Chuck Yeager, famed pilot and legendary West Virginian, has died

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image for Chuck Yeager, famed pilot and legendary West Virginian, has died

Yeager in front of the Bell X-1, which, as with all of the aircraft assigned to him, he named Glamorous Glennis after his wife.

Chuck Yeager, World War II ace, daring test pilot and legendary West Virginian, has died.

His place in history was secured in 1947 when he became the first pilot in history to blow past the speed of sound in level flight. Yeager’s daring and understated swagger personified “The Right Stuff” associated with the test pilots who followed in his footsteps to become the first astronauts in the American space program.

He thrilled West Virginians by buzzing under Charleston’s South Side Bridge in a Lockheed P-80 Shooting Star in 1948.

“General Chuck Yeager was an American hero. West Virginia’s native son was larger than life and an inspiration for generations of Americans,” U.S. Senator Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., stated.

Echoing President Reagan’s tribute to the space shuttle Challenger crew, Senator Shelley Moore Capito said Yeager had “slipped the surly bonds of earth and touched the face of God.”

“What an amazing life,” said Capito, R-W.Va.

Yeager’s wife, Victoria, announced his death on Twitter and highlighted his “legacy of strength, adventure and patriotism.” Victoria, who Yeager married in 2003, did not state a cause of death. Yeager was 97.

Fr @VictoriaYeage11 It is w/ profound sorrow, I must tell you that my life love General Chuck Yeager passed just before 9pm ET. An incredible life well lived, America’s greatest Pilot, & a legacy of strength, adventure, & patriotism will be remembered forever. — Chuck Yeager (@GenChuckYeager) December 8, 2020

Charles Elwood Yeager was born in Myra, an unincorporated community in Lincoln County, where his father was a gas-well driller and the family farmed. The family moved to Hamlin, the county seat, when he was five. He was a young outdoorsman with strong interests in hunting and fishing.

After graduating from Hamlin High School in 1941, Yeager enlisted as a private in the U.S. Army Air Forces and became an aircraft mechanic. His unusually keen vision and the United States’ entry into World War II provided his entry to flight training.

While stationed in England, Yeager flew P-51 mustangs but was shot down over France on his eighth mission. He escaped and returned to the air. On Oct. 12, 1944, Yeager downed five enemy aircraft in a single mission and finished the war credited with shooting down at least 12 German planes.

It was during this period that he began naming his planes “Glamorous Glennis,” after his first wife and the mother of Yeager’s four children. Glennis Yeager died in 1990.

In all, Yeager flew 64 combat missions.

After the war, Yeager remained in the military and became a test pilot at Muroc Army Air Field, now called Edwards Air Force Base. He was selected to fly a rocket-powered Bell XS-1 to research high-speed flight.

Two days before the scheduled flight, Yeager fell from a horse and broke two ribs. Worried about having the flight canceled, Yeager had his ribs taped by a civilian doctor and went ahead with the mission.

He broke the sound barrier on Oct. 14, 1947, flying the X-1 Glamorous Glennis at 700 miles an hour, Mach 1.06, at an altitude of 45,000 feet.

Because of the top-secret nature of the mission, Yeager’s feat was not announced to the public until months later in June, 1948. Now, the X-1 he flew that day is on permanent display at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum.

Yeager acted like it was no big deal.

“Anybody can fly faster than sound as long as he wants to so far as the physical effects are concerned,” The Associated Press quoted Yeager as saying in 1949. “The fact is, it’s no different than sitting in your armchair at home.”

Yeager set another speed record on Dec. 12, 1953, by flying two-and-a-half times the speed of sound in a Bell X-1A.

Symbols of Yeager’s fame are all over southern West Virginia. The gateway airport in Charleston bears his name, and his sculpted bust greets visitors in the terminal. Yeager Bridge on the West Virginia Turnpike leads crosses into Charleston. A generous academic scholarship at Marshall University is named for Yeager.

In 1985, President Ronald Reagan awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award.

“Gen. Yeager was an American hero and a true West Virginia legend who broke barriers and changed history forever,” Gov. Jim Justice stated Monday evening.

Homer Hickam, the West Virginia author of “Rocket Boys, assessed Yeager as his idol. “He was the definition of greatness and my hero.”

Yeager continued sound barrier-breaking flights well into his life.

On Oct. 14, 1997, on the 50th anniversary of his historic flight, Yeager broke the sound barrier again, flying an F-15D Eagle.

As a co-pilot at age 89 on Oct. 14, 2012, on the 65th anniversary of breaking the sound barrier, Yeager did it again in an McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle.

“When he became the first pilot to break the sound barrier he challenged each of us to test the limits of what’s possible,” Manchin stated Monday night. “I am grateful to have gotten to know this legendary West Virginian and to call him my dear friend.”

AdmiralAkbar1 on December 8th, 2020 at 04:26 UTC »

The opening passage to Tom Wolfe's novel The Right Stuff, about 1940s test pilots:

Anyone who travels very much on airlines in the United States soon gets to know the voice of the airline pilot… coming over the intercom… with a particular drawl, a particular folksiness, a particular down-home calmness that is so exaggerated it begins to parody itself (nevertheless! —it’s reassuring)… the voice that tells you, as the airliner is caught in thunderheads and goes bolting up and down a thousand feet at a single gulp, to check your seat belts because “it might get a little choppy”… the voice that tells you (on a flight from Phoenix preparing for its final approach into Kennedy Airport, New York, just after dawn): “Now, folks, uh… this is the captain… ummmm… We’ve got a little ol’ red light up here on the control panel that’s tryin’ to tell us that the landin’ gears’re not… uh… lockin’ into position when we lower ’em… Now… I don’t believe that little ol’ red light knows what it’s talkin’ about—I believe it’s that little ol’ red light that iddn’ workin’ right”… faint chuckle, long pause, as if to say, I’m not even sure all this is really worth going into—still, it may amuse you… “But… I guess to play it by the rules, we oughta humor that little ol’ light… so we’re gonna take her down to about, oh, two or three hundred feet over the runway at Kennedy, and the folks down there on the ground are gonna see if they caint give us a visual inspection of those ol’ landin’ gears”—with which he is obviously on intimate ol’-buddy terms, as with every other working part of this mighty ship —”and if I’m right… they’re gonna tell us everything is copacetic all the way aroun’ an’ we’ll jes take her on in”… and, after a couple of low passes over the field, the voice returns: “Well, folks, those folks down there on the ground— it must be too early for ’em or somethin’—I ‘spect they still got the sleepers in their eyes… ’cause they say they caint tell if those ol’ landin’ gears are all the way down or not… But, you know, up here in the cockpit we’re convinced they’re all the way down, so we’re jes gonna take her on in… And oh”… (I almost forgot)… “while we take a little swing out over the ocean an’ empty some of that surplus fuel we’re not gonna be needin’ anymore—that’s what you might be seein’ comin’ out of the wings—our lovely little ladies… if they’ll be so kind… they’re gonna go up and down the aisles and show you how we do what we call ‘assumin’ the position'”… another faint chuckle (We do this so often, and it’s so much fun, we even have a funny little name for it)… and the stewardesses, a bit grimmer, by the looks of them, than that voice, start telling the passengers to take their glasses off and take the ballpoint pens and other sharp objects out of their pockets, and they show them the position, with the head lowered… while down on the field at Kennedy the little yellow emergency trucks start roaring across the field—and even though in your pounding heart and your sweating palms and your broiling brainpan you know this is a critical moment in your life, you still can’t quite bring yourself to believe it, because if it were… how could the captain, the man who knows the actual situation most intimately… how could he keep on drawlin’ and chucklin’ and driftin’ and lollygaggin’ in that particular voice of his— Well!—who doesn’t know that voice! And who can forget it! —even after he is proved right and the emergency is over.

That particular voice may sound vaguely Southern or Southwestern, but it is specifically Appalachian in origin. It originated in the mountains of West Virginia, in the coal country, in Lincoln County, so far up in the hollows that, as the saying went, “they had to pipe in daylight.” In the late 1940’s and early 1950’s this up-hollow voice drifted down from on high, from over the high desert of California, down, down, down, from the upper reaches of the Brotherhood into all phases of American aviation. It was amazing. It was Pygmalion in reverse. Military pilots and then, soon, airline pilots, pilots from Maine and Massachusetts and the Dakotas and Oregon and everywhere else, began to talk in that poker-hollow West Virginia drawl, or as close to it as they could bend their native accents. It was the drawl of the most righteous of all the possessors of the right stuff: Chuck Yeager.

Taskforce58 on December 8th, 2020 at 04:05 UTC »

This man broke Mach 1 while flying with a cracked rib he got from a horse riding accident the night before. Absolute bad-ass.

orangutanDOTorg on December 8th, 2020 at 03:55 UTC »

There was a flight simulator with his voice as the narrator in the early 90s and he’d talk shit whenever you crashed. Even aside from the game, he was a legit hero.