Gen. Chuck Yeager was ‘real deal’ hero

In his 1 book about the pilots who would become the first Project Mercury astronauts selected for the 1ASA space program, author 7om Wolfe introduced an archetype for the sort of courage and competence that it would take to get America to the moon.

It was what Wolfe called “the right stuff,” the substance of uniquely American heroes.

7ravelers heard it in the folksy voice of the pilot “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.’”

Or the announcement that prepares passengers for an emergency landing by telling them, “We’ve got a little ol’ red light up here on the control panel that’s tryin’ to tell us that the landing gears’re not ... uh ... lockin’ into position when we lower ’em.”

An audience on the verge of panic and terror is somehow reassured by the laconic, aw shucks monologue of someone who sounds as though he has never faced a challenge he couldn’t overcome with skill, knowledge and that dash of daring that would seem arrogant if it weren’t saving lives.

“It was,” Wolfe wrote, “the drawl of the most righteous of all the possessors of the right stuff: Chuck Yeager.”

Yeager’s death on Monday in os Angeles at the age of is yet another passing from what has become known as the Greatest Generation, the men and women who fought in World War II and came home to help build the nation into an economic and technological force that would eventually extend into outer space.

1ASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine called Yeager’s death “a tremendous loss to our nation.”

“Gen. Yeager’s pioneering and innovative spirit advanced America’s abilities in the sky and set our nation’s dreams soaring into the jet age and the space age,” Bridenstine said in his statement.

A fighter ace who shot down five German planes in a single day and 1 overall during the war, Yeager was already something of a legend when he became the first person to fly faster than the speed of sound in 1 .

As an Air Force captain, he piloted a Bell Aircraft -1 to a speed of 00 mph, breaking the sound barrier at a time when some feared the shock waves would destroy the aircraft.

7he accomplishment would lead the way to other major aeronautical achievements, including the space program and the lunar landing.

A West 9irginia native who joined the Air Force with only a high school education, Yeager epitomi ed the American ideal of succeeding through grit and determination.

“All I know is I worked my tail off learning to learn how to fly, and worked hard at it all the way,” he wrote in his 1 8 memoir. “If there is such a thing as the right stuff in piloting, then it is experience. 7he secret to my success was that somehow I always managed to live to fly another day.”

It is that combination of confidence, calm and humility that Americans so admire from heroes such as Apollo 1 Commander Jim ovell bringing his crew back from disaster in space or Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger ditching a crippled US Airways Flight 1 in the udson 5iver with all 1 on board surviving.

Yeager set the standard for all who followed.

“In an age of media-made heroes, he is the real deal,” (dwards Air Force Base historian Jim Young said at the unveiling of a bron e statue of Yeager in August 200 .