Yeager started from humble beginnings in Myra, W.Va., and many people didn't really learn about him until decades after he broke the sound barrier — all because of a book and popular 1983 movie called The Right Stuff.
He accomplished the feat in a Bell X-1, a wild, high-flying rocket-propelled orange airplane that he nicknamed "Glamorous Glennis," after his first wife who died in 1990. It was a dangerous quest — one that had killed other pilots in other planes. And the X-1 buffeted like a bucking horse as it approached the speed of sound — Mach 1 — about 700 miles per hour at altitude.
But Yeager was more than a pilot: In several test flights before breaking the sound barrier, he studied his machine, analyzing the way it handled as it went faster and faster. He even lobbied to change one of the plane's control surfaces so that it could safely exceed Mach 1.
You don't do it ... to get your damn picture on the front page of the newspaper. You do it because it's duty. It's your job.
As popularized in The Right Stuff, Yeager broke the sound barrier on Oct. 14, 1947, at Edwards Air Force Base in California. But there were no news broadcasts that day, no newspaper headlines. The aviation feat was kept secret for months. In 2011, Yeager told NPR that the lack of publicity never much mattered to him. "I was at the right place at the right time. And duty enters into it. It's not, you know, you don't do it for the — to get your damn picture on the front page of the newspaper. You do it because it's duty. It's your job."
Yeager never sought the spotlight and was always a bit gruff. After his famous flight in the X-1, he continued testing newer, faster and more dangerous aircraft. The X-1A came along six years later, and it flew at twice the speed of sound. On Dec. 12, 1953, Chuck Yeager set two more altitude and speed records in the X-1A: 74,700 feet and Mach 2.44.
It's what happened moments later that cemented his legacy as a top test pilot. The X-1A began spinning viciously and spiraling to Earth, dropping 50,000 feet in about a minute. His flight helmet even cracked the canopy, and a scratchy archive recording from the day preserves Yeager's voice as he wrestles back control of the aircraft: "Oh! Huh! I'm down to 25,000," he says calmly — if a little breathlessly. "Over Tehachapi. I don't know if I can get back to base or not."
Yeager strikes a pose with Sam Shepard, who played him in the movie version of The Right Stuff.
Yeager would get back to base. And in this 1985 NPR interview, he said it was really no big deal: "Well, sure, because I'd spun airplanes all my life and that's exactly what I did. I recovered the X-1A from inverted spin into a normal spin, popped it out of that and came on back and landed. That's what you're taught to do."
It's more than that, though. Yeager was a rare aviator, someone who understood planes in ways that other pilots just don't. He ended up flying more than 360 types of aircraft and retired from the Air Force as a brigadier general.
Bob van der Linden of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington says Yeager stood out. "He could give extremely detailed reports that the engineers found extremely useful. It's not just flying the airplane, it's interpreting how the airplane is flying and understanding that. And he understood that, just because he understood machines so well. And was just such a superb pilot."
Yeager grew up in the mountains of West Virginia, an average student who never attended college. After high school, he enlisted in the Army Air Corps where he didn't have the education credentials for flight training. But once the U.S. entered World War II a few months later, he got his chance.
). I'll check your links, but what I was trying to say was he knew they would be re-recording it (with him assuming it would be his voice). I think once he found out that it wouldn't be his voice he just ad libbed lines and that's why the one that was linked previously wasn't what we heard in the final product.
