Spirit of Yeager can inspire us to greatness

This lamentable year has been marked by yet another notable death, as retired Air Force Brig. Gen Chuck Yeager passed away Monday at the age of 97.

Yeager lived a long and incredibly productive life, but that doesn’t diminish the pain of having lost someone so extraordinary.

The great pilot is most famous for his 1947 flight in which he became the first person to travel faster than sound, a feat immortalized in Tom Wolfe’s 1979 book “The Right Stuff” and in a 1983 movie and 2020 Disney+ television adaptation. Yeager’s accomplishments helped usher in the age of space exploration.

Truly he was among the greatest of what has become known as the greatest generation.

NASA 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. He said, ‘You don’t concentrate on risks. You concentrate on results. No risk is too great to prevent the necessary job from getting done.’ ”

“In an age of media-made heroes, he is the real deal,” Edwards Air Force Base historian Jim Young said in 2006.

Indeed he was, and exceeding the speed of sound is only one of many reasons why. The fearless pilot from West Virginia flew for more than 60 years, serving in World War II and the Vietnam War. He piloted an F-15 to near 1,000 mph at Edwards in October 2002 at age 79. And in 2012, on the 65th anniversary of his history-making flight, he was aboard an F-15 Eagle as it broke the sound barrier at more than 30,000 feet above the Mojave Desert.

There is much we can learn from this extraordinary life, starting with the attitude that enabled Yeager to thrive for so many years.

“Living to a ripe old age is not an end in itself,” he wrote in his autobiography. “The trick is to enjoy the years remaining.”

“I haven’t yet done everything, but by the time I’m finished, I won’t have missed much,” he wrote. “If I auger in (crash) tomorrow, it won’t be with a frown on my face. I’ve had a ball.”

Yeager was a man who did his work out of duty and a desire to excel, not for attention. What would become his most famous feat was kept secret for about a year after it happened.

He characterized himself as being lucky to have come of age just as aviation was entering its modern era.

“I was just a lucky kid who caught the right ride,” he said.

Such modesty is admirable and refreshing in a world where so many have achieved fame without having accomplished anything significant.

Let us remember the examples of men such as Yeager and the many others in his generation who helped our nation soar. As they leave us, let us become more determined to revive the can-do spirit that animated them and brought about so many great American accomplishments.

A sense of defeatism has crept into our national life. It seems as though we’re losing our will to tackle difficult tasks and make the seemingly impossible become possible.

Yet the spirit of Yeager and the space program is still alive. A great example is the remarkable effort by an army of scientists to produce COVID-19 vaccines in an astonishingly short time. Thanks to these researchers working with the support of the government and private industry, an end to this global nightmare appears to be in sight.

Greatness does not have to come to an end with the deaths of Yeager and others like him. Indeed we have all the ingredients for greatness in today’s younger generations, if only we make the commitment to nurture and support it. Once we’ve finally moved beyond the pandemic, let’s push to solve other seemingly intractable problems here and around the world.

Remember that one danger of celebrating figures from the past is the implication that our best days are behind us. Do not give in to that line of thinking. Let us learn from great men and women of older generations so we can accomplish even more.