The no-nonsense test pilot who broke the sound barrier

On Oct. 14, 1947, Air Force Capt. Chuck Yeager climbed out of a B-29 bomber as it soared over California’s Mojave Desert and stepped into the cockpit of the Bell X-1: a bulletshaped, rocket-propelled aircraft attached to the bomb bay. The 24-year-old test pilot roared off in the bright-orange experimental plane—named Glamorous Glennis after his first wife—and when it reached an altitude of 43,000 feet, the first-ever man-made sonic boom ricocheted across the desert. Yeager had hit a speed of about 700 mph, Mach 1.07, breaking both the sound barrier and the long-held belief that a plane flying at the speed of sound would be ripped apart by sound waves. The West Virginia–born pilot had almost missed out on that record-setting flight. A couple of days earlier, he had cracked two ribs while on a booze-fueled, nighttime horseback ride with Glennis. To avoid being grounded, he kept his injury secret from superiors and used a sawed-off broomstick as a makeshift handle to help ease the pain of closing the cockpit hatch. “That warm desert sun really felt wonderful,” he recalled of his momentous flight, “but my ribs ached.” His pluck and coolness under pressure would lead author Tom Wolfe to immortalize Yeager in his 1979 book The Right Stuff, about the glory days of test piloting, as “the most righteous of all the possessors of the right stuff.”

“Charles Elwood Yeager grew up in the tiny Appalachian town of Hamlin, W. Va.,” where his father mined coal and later drilled gas wells, said the Los Angeles Times. By age 6, the young Yeager was a crack shot, hunting rabbits and squirrels and skinning them for family dinners. Possessing “an affinity for machinery but not much for the classroom,” he enlisted in the Army Air Forces out of high school in 1941 and trained as a mechanic. One day Yeager took a ride with a maintenance officer flight-testing a plane, “and promptly threw up over the back seat,” said The New York Times. But noticing that pilots got the best-looking girls and didn’t have dirty hands, he decided to apply for flight school anyway. With remarkable 20/10 eyesight and an intuitive understanding of aeronautical engineering, he proved to be a natural flying ace. He piloted P-51 Mustangs in Europe during World War II, and in March 1944, on his eighth mission, he was shot down over France by a German fighter plane. Rescued by members of the French Resistance, he escaped to neutral Spain and then to Britain. Yeager resumed combat flying after D-Day and ended the war with 13 kills—including five Messerschmitt 109s he brought down in a single day.

After World War II, Yeager served as a flight instructor in Texas before “becoming one of the newly created Air Force’s most revered test pilots,” said The Washington Post. He was selected over more senior officers to fly the X-1 and crack the sound barrier, a feat that numerous pilots had died trying to accomplish. Early test flights weren’t encouraging, and Yeager reported trouble controlling the X-1 as it neared the sound barrier. But when he finally hit Mach 1, Yeager said, the ride “was as smooth as a baby’s bottom.” Because of the top-secret nature of the project, the record-breaking flight wasn’t officially acknowledged until more than a year later.

Yeager went on to test “newer, faster, and more dangerous aircraft,” said NPR.org. While piloting the X-1A in 1953, after barely surviving a spin so vicious that he cracked the canopy with his helmet, he set a new world speed record by flying at nearly

2.5 times the speed of sound. Yeager would clock up many more achievements and honors—including training the first astronauts in the early 1960s and commanding a fighter wing in the Vietnam War, during which he flew 127 missions—before retiring from the Air Force as a brigadier general in 1975. Until the end, he shrugged off the risks he had taken as a test pilot. “It was your duty, like combat,” Yeager explained in 2003. “Some people are going to get killed. You just hope it’s not you.”