The NYTimes obit. It's a PITA to cut, paste and reformat, but the least I can do for the General...
[HEADING=2]Chuck Yeager, Test Pilot Who Broke the Sound Barrier, Is Dead at 97[/HEADING]
A World War II fighter ace and Air Force general, he was, according to Tom Wolfe, “the most righteous of all the possessors of the right stuff.”
[IMG alt="Chuck Yeager in 1948. The previous year, he became the first pilot to break the sound barrier."]
Chuck Yeager in 1948. The previous year, he became the first pilot to break the sound barrier.Credit...Associated Press
By [Richard Goldstein]('https://www.nytimes.com/by/richard-goldstein')
Published Dec. 7, 2020 Updated Dec. 8, 2020, 12:44 a.m. ET
Chuck Yeager, the most famous test pilot of his generation who was the first to break the sound barrier, and, thanks to Tom Wolfe, came to personify the death-defying aviator who possessed the elusive yet unmistakable “right stuff,” died on Monday at a hospital in Los Angeles. He was 97.
His death was announced [via his official Twitter account]('https://twitter.com/GenChuckYeager/status/1336150145369444352'), which cited his wife, Victoria, and confirmed by John Nicoletti, a family friend, by phone.
General Yeager came out of the West Virginia hills with only a high school education and with a drawl that left many a fellow pilot bewildered. The first time he went up in a plane, he was sick to his stomach.
But he became a fighter ace in World War II, shooting down five German planes in a single day and 13 over all. In the decade that followed, he helped usher in the age of military jets and spaceflight. He flew more than 150 military aircraft, logging more than 10,000 hours in the air.
His signal achievement came on Oct. 14, 1947, when he climbed out of a B-29 bomber as it ascended over California’s Mojave Desert from what was then known as Muroc Air Force Base, and entered the cockpit of an orange, bullet-shaped, rocket-powered experimental plane attached to the bomb bay.
An Air Force captain at the time, he zoomed off in the plane, a Bell Aircraft X-1, at an altitude of 23,000 feet, and when he reached about 43,000 feet above the desert, history’s first sonic boom reverberated across the floor of the dry lake beds. He had reached a speed of 700 miles an hour, breaking the sound barrier and dispelling the long-held fear that any plane flying at or beyond the speed of sound would be torn apart by shock waves.
“After all the anticipation to achieve this moment, it really was a letdown,” [he wrote in his best-selling memoir]('https://www.nytimes.com/1985/06/26/arts/gen-chuck-yeager-logs-his-life-in-a-book.html') “Yeager” (1985), a collaboration with Leo Janos. “There should’ve been a bump in the road, something to let you know that you had just punched a nice, clean hole through the sonic barrier. The Ughknown was a poke through Jell-O. Later on, I realized that this mission had to end in a letdown because the real barrier wasn’t in the sky but in our knowledge and experience of supersonic flight.”
Nonetheless, that exploit ranked alongside the Wright brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903 and Charles Lindbergh’s solo fight to Paris in 1927 as epic events in the history of aviation. In 1950, General Yeager’s X-1 plane, which he christened Glamorous Glennis, honoring his wife, went on display at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington.
[IMG alt="Chuck Yeager, center, as an 8th Air Force fighter pilot in Europe in front of his P-51 Mustang with his ground crew."]
Chuck Yeager, center, as an 8th Air Force fighter pilot in Europe in front of his P-51 Mustang with his ground crew. Credit...Courtesy of Chuck Yeager
But General Yeager, in the headlines for a time, became a national celebrity only after the publication of “The Right Stuff,” by Tom Wolfe, in 1979 and the movie based on it four years later, in which General Yeager was played by Sam Shepard. In the opening scene, he was depicted breaking the sound barrier.
In his portrayal of the astronauts of NASA’s Mercury program, Mr. Wolfe wrote about the post-World War II test pilot fraternity in California’s desert and its notion that “a man should 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.”
That quality, understood but unspoken, would entitle a pilot to be part of “the very Brotherhood of the Right Stuff itself.”
Mr. Wolfe also wrote about a nonchalance affected by pilots in the face of an emergency in a voice “specifically Appalachian in origin” that was first heard in military circles but ultimately emanated from the cockpits of commercial airliners.
