If there was a single, seismic event that propelled Chuck Yeager to fame, for Robert A. Hoover, universally known as “Bob,” there were a thousand small tremors. As Yeager’s backup and the number two option to go supersonic, Hoover was on the doorstep to Yeager-like fame, but that’s not the way it went down.
As was made famous in the book and film “The Right Stuff,” Yeager gutted it out, compensating for injuries sustained in a horseback riding accident shortly before his famous flight, and so fame was a given. Hoover, who died in 2016, almost certainly would have made a better spokesperson for all things supersonic—he was one of the best storytellers I’ve ever met—but instead, his path to fame, if you can call it that, followed very different terrain. And while Hoover is a near-deity to pilots, he’s not well known outside of aviation. Which apparently was just fine with Bob.
As a young man, Hoover went to war, like Yeager did, flying fighters against the Luftwaffe. Unlike Yeager, whom fate would yoke to Hoover for the rest of his life, the young Hoover got shot down while flying a Spitfire over Sicily. He was captured and held by the Germans as a POW for 16 months. When a riot broke out, Hoover climbed a fence, along with two other American soldiers, and took off, eventually finding an airport and an unattended German fighter, a Focke- Wulf Fw 190 with enough fuel to make it to Holland, where he landed after seeing tulips and windmills. After a few tense hours facing off with Dutch farmers, who assumed he was a downed German pilot, he was rescued by British troops.
After the war, he was sent to Muroc, California, where he met Yeager and became his crew chief and backup. Hoover flew chase on the October day in 1947 that Yeager moved the Mach meter for the first time into supersonic territory.
Whereas Yeager became a career military man, Hoover left the service in 1948 and worked in what we now refer to as the defense industry. He test-flew aircraft and mentored fighter pilots in Korea, where, despite his civilian status, he flew numerous bombing missions.
But what pushed him to fame was his airshow flying career. From the early 1960s into the 1990s, Hoover flew at many hundreds of airshow events in one of two planes, his bright yellow P-51 dubbed “Ole Yeller” or his Shrike Commander, a twin-engine civilian plane that he for many years demonstrated for the manufacturer, North American Rockwell.
His airshow routine was world famous—again, among aviation types. In the Shrike, Hoover would shut down one of the engines and fly much of the series single engine, a challenging and risky configuration, though apparently not for Bob. When he was tired of flying advanced aerobatic maneuvers on one engine, Hoover would shut down the one working engine and proceed to fly a series of maneuvers using only the energy the impromptu glider already had, culminating in a silky-smooth landing with both engines shut down.
In his later years, Hoover became a folk hero in aviation after the FAA revoked his medical certificate over the agency’s concern for Hoover’s competence to fly. It was a move the FAA miscalculated, as the aviation world rallied behind Bob. Before long, it was his revocation that got revoked, and Hoover flew airshows for many years afterward, delighting hundreds of thousands of airshow goers with performances that never dulled with time. Hoover, who died in 2016, remains an inspirational figure in the aviation world, not for any singular achievement but, rather, for a life’s work in the air conducted with grace, humor and humility, always underscored by his great skill as a pilot.
