Chuck Yeager, pilot who broke the sound barrier, dies at 97

“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,’” Bridenstine said in his statement.

“In an age of media-made heroes, he is the real deal,” Edwards Air Force Base historian Jim Young said in August 2006 at the unveiling of a bronze statue of Yeager.
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When i was younger on this site, my very first name was "The last Starfighter" after seeing the right stuff, and his history.
Probably too, after the film of the same name. But a pilot is a pilot.
All of us have the space sickness. We aren't in space.Flowers, threes, animals, water, but vacum attracts us better than gravity.
And we need it. We don't know it, but it's like " to remerber" and our intuitions are corrects.Amazing no?
Reaching the stars could be an unusual experience but in this times, 1965 "Galgot" it was a madness.
This "zoom climb" of this NF 104 is a promess, a gift of the "creation" for humanity, if you think it, it comes to you.
 
Sorry but also had 20 tenths in both eyes at 65 years old, it's near the cat. It's the very best vision at night for a sky knight.
I love this guy... as you can see here.
 
Thank you for this! the best flat spin with a rocket plane! The very first in starfighter i think but not sure!
 
In July 1984 I participated in an interview with BGen Robert L. Cardenas (USAF, ret). Our purpose was fact-finding related to Cardenas's time as an Air Force test pilot of the early Northrop flying wings (then "Maj Cardenas" authored a fairly famous memo that had some damning things to say about the handling characteristics). 1984 was before the B-2 was formally acknowledged as a flying wing, but it was widely speculated and Cardenas hinted at having had contact with the Northrop design team at some time in the ATB's development.

Cardenas also talked about his time as the pilot of the B-29 that carried Yeager and the X-1 to altitude to drop for flight tests leading up to the sound barrier breaking flights. I still remember him telling us how Yeager burned his ears with fiery cussing over the radio during one of the earliest drop tests because Cardenas missed the required speed and pitch-angle test point requirements for the drop. The X-1 instantly stalled on release from the B-29. Yeager had his hands full executing the recovery (but found time to verbally blast Cardenas's piloting skills).

Somewhere I think I still have the cassette tapes from that interview.
 
A St. Louis connection - in 1948, Yeager visited McDonnell Aircraft, possibly to see the XF-88. Here is a photo of him and his mount (F-86A-1-NA from the first production batch) and Mr. Mac (2nd from the right, next to Yeager) and some of the company leadership.

Enjoy the Day! Mark
 

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One of my favorite Chuck Yeager stories occurred when he was on the ground. He and Joe Engle told it at the 2009 Edwards Air Show (photos below). This account from Engle's NASA Oral History:

" Chuck Yeager and [Clarence] Bud Anderson, every year they would go on either a ten-day or two-week backpacking trip up in the High Sierras to fish; fish for golden trout. That was a delicacy and they were only found in the headwaters of the Kern River up there. So Chuck would pack up there with nothing but a backpack, and as I recall, it was a forty-four-pound backpack or fifty-four-pound backpack. I went with him a couple times, so I should remember. But you carried only your tent and enough dried food to last you for two days, because that’s how long it took to hike to up to where the lakes were where the fish were, and then you ate fish for the rest of the time.

So at that time we would fly up in whatever airplane was on the ramp that we could get, just to check and make sure that everything was okay, and they had emergency signal mirrors that they could signal us and let us know exactly where they were on the ground. We’d fly down low and wave and everybody would know that they were okay.

Chuck had said that it gets pretty old eating fish for two weeks. Not that he was complaining, because he really liked to fish, but pretty much well along into their trek, their routing around up in the Sierras, I was going to go up and check on them one day, so I went over to the commissary and picked up some really nice thick steaks, and I was going to put them in a helmet bag and put the helmet bag in the speed brake of the 104, which opened up kind of like a clamshell in the back end, and close it, and then drop them to him, open the speed brakes and drop them to him. And I thought it would be kind of fun to give him something just as a joke, so I got some frozen fish sticks and put them in another helmet bag on the other side. The speed brakes opened up on either side of the 104. So on one side there were the steaks and on the other the frozen fish sticks.

I flew up and saw the flashing mirror and saw them, and went down low and wagged the wings, and they were waving. And I came back around real slow with the flaps down, and that normally means you’re going to make a drop of some kind to them. When I got just about there to them or where I thought it was about right, I popped the speed brakes open and the bag of steaks came out just like they should, and fell and they hit very close to them on this high mesa where they were at. The other bag kind of hung up on the actuator, the hydraulic actuator that opened the speed brake, hung up for a while, flapped around until it tore the handle loose, and then it finally came out, but it fell down in a very steep canyon, down into the Kern River.

So Bud and Chuck ran over and picked the helmet bag up and saw these steaks and they were just beside themselves, Chuck said, that they knew the other bag had fallen down there and they were discussing whether or not it was worth going after those steaks or not, because it was a very steep climb down into the deep, deep Kern Valley, but they decided, yeah, for steaks it was. They spent the best part of a day going down, looking for that bag, because it was olive-drab-colored and didn’t really stand out. But they found it, and then when they found out that they were frozen fish sticks, that was a good gotcha. That was one that Chuck hasn’t equaled yet, but he’s still trying.
"
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Mark Nankivil said:
A St. Louis connection - in 1948, Yeager visited McDonnell Aircraft, possibly to see the XF-88. Here is a photo of him and his mount (F-86A-1-NA from the first production batch) and Mr. Mac (2nd from the right, next to Yeager) and some of the company leadership.

Enjoy the Day! Mark
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Nice. Standing next to his jet, helmet with oxygen mask under his arm in his uniform-of-the-day (khaki utility uniform), not a flight suit. Today, many an Air Force pilot, even when at an office non-flying assignments, always wear their "bags" (flight suits). Yeager looks like he flew to the meeting in an F-86 dressed like he just drove over in his car for the meeting!
 
A Celebration of Life memorial service for retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Charles “Chuck” Yeager — best known for being the first to fly faster than the speed of sound — is scheduled for Friday at noon Eastern Time.
Vice President Mike Pence is slated to provide opening remarks at the ceremony, which will be held at the Charleston, West Virginia Coliseum and Convention Center. Among those in attendance will be Gen. David Allvin, vice chief of staff of the Air Force.
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www.airforcetimes.com

WATCH: Memorial service for retired Brig. Gen. Chuck Yeager, WW II ace, first to break sound barrier

Vice President Mike Pence is slated to provide opening remarks at the ceremony, which will be held at the Charleston, West Virginia Coliseum and Convention Center.
www.airforcetimes.com www.airforcetimes.com
And you can read US VP Mike Pence eulogy here:

Vice President Pence: The late test pilot Chuck Yeager, first to break sound barrier, makes his last flight | Fox News

Last Dec. 7, the greatest aviator in American history ascended into the heavens. On Friday, joined by my family on Air Force Two, it will be my honor to accompany the widow and earthly remains of retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Chuck Yeager, America’s pilot, on his last flight.
www.foxnews.com www.foxnews.com
 
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