Don Keith - Chuck Yeager: World War II Fighter Pilot

Torpedo Run

Only the Brave

Arabian Storm

Cuban Deep

Fast Attack

Hunter Killer

The Indestructible Man

Dream On

Dial Dancing

Dangerous Grounds

The Ship That Wouldnt Die

The Amateur Radio Dictionary

Get on the Air... Now!

Mattie C.s Boy

The Spin

Firing Point

Riding the Shortwaves

Undersea Warrior

On the Road to Kingdom Come

We Be Big

War Beneath the Waves

The Ice Diaries

Final Patrol

The Bear

In the Course of Duty

Gallant Lady

Final Bearing

The Forever Season

All I know is I worked my tail off learning to fly. 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.

Charles E. Chuck Yeager

For a stretch of more than sixty years, Charles Elwood Yeager was one of the more recognized figures on the planet. He was a regular guest on television, including appearances on Whats My Line?, This Is Your Life, The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, and The David Letterman Show, and even had brief camera time in sitcoms, such as I Dream of Jeannie. He was featured in scores of commercials and print ads for General Motors and ACDelco. He made cameo appearances in such movies as The Right Stuff (in which he also did most of the flying and had a bit part as the bartender at a watering hole frequented by Air Force test pilots) and in Smokey and the Bandit II. His real-world experiences as a daring and colorful test pilot were featured in both the nonfiction work The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe and the movie of the same name based on the book. Yeager was portrayed in the film by actor Sam Shepard, who received an Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actor for his interpretation. (Shepard was the son of a US Army officer and World War II bomber pilot but also had a well-publicized fear of flying.) Yeager himself had almost three dozen film credits.

Yeager twice drove the pace car to start the Indianapolis 500 motor race. He served as consultant for three flight simulator video games, each of which bore his name in their titles. One became Electronic Arts best-selling video game of 1987. On a more serious note, President Ronald Reagan appointed Yeager to the Rogers Commission, tasked with investigating the space shuttle Challenger disaster in January 1986.

President Gerald Ford presented him with the Congressional Silver Medal, generally considered to be the noncombat equivalent to the Medal of Honor. He was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame, the International Air & Space Hall of Fame, the California Hall of Fame, and the Aerospace Walk of Honor.

In his home state of West Virginia, the airport at Charleston was dubbed Yeager Airport, and the Interstate 77 bridge over the Kanawha River was also named in his honor. Several stretches of highway around the state also bear his name. And though he never attended college, Marshall University dubbed its top academic scholarship program the Society of Yeager Scholars.

He was also a best-selling author. His life story, Yeager: An Autobiography, was a long-term success, as was a follow-up book, Press On!: Further Adventures in the Good Life.

Chuck Yeager was a likable, charismatic, and colorful figure, a self-described individualist. His tendency to be plainspoken and incisive rubbed some in the military the wrong way but only helped endear him to the general public. The event that truly put him into the limelightand earned him a place in the script for The Right Stuffcame on October 14, 1947, above the high desert of central Southern California.

On that day Yeager accomplished something many thought impossible and everyone knew to be highly dangerous. He piloted a rocket-powered aircraftdropped from the belly of a B-29 bomberto a speed of more than 660 miles per hour, swifter than the speed of sound at that altitude and faster than any human being had ever moved on purpose. The sound barrier had long terrified but fascinated engineers and pilots. Many scientists, without equivocation, predicted an aircraft approaching and then flying through that speed point would simply come apart, disintegrating in midair due to violent shock waves buffeting the plane.

But then, with Chuck Yeager at the controls of that bottle rocket of an airplanea Bell X-1 that Yeager had named Glamorous Glennis after his wife, as he did many of the planes he flew in his lifetimethere was proof that such a catastrophe could be avoided after all if the aircraft was properly designed and flown. It was a bumpy ride all right, but he had demonstrated once and for all thatwith the specific aeronautical design and a competent pilot who could make the appropriate adjustments at the right timeMach 1 was no barrier at all. It was merely another tick on a Machmeter.