‘It’ll Never Replace Sex’ : Yeager Sets a Slow Record to Mark 1st Wright Flight

Pioneering pilot Chuck Yeager set yet another aviation mark today, flying from the California desert to Kitty Hawk to establish a speed record and mark the 83rd anniversary of the Wright Brothers’ famed flight.

“It’ll never replace sex,” a smiling Yeager said as he emerged from the Piper Cheyenne 400LS twin-engine turboprop at 7:05 a.m. “I’d been waiting all morning to say that.”

Yeager said Dec. 17 is to aviators what Christmas is to Christians.

The retired Air Force general took off Tuesday night from Edwards Air Force Base, where he broke the sound barrier in 1947. He reached Kitty Hawk five hours and 15 minutes later.

Yeager said his average speed was 450 m.p.h., but because no speed record for this type of aircraft currently exists between those two points, any speed would have set the record.

“We didn’t have nothing to fight,” Yeager said. “We laid one down for them to shoot at.”

But he belittled another record-breaking attempt--the current flight of the Voyager, an experimental aircraft trying to fly around the world without refueling.

“The Voyager? That’s just one of those things,” Yeager said. “That’s like taking a car from Los Angeles and driving it to New York and putting a big enough fuel tank in it so you don’t have to stop.

“The technology in the Voyager is old technology--it’s not a breakthrough.”

Today is the 83rd anniversary of the Wright Brothers’ Dec. 17, 1903, flight at Kitty Hawk, the first successful sustained flight. It also is the 50th anniversary of Piper Aircraft, the company that made the plane Yeager flew with co-pilot Renald Davenport.

“He (Yeager) said he wanted to take off from Edwards because this is where the state of the art of aviation is being pioneered” said base spokesman Don Haley.

Yeager is no relation to pilot Jeana Yeager, who with Dick Rutan is trying to set an aviation record by circling the globe without refueling in the Voyager.