Yeager Has Record Slice of ‘Cake’

--Calling the flight “a piece of cake,” legendary test pilot Chuck Yeager added three more speed records to his string, including coast-to-coast nonstop flight time for a class of turboprop plane. Yeager, who was the first man to break the sound barrier, piloted a Piper Cheyenne 400 LS from Burbank Airport to La Guardia Airport in New York in 5 hours, 23 minutes. That mark bettered by more than an hour the previous record of 6 hours, 28 minutes set early last year on the 2,457-mile trip, and gave the 63-year-old retired Air Force brigadier general a total of 36 records set. Yeager, who has a best-selling autobiography, “Yeager,” and was profiled in the book and film “The Right Stuff,” said that he never had any doubts that he would break the old record. “We took a look at the winds and knew it would be a piece of cake,” said Yeager, who was accompanied on the flight by C.E. (Bud) Anderson, a friend since World War II. “You don’t have feelings when you fly an airplane, you just have a lot of fun. Anything that’s a challenge is fun.” The records were for a business turboprop aircraft weighing between 6,700 and 13,000 pounds, and included speed records for the first leg of the trip, Burbank to Charleston, W.Va., and for flight from Charleston to New York.

--Thousands of raucous revelers crowded the narrow streets of New Orleans’ French Quarter for the final weekend of Carnival, the pre-Lenten bash that reaches a climax on Mardi Gras, or Fat Tuesday, the last day before Lent begins on Ash Wednesday. “I’m going to be partying like crazy, like everyone else,” said Geoffrey Warner, a 27-year-old toolmaker visiting from Adelaide, Australia. More than 1 million people are expected to be in the streets of New Orleans and its suburbs for the world’s biggest block party.

--Nurses at a Rochester, N.Y., hospital have to be doubly careful about giving Victor John Foti his medicine. Two men with that name are in the hospital, both diagnosed by the same doctor and scheduled for the same surgery. “We have had patients with the same last name, but not with the same first and middle name, same surgery and same physician,” said Kae Robertson, surgical head nurse of Strong Memorial Hospital. Victor Foti, 59, of Irondequoit, entered the hospital Feb. 2 for a coronary-bypass operation. The following day, Victor Foti, 64, of Fairport, was admitted for the same procedure. Robertson said that to eliminate confusion, nurses have placed the men in rooms at opposite ends of the section and are marking all their medications with warnings that another patient has the same name.