A legendary life
Pilot’s history, legacy still live in Kern, beyond
Lots of places may stake a claim to the fame of legendary test pilot Chuck Yeager — including West Virginia, his birthplace, and Northern California, where he spent his latter years.
But there’s no denying that Yeager’s lasting legacy was earned right here in Kern County when the World War II flying ace climbed into a bright-orange Bell X-1 experimental rocket plane attached to the belly of a B-29 bomber, and made history by becoming the first human to fly faster than the speed of sound.
Muroc Air Force Base, now Edwards, in eastern Kern County, was the proving ground. But it’s also worth noting that the 24-year-old test pilot’s triumph on that October day in 1947 is still informing efforts in aviation and aerospace to this day.
George Whitesides, chief space officer at Virgin Galactic, which developed and tested its SpaceShipTwo vehicles at Mojave Air & Space Port, acknowledged that the company owes a debt of gratitude to Yeager and his flight research team.
“When Gen. Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in the Bell X-1, “Glamorous Glennis,” he redefined the realms of possibility,” Galactic said in an email. “The air-launched system he pioneered also provided inspiration for the design of our spaceflight system.
“Godspeed, Chuck — your legacy lives on.”
Indeed, the system used 73 years ago to launch the X-1 in mid-flight not only
shares similarities with the method used by SpaceShipTwo, it also shares the air-launch capability employed in 2004 by the experimental rocketplane SpaceShipOne when its pilot Mike Melvill became the first human to fly to the edge of space in a private, non-government aircraft.
Yes, THAT also happened in eastern Kern.
Melvill, now 80, couldn’t be reached for comment Tuesday, but in never-published remarks from an interview with this reporter in 2007, Melvill said the X-1 team was definitely onto something when they opted for an air-launched rocketplane.
“No doubt about it,” he said. “A wing-borne launch allows a safe recovery from almost any problem during the early stages of launch, whereas any propulsion problems during this period in a ground launched vehicle is usually disastrous.
“Launching from a
Mother Ship at high altitude allows a lighter structure for the space vehicle, because dynamic pressure is much lower passing through the transonic speed range. Much less fuel and lower thrust requirements are also large benefits. The Mothership is the first stage.”
Kern County has amassed an impressive list of history-makers in aviation, starting with the sound barrier-busting Bell X-1, the famed X-15 rocket plane, the around-the-world Voyager aircraft, the human-powered Gossamer Condor, SpaceShipOne, the first privately funded craft to carry a human to space, and SpaceShipTwo, which despite delays in going operational is expected to ferry thousands of aspiring astronauts to suborbital space, six at a time.
Much of this began with Yeager’s dauntless flight. But it wasn’t just the “geewhiz” space projects that benefited. Commercial aviation was also a beneficiary of Yeager’s daring and Kern County’s pioneering heritage. In fact, every time
humans fly on board a commercial airliner, we are benefiting from the technology derived from Yeager’s historic flight, veteran flight test engineer and educator George Cusimano told The Californian in 2007.
“Even though we are not flying at supersonic speeds, the understanding of high speed drag resulting from his flight allows the aircraft ... to fly at optimum Mach numbers that are the best
balance of speed and economy,” Cusimano said in an email.
The so-called “sound barrier” estimated by the mathematical theory of the time was proven incorrect by Yeager and the X-1 team, Cusimano added.
Yeager would later describe the feeling of breaking through the sound barrier as “a poke through Jello.”
Remaking mathematics and immortalizing the sound of Jello. Talk about legacy.
But Yeager’s legacy is also quite down to earth. In many ways, he was an unlikely choice for the job of unlocking the mystery of Mach 1. A self-described country boy from the hills of West Virginia, Yeager was not college-educated and had no formal engineering background.
Longtime Kern County mover and shaker Gene Lundquist remembers being a student in the third or fourth grade at Vineland School near Arvin when Yeager visited Vineland’s sister school, Sunset School, originally built to serve the migrant families who had come to the Central Valley to escape the Dust Bowl and the hard times of the Great Depression and post-Depression economy.
Yeager had flown his own plane to the school and landed on the short airstrip adjacent to the modest campus.
“We kids were lined up on both sides of the runway,” Lundquist recalled Tuesday.
Sunset School boasted an aviation class for students, begun by the tiny district’s innovative superintendent, Peter Bancroft. It even had three or four war-surplus airplanes parked in an adjacent field, where some classes were held.
To this day, Lundquist thinks it’s amazing that a man of Yeager’s fame and stature would take the time to visit a classroom of young aviation enthusiasts to share his experience, knowledge and love for airplanes and flying.
“He shared a lot of inspiration with those kids,” he said.
In 2007, Yeager told this reporter that he didn’t pretend to be the greatest pilot who ever lived. But he believed he was the right man for the job.
He was honored, he said, to be listed in the same company with such aviation pioneers as the Wright Brothers, Charles Lindbergh, Yuri Gagarin, John Glenn, and Neil Armstrong.
One thing is certain. Kern County owes him a debt of gratitude. Kern County will remember.