In 2006, Edwards Air Force Base unveiled a statue of ace airman Chuck Yeager, and the base’s historian, Jim Young, had just one thing to say about the man who, at the time of his death last week, had clocked more than six decades of flight.
“In an age of media-made heroes, he is the real deal.”
Yeager, who died at the age of 97 at his home in Los Angeles, was “the most righteous of all the possessors of the right stuff,” according to author Tom Wolfe, who cataloged Yeager’s incredible life in his book, appropriately titled The Right Stuff. He spent his life reaching higher and going faster than, perhaps, any human in history.
The future Gen. Yeager was born in West Virginia and had barely finished high school when he enlisted in the United States Air Force. Despite initially struggling with airsickness, he quickly found himself over Europe during World War II. He decided to become a pilot, he said, because “I was in maintenance, saw pilots had beautiful girls on their arms, didn’t have dirty hands, so I applied.”
He flew P-51 Mustang fighters and was shot down over France on his eighth mission. He took up with the French resistance and, despite being wounded, escaped to Spain over the Pyrenees, carrying another wounded fighter, a B-1 bombardier, with him. He returned to his base in Britain, to the cockpit, and to the skies, eventually taking out 13 members of the Luftwaffe — five in a single day — even though pilots who mixed with European resistance movements were barred from returning to active duty. Yeager was so desperate to take on the Nazis, he appealed directly to Gen. Dwight Eisenhower.
His service in World War II, though, was hardly his most significant achievement. “On Oct. 14, 1947,” CBS News noted, “Yeager, then a 24-year-old captain, pushed an orange, bullet-shaped Bell X-1 rocket plane past 660 mph to break the sound barrier, at the time a daunting aviation milestone.”
Yeager pushed the Bell X-1 aircraft, named “Glamorous Glennis” after his wife, to 43,000 feet over the Mohave desert before reaching an astounding 700 miles per hour, becoming the first pilot to break the sound barrier and the first to prove that man could survive supersonic flight, paving the way for decades of daring aviation and, eventually, spaceflight.
To have the “right stuff,” Wolfe noted, a man had to have “the ability to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and put his hide on the line and then have the moxie, the reflexes, the experience, the coolness to pull it back in the last yawning moment — and then go up again the next day, and the next day, and every next day.”
Yeager was, no doubt, that man. He continued to set record after record, taking risk after risk. He “flew an F-80 under a Charleston bridge at 450 mph on Oct. 10, 1948,” according to CBS, and, at age 79, Yeager took an X-15 to 1,000 miles per hour.
He won the Silver Star, the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Bronze Star, the Air Medal, the Purple Heart, the Collier air trophy, and, in 1985, then-President Ronald Reagan awarded Yeager the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Last week, his wife, Victoria Yeager, summed it up by tweeting that “it is w/ profound sorrow, I must tell you that my life love General Chuck Yeager passed just before 9pm ET. An incredible life well lived, America’s greatest Pilot, & a legacy of strength, adventure, & patriotism will be remembered forever.”
“Living to a ripe old age is not an end in itself. The trick is to enjoy the years remaining,” Yeager wrote in his autobiography. “All I know is I worked my tail off learning to learn how to fly, and worked hard at it all the way … If there is such a thing as the right stuff in piloting, then it is experience. The secret to my success was that somehow I always managed to live to fly another day.”
“I haven’t yet done everything, but by the time I’m finished, I won’t have missed much,” he added. “If I auger in tomorrow, it won’t be with a frown on my face. I’ve had a ball … I was just a lucky kid who caught the right ride.”
Emily Zanotti is the senior editor of the Daily Wire.
