Chuck Yeager Test pilot
BORN FEBRUARY 13, 1923 – DIED DECEMBER 7, 2020, AGED 97
CHUCK Yeager was the American test pilot who in 1947 became the first human in history to break the sound barrier.
A Second World War flying ace who was as cavalier in his attitude to living dangerously on the ground as in the skies, he was played by Sam Shepard in the 1983 film The Right Stuff. He also broke other speed and altitude records throughout his lifetime.
Yeager was just 24 when he took flight in the Bell X- 1 experimental rocket plane called Glamorous Glennis, named after his wife Glennis Dickhouse.
He was dropped from the bomb bay of a B- 29 aircraft over the Mojave Desert in the United States, at an altitude of 23,000ft, before manoeuvring to 45,000ft where he achieved his sonic boom.
It was a tense moment as British pilot Geoffrey de Havilland Jr had died the year before attempting the same record, his plane disintegrating over the Thames Estuary. What
Yeager’s superiors didn’t know was that he completed his feat in extreme pain after breaking several ribs two days earlier in a horseriding accident.
He told no one for fear of being taken off the mission.
Charles Elwood Yeager was born in Myra, West Virginia, the second son of gas drilling owner Albert Hall and Susie Mae Yeager.
Although he was not academically minded, he excelled at fishing and hunting and repaired machinery easily with help from his father.
He enlisted in the US Army as an aircraft mechanic before receiving his pilot wings. Assigned to the Eighth Air Force, he shot down 13 planes, including five in one day.
Glennis died in 1990. Yeager is survived by their four children and his second wife, Victoria D’Angelo.