Chuck Yeager

Chuck Yeager, born in 1923, 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 (see Mach Number).

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 attempted to break the altitude record 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.

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, and was awarded the Medal of Honor by President Gerald Ford the following year. His autobiography, Yeager, was published in 1985.