Chuck Yeager gets into the back seat of a F-15 prior to reenacting his famous flight 65 years earlier in which he broke the sound barrier.
225 Chennault Cir, Montgomery, AL 36112, USA
Yeager graduated from the Air War College in 1961.
1947
Captain Chuck Yeager with the X-1 supersonic research aircraft in 1947, shortly after breaking the sound barrier.
1948
Washington, District of Columbia, United States
December 17, 1948, Washington, D.C.: President Harry Truman awards the Collier Air Trophy, commonly rated aviation’s highest honor, to the three men who will share the honor for the part they played in the first human faster-than-sound flight. Left to right are John Stack of Hampton, Virginia, research scientist on the staff of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics; President Truman; Captain Charles E. Yeager, Air Force test pilot who made the first flight; and Lawrence D. Bell, the president of Bell Aircraft Corporation of Buffalo.
1949
Air Force Captain Charles Yeager has spent more time flying supersonic jet planes than any other person.
1962
Edwards Air Force Base, California, United States
Jackie Cochran and Colonel Chuck Yeager, the first woman and man to break the sound barrier, walk away from an aircraft after a flight, Edwards Air Force Base, California in 1962.
1997
Edwards Air Force Base, California, United States
General Yeager honoring the 50th anniversary of his first supersonic flight at Edwards Air Force Base in 1997.
1947
Captain Chuck Yeager with the X-1 supersonic research aircraft in 1947, shortly after breaking the sound barrier.
1948
Washington, District of Columbia, United States
December 17, 1948, Washington, D.C.: President Harry Truman awards the Collier Air Trophy, commonly rated aviation’s highest honor, to the three men who will share the honor for the part they played in the first human faster-than-sound flight. Left to right are John Stack of Hampton, Virginia, research scientist on the staff of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics; President Truman; Captain Charles E. Yeager, Air Force test pilot who made the first flight; and Lawrence D. Bell, the president of Bell Aircraft Corporation of Buffalo.
1949
Air Force Captain Charles Yeager has spent more time flying supersonic jet planes than any other person.
1962
Edwards Air Force Base, California, United States
Jackie Cochran and Colonel Chuck Yeager, the first woman and man to break the sound barrier, walk away from an aircraft after a flight, Edwards Air Force Base, California in 1962.
1985
9880 W Girton Dr, Denver, CO 80227, USA
Awards Council member General Chuck Yeager (left) presents the American Academy of Achievement’s Golden Plate Award to Olympic gold medal gymnast Mary Lou Retton (right) at the 1985 Banquet of the Golden Plate in Denver, Colorado.
1985
9880 W Girton Dr, Denver, CO 80227, USA
Legendary musician Ray Charles (left) receiving the American Academy of Achievement’s “In Appreciation” Award from General Chuck Yeager (right), during the 1985 Achievement Summit in Denver, Colorado.
1995
101 Visitor Center Dr, Williamsburg, VA 23185, USA
Actor Tom Selleck (left) and General Chuck Yeager (right), at an Academy of Achievement outing during the 1995 Achievement Summit held in Colonial Williamsburg.
1997
Edwards Air Force Base, California, United States
General Yeager honoring the 50th anniversary of his first supersonic flight at Edwards Air Force Base in 1997.
225 Chennault Cir, Montgomery, AL 36112, USA
Yeager graduated from the Air War College in 1961.
(The amazing behind-the-scenes story of smashing the sound...)
The amazing behind-the-scenes story of smashing the sound barrier despite cracked ribs from a riding accident days before. The entire story is here, in Yeager's own words, and in wonderful insights from his wife and those friends and colleagues who have known him best. It is the personal and public story of a man who settled for nothing less than excellence, a one-of-a-kind portrait of a true American hero.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0553256742/?tag=2022091-20
1985
(An intriguing portrait of the life of a rugged individual...)
An intriguing portrait of the life of a rugged individualist covers everything from flying stunts and tales of travel to fishing advice, family stories, and a live-for-the moment philosophy.
https://www.amazon.com/Press-Further-Adventures-Good-Life/dp/0553053337/?tag=2022091-20
1988
(In a compendium of reminiscences, photographs, and expert...)
In a compendium of reminiscences, photographs, and experts' discussions, the surviving participants in the development and flying of the Bell X-1 rocket plane that broke the sound barrier in 1947 recount their experiences.
https://www.amazon.com/Quest-Mach-One-First-Person-Breaking/dp/0670874604/?tag=2022091-20
1997
Charles Elwood Yeager was born on February 13, 1923 in Myra, West Virginia, United States and grew up in the nearby village of Hamlin. His parents were Susie Mae (Sizemore) Yeager and Albert Hal Yeager. His father was a coal miner and driller for natural gas in the West Virginia coal fields.
Charles Yeager is the cousin of former baseball catcher Steve Yeager.
Yeager's first experience with the military was as a teen at the Citizens Military Training Camp at Fort Benjamin Harrison, Indianapolis, Indiana, during the summers of 1939 and 1940.
A few months after his high school graduation in Hamlin, West Virginia in June 1941, Yeager joined the U.S. Army Air Forces.
Yeager graduated from the Air Command and Staff School in 1952 and from the Air War College in 1961.
He also received his Doctor of Science (honorary) degree from West Virginia University in 1948, then a Doctor of Science (honorary) degree from Marshall University, Huntington, West Virginia in 1969 and a Doctor in Aeronautical Science degree from Salem College, West Virginia in 1975.
As the United States began mobilizing for World War II, Chuck Yeager enlisted in the Army Air Force in 1941 at the age of 18. In 1943 he became a flight officer, a non-commissioned officer who could pilot aircraft. He went to England where he flew fighter planes over France and Germany during the last two years of the war.
In his first eight missions, at the age of 20, Yeager shot down two German fighters. On his ninth mission he was shot down over German-occupied France, suffering flak wounds. He bailed out of the plane and was rescued by members of the French resistance who smuggled him across the Pyrenees Mountains into Spain. In Spain he was jailed briefly but made his way back to England where he flew fighter planes in support of the Allied invasion of Normandy.
On October 12, 1944, Yeager took on and shot down five German fighter planes in succession. On November 6, flying a propeller-driven P-51 Mustang, he shot down one of the new jet fighters the Germans had developed, the Messerschmidt-262, and damaged two more. On November 20 he shot down four FW-1906. By the end of the war, at which time he was 22 years old, he was credited with having shot down 13 German planes (one was also claimed by another pilot).
In 1946 and 1947 Yeager was trained as a test pilot at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio. He showed great talent for stunt-team flying and was chosen to go to Muroc Field in California, later to become Edwards Air Force Base, to work on the top-secret XS-1 aircraft, built by the Bell Aircraft Company to test the capabilities of the human pilot and a fixed-wing aircraft against the severe aerodynamic stresses of sonic flight.
On October 14, 1947, over Rogers Dry Lake in southern California, he rode the X-1, attached to a B-29 mother ship, to an altitude of 25,000 feet (7,600 metres). The X-1 then rocketed separately to 40,000 feet (12,000 metres), and Yeager became the first man to break the sound barrier, which was approximately 662 miles (1,066 km) per hour at that altitude. The feat was not announced publicly until June 1948. Yeager continued to make test flights, and on December 12, 1953, he established a world speed record of 1,650 miles (2,660 km) per hour in an X-1A rocket plane.
Yeager left his post as assistant chief of test-flight operations at Edwards Air Force Base in California in 1954 to join the staff of the Twelfth Air Force in West Germany. He then went to Okinawa where he flew Soviet planes captured in the Korean War in order to test their performance. He returned to the United States in 1957 to lead an air squadron, and flew on training operations and readiness maneuvers at Air Force bases in the United States and abroad. In 1961 he was appointed director of test flight operations at Edwards Air Force Base and the following year was made commandant of the Aerospace Research Pilot School at Edwards.
In 1963 Yeager tested an experimental plane designed for high altitude flying, the NF-104, to see if it could beat the record set by a Soviet military plane of 113, 890 feet. Yeager reached 108, 000 feet when the plane spun out of control, and he was forced to eject from the plane. He was severely burned on the left side of his face and left hand. He spent a month in the hospital but was able to return to flying duties and as head of the experimental test pilot school.
Yeager was promoted to brigadier general in 1969, by which time he had flown more than one hundred missions in Southeast Asia in B-57 tactical bombers.
Chuck Yeager became the most famous pilot in the United States, and the Air Force called upon him increasingly for its public relations and recruiting efforts. He served in a variety of Air Force positions until his retirement from the air force with the rank of brigadier general in 1975.
Besides, his autobiography, Yeager, was published in 1985. Yeager’s autobiography enjoyed phenomenal success, and he remains much in demand on the lecture circuit and as a corporate spokesman.
Chuck Yeager made his last flight as a military consultant on October 14, 1997, the 50th anniversary of his history-making flight in the X-1. He observed the occasion by once again breaking the sound barrier, this time in an F-15 fighter.
Chuck Yeager was the first person to fly a plane faster than the speed of sound. He is the recipient of numerous military awards, including the Air Force Distinguished Service Medal - retirement award in 1975. In 1976, Chuck Yeager was awarded the Congressional Silver Medal, presented to him by President Gerald Ford.
President Ronald Reagan honored him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1985. These are the highest honors the nation bestows for outstanding service or achievement.
General Yeager’s other decorations include the Purple Heart, the Bronze Star with V device, the Air Force Commendation Medal, the Silver Star with oak leaf cluster, the Legion of Merit with oak leaf cluster, the Distinguished Service Medal, the Distinguished Flying Cross with two clusters, and the Air Medal with ten clusters.
His civilian awards include the Harmon International Trophy in 1954 and the Collier and Mackay Trophies in 1948. He was the first and the youngest military pilot to be inducted into the Aviation Hall of Fame in 1973. He was also inducted into the International Space Hall of Fame in 1981.
Yeager Airport in Charleston, West Virginia, is named in his honor. The Interstate 64/Interstate 77 bridge over the Kanawha River in Charleston is named in his honor. On October 19, 2006, the state of West Virginia also honored Yeager with a marker along Corridor G (part of U.S. 119) in his home Lincoln County, and also renamed part of the highway the Yeager Highway.
On August 25, 2009, Governor Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver announced that Yeager would be one of 13 California Hall of Fame inductees in The California Museum's yearlong exhibit. The induction ceremony was on December 1, 2009, in Sacramento, California. Flying Magazine ranked Yeager number 5 on its 2013 list of The 51 Heroes of Aviation; he is the highest-ranked living person on the list.
(In a compendium of reminiscences, photographs, and expert...)
1997(An intriguing portrait of the life of a rugged individual...)
1988(The amazing behind-the-scenes story of smashing the sound...)
1985
Quotations:
"You do what you can for as long as you can, and when you finally can't, you do the next best thing. You back up but you don't give up."
"There is no such thing as a natural born pilot. Whatever my aptitudes or talents, becoming a proficient pilot was hard work, really a lifetime's learning experience. For the best pilots, flying is an obsession, the one thing in life they must do continually. The best pilots fly more than the others; that's why they're the best. Experience is everything. The eagerness to learn how and why every piece of equipment works is everything. And luck is everything, too."
"Just before you break through the sound barrier, the cockpit shakes the most."
"If you can walk away from a landing, it's a good landing. If you use the airplane the next day, it's an outstanding landing."
"You don't concentrate on risks. You concentrate on results. No risk is too great to prevent the necessary job from getting done."
"Leveling off at 42, 000 feet, I had thirty percent of my fuel, so I turned on rocket chamber three and immediately reached . 96 Mach. I noticed that the faster I got, the smoother the ride. Suddenly the Mach needle began to fluctuate. It went up to . 965 Mach - then tipped right off the scale... We were flying supersonic. And it was a smooth as a baby's bottom; Grandma could be sitting up there sipping lemonade."
"If you want to grow old as a pilot, you've got to know when to push it, and when to back off."
"There is no kind of ultimate goal to do something twice as good as anyone else can. It's just to do the job as best you can. If it turns out good, fine. If it doesn't, that's the way it goes."
"I was always afraid of dying. Always. It was my fear that made me learn everything I could about my airplane and my emergency equipment, and kept me flying respectful of my machine and always alert in the cockpit."
"It's your duty to fly the airplane. If you get killed in it, you don't know anything about it anyway. Duty is paramount. It's that simple if you're a military guy. You don't say 'I'm not going to do that - that's dangerous.' If it's your duty to do it, that's the way it is."
"That to me is a bunch of crap trying to shoot guys up into damned space. What they're going to do is they're going to wipe out half a dozen people one of these days, and that will be the end of it."
"I have flown in just about everything, with all kinds of pilots in all parts of the world - British, French, Pakistani, Iranian, Japanese, Chinese - and there wasn't a dime's worth of difference between any of them except for one unchanging, certain fact: the best, most skillful pilot has the most experience."
"Later, I realized that the mission had to end in a let-down because the real barrier wasn't in the sky but in our knowledge and experience of supersonic flight."
"Most pilots learn, when they pin on their wings and go out and get in a fighter, especially, that one thing you don't do, you don't believe anything anybody tells you about an airplane."
Chuck Yeager is an honorary board member of the humanitarian organization Wings of Hope. He has also been a founder and chairman of the General Chuck Yeager Foundation, California, since 2002.
On February 26, 1945, Yeager married Glennis Dickhouse, and the couple had four children: Donald, Michael, Sharon, Susan. Glennis died in 1990. In 2000, Yeager met actress Victoria Scott D'Angelo on a hiking trail in Nevada County. The pair started dating shortly thereafter, and married in August 2003.
They were married from 1945 to 1990 until her death.
They are married since 2003.
Their friendship lasted until her death in 1980.
