The Right Stuff legend Chuck Yeager dies at 97
Hero was first to break sound barrier
HE was the US war hero who paved the way for the Moon landings when he became the first pilot to break the sound barrier.
But Chuck Yeager, who died on Monday night aged 97, nearly didn’t earn the tag ‘the fastest man alive’.
Two days before his epic flight on October 14, 1947, he broke two ribs in a fall from his horse. He told only his wife Glennis and fellow pilot Jack Ridley. His ribs strapped, the 24-year-old was in such pain that he could not seal the hatch on his experimental Bell X-1 rocket plane without a lever rigged up by Ridley.
Yeager’s orange bullet- shaped plane, named Glamorous Glennis, was dropped from a B-29 bomber 45,000ft above the Mojave Desert in California, achieving Mach 1.05 – 805mph. The main challenge, he said later, was not to hit that speed but to keep the plane from disintegrating in the sonic boom, as scientists had feared. Yeager’s achievement was kept secret by the US military until June 1948.
His exploits were celebrated in the 1983 film The Right Stuff – based on Tom Wolfe’s book about the early astronaut programme – in which he was played by Sam Shepard. Yeager made a cameo appearance as a bartender.
A farmer’s son from West Virginia, Yeager became an air force mechanic on leaving school in 1941. He trained as a pilot and was stationed at RAF Leiston in Suffolk in 1943, downing 12 German planes – five in one mission.
He was shot down over France and broke his leg but, with the help of the French Resistance, escaped to England via Spain and returned to his squadron.
His combat experience and technical know-how made him an ideal test pilot. But his lack of a college education meant he was not chosen for Nasa’s fledgling space programme. Instead he trained 26 of the astronauts who flew on the Gemini and Apollo missions.
In 1963, in an incident depicted in The Right Stuff, he went into a flat spin on a test flight, falling 10,000ft before ejecting with slight burns.
He once said: ‘I was always afraid of dying. Somehow I always managed to live to fly another day.’
Yeager had four children with Glennis, whom he married in 1945 and who died in 1990. In 2003 he married Victoria, an actress 35 years his junior, leading to a bitter rift with his children.
She broke the news of his death on Twitter yesterday morning, saying: ‘An incredible life well lived, America’s greatest pilot.’