Journal. “One day I got on my roof with my 8mm camera when it flew over my head. I thought it was going to take me off the roof. You can see the treetops at the bottom of the photos.”

Yeager flew an F-80 under a Charleston bridge at 450 mp / h on October 10, 1948, according to newspaper reports. When asked to repeat the feat for the photographers, Yeager replied, “You should never bomb the same place twice because the gunners will be waiting for you.”

Yeager never forgot his roots and West Virginia named Charleston bridges, schools and the airport in his honor.

“My beginnings in West Virginia say who I am to this day,” Yeager wrote. “My accomplishments as a test pilot say more about a person’s luck, chance and fate. But the guy who broke the sound barrier was the boy who swam the Mud River with a cut watermelon or shot a squirrel before to go to school. “

Yeager received the Silver Star, the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Bronze Star, the Air Medal, and the Purple Heart. 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 retired from the Air Force in 1975 and moved to a ranch on Cedar Ridge in Northern California, where he continued to work as a consultant to the Air Force and Northrop Corp. and became well known to younger generations as a presenter for television for automotive parts and heating. sneakers.

He married Glennis Dickhouse of Oroville, California, on February 26, 1945. She died of ovarian cancer in December 1990. They had four children: Donald, Michael, Sharon, and Susan.

Yeager married Victoria Scott D’Angelo, 45, in 2003.