Chuck Yeager

A high school graduate who rose in the ranks of the Army Air Forces due to his tremendous talent as a pilot, Chuck Yeager, the first person to bust the speed of sound, is for many pilots the pinnacle of accomplishment.

When people learn about Chuck Yeager, many folks assume that when he became the first person to fly faster than the speed of sound, in October of 1947 in the high desert of southern California, the presses worldwide must have been stopped. Ticker-tape parades and speaking tours surely followed. But nothing of the sort happened. Instead, he continued in relative anonymity at Muroc Dry Lake among the Joshua trees and X-planes. Fame would come a bit later, when the next year, he was feted and awarded the prestigious Collier Trophy.

But in aviation circles, Yeager was a big deal even before busting the sound barrier. Despite possessing only a high school diploma, he was able to trade in his Air Corps wrenches for a leather jacket and went to fly in battle in Europe. He became an ace while piloting a P-51 Mustang, Glamorous Glen, named after his wife, recording 11.5 kills, including a rare shootdown of a jet, the Messerschmitt Me 262.

After the war, Yeager's skills as a pilot and leader were well known, so his choice to fly the Bell XS-1 in the trials was not a big surprise. But because of the secrecy surrounding the program, it was around eight months before the news of the first Mach 1 flight came to light. Yeager, ever the fierce competitor, continued to fly faster, to command squadrons and fly in combat up through Vietnam. The fame wasn't what he wanted. It was what he got for his achievements, especially that one, and it was pushing himself and proving himself that mattered to him more than anything. A big part of Yeager's fame was that very quality, an intensity of purpose and self-belief that predated that first supersonic flight by many years and stayed with him for the rest of his years until he died in 2020.

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Isabel GoyerWriter