Chuck Yeager, who piloted the Bell X-1 experimental rocket plane past the sound barrier and thrust America into the dawn of the space age, died Monday. He was 97.
His death, on the 79th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, was announced via his official Twitter account, which, according to The New York Times, cited his wife, Victoria.
General Yeager’s 14-minute sprint over the Mojave Desert on Oct. 14, 1947, is considered the most important airplane flight since Orville Wright swept over the sands of Kitty Hawk for 40 yards on Dec. 17, 1903.
There were, however, few accolades for the 24-year-old captain. No ticker-tape parades, no handshakes from the president. The flight occurred in the early dark days of the Cold War and was filed away as top secret. The public would not know of the feat for months.
Then-Captain Yeager instead celebrated with a few slaps on the back and a round of martinis at the Happy Bottom Riding Club near Muroc Air Base. For the unassuming aviator from the backwoods of West Virginia — his first radio transmission after passing the elusive Mach 1 and breaking the sound barrier was “Ah, we have problems. This ol’ Mach meter is plumb off the scale” — that was plenty of praise.
Born in Hamlin, W.V., Charles E. Yeager developed an acute sense of machines, their parts, and how they worked in unison from his father, a gas-well driller. Enlisting in the Army Air Corps just before the attack on Pearl Harbor, General Yeager initially served as a warrant officer maintaining aircraft.
By 1943, he was in flight school; by the next spring, a P51 Mustang pilot, escorting bombers out of England. On his ninth mission, he was shot down and eluded capture only with the help of a French farmer and the Resistance. When he was ordered stateside to recover, he successfully petitioned Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower to allow him to instead return to the skies over Europe.
Blessed with 20-10 eyesight — his fellow pilots swore he could see forever — General Yeager became a top fighter pilot, shooting down in one day the five planes needed for designation as an “ace;” one day a month later, he downed four more.
After the war, General Yeager found himself in the same place he was at the beginning of his service: on a maintenance team. It proved to be the opportunity of his lifetime. He worked on aircraft at Wright Field in Ohio, and after any plane was tuned up or repaired, he made sure he was the pilot to test it. That way, he got to fly almost every fighter on the flight line.
His flying ability caught the attention of Colonel Albert Boyd, who was trying to build a cadre of top pilots for what became the military’s first test-pilot division.
Boyd would soon get to test the mettle of these recruits. Across the continent, at Muroc base in California, Bell Aircraft was testing its X-1 with civilian test pilots, who then were considered superior to military “fly boys.” Bell engineers were confident the plane could break the sound barrier (Mach 1 is 742 miles per hour at sea level; slightly less as altitude increases), but funding problems threatened to ground the tests. The cost of hiring civilian pilots was too high for the postwar US government. The Army Air Corps, soon to be christened the Air Force, assumed responsibility for the tests.
The next task for Boyd was choosing the X-1 pilot. Some superiors told Boyd the pilot should be a West Pointer, others said he had to have an engineering degree. But Boyd and his assistant, Colonel Fred Ascani, kept coming back to a junior officer.
“Though (Yeager) lacked a college education, Boyd considered him the best instinctive pilot he had ever seen,” Air Force historian James Young wrote in the book, “The Quest of Mach One.”
Ascani was more expansive:
“Yeager flies an airplane as if he is welded to it — as if he is an integral part of it. His ‘feel’ for any strange airplane is instinctive, intuitive and as natural as if he had flown it for 100 or more hours. … No one, earthbound or ethereal, will ever be a clone of Yeager. Never, ever.”
As the flight team traveled to Muroc, the only doubts about the young pilot seemed to be whether his superiors could rein in his sense of adventure.
“He was a little hard to tame,” said Jack Russell, crew chief on the X-1 program. “I’d flown with him before and we were never right side up.”
On his first test of the X-1, a glide test, the rocket plane and General Yeager were released from the dark belly of a B-29 into the blinding sunlight at 18,000 feet. General Yeager immediately piloted the plane into a series of unchoreographed rolls.
The danger of the mission, however, was always apparent. A few months earlier, Britain’s top test pilot, Geoffrey de Havilland Jr., died as his plane disintegrated as it passed .9 Mach. The first X-1 pilot, Jack Woolams, died in a practice flight on another plane.
“Fatalities occurred at a rate that would be considered absolutely unacceptable today,” Walter Boyne, former director of the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum, said.
As planes approached the sound barrier, mysterious forces would freeze controls or shred the fuselage. The culprit, theorists in aerodynamics said, was a phenomenon called “compressibility.” As a plane flies well below the speed of sound, the fuselage pushes the air around it. As a plane approaches the speed of sound, the air moving around the aircraft starts accelerating. When it collides with the slower air, shock waves are created, building up on the wing and violently shaking the plane.
To counter this, the X-1 was designed in the shape of a .50-caliber bullet, which breaks the sound barrier without losing stability.
It was fueled by 600 gallons of ethyl alcohol and liquid oxygen, as volatile a mixture as ever used before. “He was sitting on top of a bomb,” said Bob Hoover, the X-1 backup pilot who would become one of the world’s leading acrobatic pilots.
There was an escape hatch — directly in front of the plane’s razor-thin wings, which would have sliced General Yeager in half if he had tried to bail out.
General Yeager’s only protection was a leather football helmet, which he adapted for the purpose with his penknife. He dubbed the craft Glamorous Glennis after his wife, as he had done with his combat fighters.
After three glide test flights, the team was ready for a powered test. After flipping on one of the plane’s four engine chambers, General Yeager later recalled, “the impact nearly knocks you back into last week. … We are no longer an airplane: We’re a skyrocket. You’re not flying. You’re holding on to a tiger’s tail.”
After three glide and eight powered test flights, General Yeager thought he and the X-1 were ready to break the barrier. But on the morning of Oct. 14, he had to overcome two significant obstacles, one mechanical, one physical.
Project engineer Jackie Ridley solved both.
As the X-1 had approached the sound barrier during the previous test flight, a shock wave rendered the tail’s elevator useless. Without this stabilizing device, General Yeager could not control altitude well enough to increase speed. Ridley correctly surmised that the X-1′s revolutionary movable horizontal tail itself could instead be moved by the pilot in one-quarter degree adjustments, having a similar effect as the elevator. Other project engineers disagreed.
“Chuck was aware, as I was, that the four Ph.D’s on the ground thought we were going to kill Chuck and lose the airplane,” Robert Cardenas, the pilot of the B-29, recalled of that morning. “I said, ‘Chuck, if Ridley’s right, you’re going to be a hero. But if he’s wrong, you’re going to be dead.’”
The physical problem was more embarrassing. Two days before, General Yeager had broken two ribs when his horse tossed him while riding with his wife. He secretly had a private doctor wrap his torso for the flight.
After confessing to Ridley, he realized it would be too painful to close the X-1′s hatch with his right hand and the cockpit was too confining to reach across and close it with his left. The mission was salvaged by a broom stick, which Ridley fashioned into a lever that could close the hatch. After being dropped from the bomber, General Yeager fired all four chambers in succession, then shut off two of them. When, as expected, the plane started buffeting as it passed .90 Mach, he tested adjustments of the tail. Satisfied, General Yeager leveled the plane and fired a third cylinder. The buffeting stopped; the mythical sonic wall had been shattered.
On the way down, General Yeager did victory rolls.
“I was thunderstruck,” he wrote in “Yeager,” an autobiography. “After all the anxiety, breaking the sound barrier turned out to be a perfectly paved speedway. ... Grandma could be sitting up there sipping lemonade.”
Over the next decade, General Yeager cemented his reputation as the greatest test pilot, both for repeatedly setting speed and altitude records and for coolly maneuvering through catastrophic failures. His stature soared on Dec. 12, 1953. Moments after setting the speed record again — at Mach 2.44 (1,650 miles per hour) — his X-1A started an out-of-control spinning and tumbling plunge of about 10 miles in a little more than a minute. The violence of the descent slammed his head against the fuselage, cracking the glass canopy, and generated G-forces of plus 8 (more than twice what space shuttle astronauts felt during ascent). Yet General Yeager was able to regain control at 20,000 feet.
Rival test pilot Scott Crossfield called it “the fastest and wildest airplane ride in history.”
In 1961, General Yeager was named commander of the new Aerospace Research Pilot School, designed to transform military test pilots into astronauts. Because a college degree was required to be part of the astronaut corps, General Yeager never made it himself.
Glennis Yeager died in 1990. They had four children: Donald, Michael, Sharon, and Susan.
General Yeager stayed active, mainly by hiking, including climbing 14,494-foot Mount Whitney every year for many years. He broke the sound barrier again in an Air Force plane at age 74 in 1997 as part of the 50th anniversary celebration of his X-1 flight. He married Victoria Scott D’Angelo in 2003.
For much of his life, General Yeager was a footnote in history. That had changed in 1979, when Tom Wolfe’s epic book “The Right Stuff” was released. In his account of the early days of America’s space program, Wolfe cast the young Yeager as the cowboy of the modern age, a strong, virile, independent sort who let his actions do his talking.
“Tom got a little emotional,” General Yeager said.
Few, however, would downplay the flight that shattered both the sound barrier and the myths surrounding it.
“This was undoubtedly the most significant event in the history of aerospace that took place between the Wright brothers and the landing on the moon,” said Richard P. Hallion, a leading Air Force’s historian. “It started a revolution in high-speed flight. And that revolution opened up the world as we know it today: a world of international, global air transportation and international, global military air power.”
The flight’s pilot put it more plainly: “Break Mach 1, don’t bust your ass, and don’t screw it up. That was it.”
Michael Bailey can be reached at michael.bailey@globe.com.