Chuck Yeager

Hamlin, West Virginia, was where the family landed when he was five, and where his sister Doris Ann had already been killed at two by their four-year-old brother playing with a gun. He took his best grades in geometry and typing, played basketball and football, and finished high school in June 1941 after two summers at a military training camp in Indiana. He enlisted as a private that September and worked as an aircraft mechanic. He had never left the ground until January 1942, when an engineering officer took him up after a maintenance check. He was sick all over himself and decided he had made a mistake. His eyesight was rated 20/10. He entered enlisted pilot training that September and was made a flight officer on March 10, 1943.

Germans shot him down over France on March 5, 1944, his eighth mission. He got out over the Pyrenees with the Maquis, hauling a wounded navigator named Pat Patterson, and reached Spain in May. Regulations barred escaped pilots from flying over occupied territory, so on June 12 he asked Eisenhower in person and got permission. He finished the war with 11.5 kills, five in one mission on October 12, 1944, one of them a Messerschmitt jet. On October 14, 1947 he flew a Bell X-1 named Glamorous Glennis to Mach 1.05 at 45,000 feet, two nights after breaking two ribs falling off a horse, using a broom handle Jack Ridley sawed down so he could lever the hatch shut. In December 1953 he took an X-1A to Mach 2.44, lost it to inertia coupling and fell 51,000 feet before recovering.

In 1962 he was made the first commandant of the Aerospace Research Pilot School, which fed pilots to NASA. He was not eligible himself. The astronaut program required a college degree and he had a high school diploma. The next year Ed Dwight arrived, the first Black pilot admitted. A 2019 documentary quoted Yeager instructing staff and students not to speak to Dwight, drink with him or invite him home, using a racial slur and predicting he would be gone in six months. Dwight's own memoir describes the treatment that followed. Yeager's account differs. On December 10, 1963 an NF-104 flat-spun off the top of a climb. He ejected, the seat base struck him, the rocket motor broke his faceplate and set his emergency oxygen alight, and he came down badly burned. He never chased another record.

He flew 127 missions in Southeast Asia, made brigadier general in 1969, and retired on March 1, 1975, a date picked to sound like Mach 1. Tom Wolfe put him at the center of The Right Stuff, and in the 1983 film Sam Shepard played him while he played a bartender. Glennis died of ovarian cancer on December 22, 1990. He married Victoria Scott D'Angelo in 2003, and his children sued alleging undue influence, while he accused them of moving money. The California Court of Appeal found for him in 2008 and held his daughter had breached her duty as trustee. He died in a Los Angeles hospital on December 7, 2020, at 97. The Charleston airport carries his name.

Chuck Yeager's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Bell X-1 supersonic flight mission
  Mach 1.05 at 45,000 feet on October 14, 1947. Collier and Mackay trophies followed 1947
• Bell X-1A flight to Mach 2.44 mission
  He lost control to inertia coupling and fell 51,000 feet before recovering 1953
• USAF Aerospace Research Pilot School company
  He was its first commandant 1962
• 405th Tactical Fighter Wing command mission
  Clark Air Base, and 127 missions over Southeast Asia 1966
• Yeager: An Autobiography book
  Written with Leo Janos 1985

• September 12, 1941 aged 18 Enlists as a private and is put to work as an aircraft mechanic
• January 1942 aged 18 Goes up in an airplane for the first time and is sick the whole flight He said afterward that he had made a big mistake.
• March 5, 1944 aged 21 Shot down over France on his eighth mission He crossed the Pyrenees with the Maquis and reached Spain in May.
• June 12, 1944 aged 21 Asks Eisenhower in person to let him fly combat again
• October 12, 1944 aged 21 Shoots down five enemy aircraft in one mission
• October 14, 1947 aged 24 Breaks the sound barrier in the Bell X-1 Two cracked ribs, taped, and a sawed-off broom handle to lever the hatch shut.
• December 10, 1963 aged 40 Ejects from a flat-spinning NF-104 and is severely burned His last attempt at a record.
• March 1, 1975 aged 52 Retires from the Air Force after more than 30 years of active flying
• December 7, 2020 aged 97 Dies at 97 in a Los Angeles hospital

• Dwight D. Eisenhower 1890–1969
  34th President and Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War II. cleared him back into combat
• Neil Armstrong 1930–2012
  Astronaut who commanded Apollo 11 and became the first person to set foot on the lunar surface. flew with him once, in April 1962
• Tom Wolfe 1930–2018
  New Journalism pioneer whose The Right Stuff and Bonfire of the Vanities chronicled American culture. wrote him into The Right Stuff
• Alan Shepard 1923–1998
  First American in space and fifth person to walk on the Moon during Apollo 14. astronaut of a program he was not eligible for
• Charles Lindbergh 1902–1974
  Aviator who made the first solo nonstop transatlantic flight from New York to Paris in 1927. earlier holder of the same kind of fame