Chuck Yeager was an American test pilot and United States Air Force
officer. Yeager is best known for being the first aviator to fly faster
than the speed of sound.
Charles Elwood Yeager was born in Myra, West Virginia. He enlisted in
the U.S. Army Air Force after high school in 1941 and served as a
flight officer during World War II (1939-1945). He was commissioned as
a reserve flight officer in 1943 and became a pilot in the fighter
command of the Eighth Air Force stationed in England. He flew 64
missions over Europe and shot down 13 German aircraft. Yeager's courage
was put to the test when his own plane was shot down during a mission
over Germany, but with the aid of the French underground, he escaped
capture and returned to his unit. After the war, he became a flight
instructor and a test pilot, securing a regular commission as a captain
in 1947.
Yeager was chosen from several volunteers to test-fly the secret,
experimental X-1 aircraft, built by the Bell Aircraft Company. The Bell
X-1 was designed to test the capabilities of the human pilot and
fixed-wing aircraft against the severe aerodynamic stresses of flight
near the speed of sound, and to determine if a straight-wing plane
could fly faster than the speed of sound (approximately 1223 km/h, or
approximately 760 mph, in air at sea level). No one knew whether a
pilot could successfully control a plane under the battering effects of
the shock waves produced as the plane's speed neared Mach 1. On October
14, 1947, over dry Rogers Lake in California, Yeager rode the X-1,
attached to the belly of a B-29 bomber, to an altitude of 7600 m
(25,000 ft). He then released the aircraft from the B-29 and rocketed
to an altitude of 12,200 m (40,000 ft). Yeager became the first person
to break the sound barrier, safely taking the X-1 to a speed of 1065
km/h (662 mph), faster than the speed of sound at his altitude. Eight
months later, in June of 1948, the Air Force announced the record to
the public.
Yeager continued to make test flights for the Air Force. On December
12, 1953, in an X-1A rocket plane, he set a world speed record of 2655
km/h (1650 mph). In 1954 Yeager left his post as assistant chief of
test-flight operations at Edwards Air Force Base in California to join
the staff of the Twelfth Air Force in
West Germany. Following other
assignments, he returned to Edwards in 1962 as a colonel to command the
Aerospace Research Pilot School. During this time, Yeager trained to
break the speed record again, this time in an NF-104
fighter-interceptor. But in a practice flight, his plane went into a
spin and fell from an altitude of more than 30,000 m (more than 100,000
ft). Yeager survived only by ejecting. He was badly burned, but saved
himself by parachuting into the desert. That was Yeager's last attempt
to break the speed record. In 1968 he took command of the Fourth
Tactical Fighter Wing. Yeager retired from the Air Force with the rank
of brigadier general in 1975. His autobiography, Yeager, was published
in 1985.
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