‘SMOKING AT 1.35’

Fifty years after he broke the sound barrier and ushered in the space age, Chuck Yeager recreated his historic flight Tuesday with a thundering sonic boom across the Mojave Desert.

Piloting an F-15 jet fighter through a cloudless sky, the 74-year-old Yeager radioed from the cockpit, “I’m smoking along at about 1.35”--meaning 1.35 times the speed of sound, or roughly 900 to 950 mph.

Edwards AFB, which became the crucible for Air Force test flying, remains the site for many space shuttle landings on its dry, hard lake bed of prehistoric silt.

And Yeager, who will continue to fly for industry, said the anniversary flight Tuesday will be his last in an Air Force plane.

“I’ll miss military flying. I’ve been doing it 55 years,” he said in a recent interview. “I’ve been very lucky . . . I might as well hang it up while I’m on top.”

“I was at the right place, at the right time,” Yeager said. “I knew it had opened up the world to us, speed-wise, right into space.”

The flight was kept a military secret until the following year, 1948, but the feat and Yeager himself quickly became American legends, mythologized in the subsequent novel and movie, “The Right Stuff.”