Legendary Pilot Yeager Goes Out With a Boom

Almost 50 years to the day after he became the first man in history to pilot a jet faster than the speed of sound, retired Brig. Gen. Charles “Chuck” Yeager flew his final military mission Sunday, re-creating for tens of thousands of appreciative spectators the historic flight that helped launch the Space Age.

At precisely 10 a.m., a resounding boom rolled across an expansive dry lake bed, as Yeager, at the controls of an F-15 fighter jet, broke the sound barrier for the last time.

“It’s nice to go out on top,” Yeager, 74, said Sunday in his familiar West Virginia drawl. “These planes sure are fun. They’re a pleasure to fly.”

Yeager, who has said he will never again fly for the military, broke the sound barrier three times last week as part of a 50th-birthday party for the U.S. Air Force, which was formed out of the Army Air Corps in October 1947.

Braving traffic jams that stretched for miles, more than 750,000 visitors turned out Saturday and Sunday for a neck-stretching aerial display of stunt flying, skydiving and more than 90 new and vintage aircraft.

Judging from Sunday’s audience, however, the show clearly belonged to Yeager.

“This is living history. I shook his hand and it was incredible. It’s like meeting [Abraham] Lincoln,” said Paul Frishman, who drove from Las Vegas to witness Yeager’s final flight.

“You look at all these sports stars today who are revered and called heroes. Well, they haven’t done anything like this man did. He’s a true hero,” Frishman said.

In addition to his work as a test pilot, Yeager was a P-51 ace in Europe during World War II, flew combat missions in Vietnam and has commanded operational Air Force wings throughout the world. His name became a household word after his exploits were recounted in the book and movie “The Right Stuff.”

All told, his remarkable military career spanned 55 years.

On Sunday, Yeager was in top form, throwing a jab at President Clinton by commenting that George Bush “was one president who knew the meaning of duty” and showing no hint of the nostalgia expressed by many spectators.

He popped open the cockpit of his F-15, gave a small wave to the crowd and bounded spryly down the steps of his jet. Later, dressed in a green flight suit and white baseball cap, Yeager signed autographs and continued to downplay his accomplishments.

“It wasn’t that much different than 50 years ago. I just fly the airplane and it does the work,” he said.

Yeager was being modest. The truth is that his flight 50 years ago was tremendously dangerous.

“Some folks said it would kill a person to go beyond Mach 1, that it would just crush you,” said Ed Seitz, a retired Lockheed engineer from Loma Linda who helped design several of the planes on display Sunday. “But he took the chance. He put his life on the line and proved that it could be done.”

On Oct. 14, 1947, flying with two ribs broken in a fall from a horse, Yeager became the first person to break the supersonic barrier. His Bell X-1 rocket plane, like the modern plane he flew Sunday, was named for his wife. Fueled by a volatile mixture of liquid oxygen and alcohol, the “Glamorous Glennis” soared 26,000 feet above the California desert at the unheard-of speed of 600 mph.

Air Force historian Dick Hallion has called the flight “undoubtedly the most significant event in the history of aerospace that took place between the Wright Brothers and the landing on the moon.”

“What most people don’t realize was the tremendous amount of risk Chuck was undergoing,” said Bob Hoover, himself a legendary combat and test pilot who served as Yeager’s backup pilot on the X-1 project. Part of the danger, Hoover said, was that the fuel was so combustible that stray sparks could cause the plane to explode.

“If anything went wrong, his chances of survival were slim and none,” Hoover said. “He was sitting on top of a bomb.”