The Reluctant Celebrity : When Chuck Yeager’s Best-Selling Autobiography Came Out, the Man Who Broke the Sound Barrier Took to the Woods, Not the Talk-Show Circuit

Monday, if research and personal schedules al low, a softer, older Chuck Yeager will fly in private celebration. He’ll be over Rogers Dry Lake and Edwards Air Force Base in an F-20 Tigershark, the scarlet-on-white jet fighter he works as a consulting test pilot for Northrop Corp. And tomorrow’s flight will be work: Aerospace firms no longer have jet fuel and multimillion-dollar aircraft to spare for self-indulgent pilots. Even legends.

But after all tests have been run, no one will gripe if Yeager points his airplane to where atmosphere becomes space and blue turns to pastel purple. There he’ll romp and shadowbox clouds and if there’s another fighter in the area he just might roll in and bounce it.

For 30 of the past 38 years, Yeager has flown to mark this fall day, in 1,400-mile-an-hour combat fighters and aboard his own 60-mile-an-hour ultralight. Except on Sundays. Yeager once was an enlisted Air Force mechanic. He will not work his ground crews on Sundays--not even for his private rite of Oct. 14.

On that day in 1947, more than eight miles above the Tehachapi Mountains, Yeager flew a Bell X-1 rocket ship christened “Glamorous Glennis.” In an orange pipe bomb named after his wife but shaped after a machine-gun bullet, he became the first man to overtake Mach 1, the speed of sound.

“We didn’t know it (the flight) was going to be above Mach 1,” Yeager, now 62, recalls. “We were just increasing our Mach number. All I was going to do was to go on up and probably run it out to about .98.”

Yeager actually ran it out to Mach 1.06, which at 43,000 feet (where thinner air lowers the speed of sound) is about 700 m.p.h.

In doing so, he became the fastest man alive. He’d slipped through a challenge that had killed others. And he changed from an unknown junior officer to an international celebrity who still commands standing ovations four decades later.

His autobiography has spent months at the top of the best-seller list on both coasts and produced a fresh surge of worship for an elderly hero.

Yet it has not budged Yeager from his privacy and preferences. The week the book was published, as talk show hosts called, as magazine writers demanded interviews, Yeager was unreachable and away from the fuss--backpacking and trout fishing the High Sierra.

Ever the realist, Yeager neither overbuilds the achievement nor inflates the elation of his first supersonic flight.

“There have been lots of things written about (my) feelings,” says Yeager. “Well . . . you just sit there and have a fleeting thought like: ‘Man, that wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be.’ ”

Flying faster than sound had challenged aeronautical engineers since the ‘20s. The limits seemed clear. Propeller blades lost lift as planes approached Mach 1. Compressibility--air piling up ahead of a speeding shape--caused airflows to separate, controls to freeze and airplanes to disintegrate.

One aerodynamicist declared that it would take a 30,000-horsepower engine to exceed the speed of sound. He called that a “barrier against further progress.”

A barrier. The sound barrier. But the National Aeronautics Advisory Committee, forerunner of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and Bell Aircraft Corp., manufacturer of World War II fighters, finally broke through. The means were almost simple.

Bullets and shells travel faster than the speed of sound, and they don’t break up. So Bell built an airplane with the profile of a machine-gun bullet.

Then, since propellers and air-breathing engines--including turbojets--couldn’t produce the necessary power, a form of propulsion that required neither was developed: a rocket, a four-chamber blowtorch fueled by compressed liquid oxygen and alcohol.

And to reduce fuel loads so that the plane would be smaller and lighter and would reach high altitudes more easily, the Bell X-1 would be dropped from the belly of a B-29 Superfortress.

After civilian test pilots proved too expensive--one wanted $150,000 to fly the program--the Army took over. Yeager, stationed at Muroc as a maintenance officer, a World War II ace with two Silver Stars, agreed to fly the X-1. The cost would be his military salary of $238 a month.

At 24, he was an aggressive showman. But he was also a calculated perfectionist.

“I know everything I possibly can about the survival equipment that has been given to me, for when things start falling apart . . . you’d better well know how (to use it) even in a subconscious condition. That’s the way you survive.”

That was how he survived the first 11 flights in the X-1. There were in-flight fires, and a flight into the transonic range, beyond Mach .7, when he lost all pitch control. “I just sat there and flopped the controls back and forth,” he remembers.

And it was a cool assessment of risks versus his ability that made Yeager fly that Oct. 14 with broken ribs from a horseback-riding accident two days earlier.

“Monday (Oct. 13) was just a shakedown day for the instrumentation and stuff,” Yeager says. “I don’t do stupid things. I went in and tried the system and said: ‘Can I operate under this system with this handicap?’ And, yes, I could, and so I made a decision that I’d fly the thing.”

Oct. 14, 10:02 a.m.--The Superfortress, the orange rocket inside, started its engines.

10:12 a.m.--Takeoff.

10:15 a.m.--The B-29 climbed to 20,000 feet above the lake bed.

10:20 a.m.--Yeager, having recited all systems and procedures in his head, stepped down a ladder into the X-1’s cockpit and closed the hatch. Checks and double checks began.

There was radio chatter between the B-29, the control tower, NAAC radar, the two chase planes, Yeager and project officer Jack Ridley.

“Four minutes . . . Roger . . . Yeager, this is (chase pilot) Frost. I’m in position now to check your jettison . . . Clear to drop . . . You all set? . . . Hell yes, let’s get it over with . . . Here is your countdown . . . Three, two, one . . . DROP.”

From dark bomb bay to bright sunlight. It was 10:26 a.m.

The free fall ended as Yeager flicked switches to fire two of the four rocket chambers. The rocket plane accelerated, gaining altitude. Forty thousand feet. Yeager leveled off. Four chambers would be too much, two chambers not enough. He fired three.

He remembered that cockpit instruments on earlier flights had shown the plane at about Mach .95. But what he didn’t know then was that there had been an error in the airspeed system. “We’d probably been to .98 or .985 already.”

On this flight, “(as) the Mach meter went through .96 or .965 it fluctuated and went off the scale, and when it went off the scale, all the buffeting quit . . . and I held it out there for about 19 seconds, and I knew we’d got the airplane supersonic.

“I said to myself: ‘We’re getting into regions we’ve never been in before. And we’re obviously doing something right.’ ”

That was it. There was, he insists, neither climax nor anticlimax to the flight.

“That never did apply. Believe nothing you read. You just say: ‘Well, we’ve accomplished the mission, but there’s a helluva lot more work to do with the airplane.’ It doesn’t mean that you’re going to live happily ever after.

“It just means that you survived one more flight, and you’ve got a million other flights to survive.”

On that night 38 years ago, the Muroc Field pilots drank bourbon to one of theirs who’d overtaken the speed of sound. But the occasion wasn’t much wilder than any other party at the end of a day’s work. Morning would bring another job in the same program.

But 10 months after that autumn day, when the security surrounding the program was lifted, there were medals, trophies and presidential meetings for Yeager and the team that had given its country an incredible lead in world aviation.

For Yeager, after Muroc there was service at Edwards, and then Vietnam. He retired from the Air Force in 1975 as a brigadier general, and in February of this year, Yeager and Glennis, who now live in Grass Valley, celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary.

He hunts antelope in Wyoming, fishes for golden trout in High Sierra lakes and advertises spark plugs. Yeager charges $10,000 for speaking engagements, unless it’s an Air Force group. They get to hear him for nothing. The honors continue: Six months ago he was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom in the company of Jacques Cousteau and Mother Teresa.

But Yeager is far from his characteristic equivalent in literature and cinema. He’s no engineering genius; no dour, laconic Sam Shepard.

“The right stuff? It doesn’t mean a thing. The terminology is non-existent to me. I think it is more apropos to say ‘being at the right place at the right time.’ Hell, had (backup test pilot) Bob Hoover been selected as primary pilot and I as backup pilot in the X-1, Bob Hoover would have been the first guy to fly faster than sound, because he flies like I do, which is ‘get on with the program.’

“But he wasn’t and I was, and that’s the way it turns out.”