'America's greatest Pilot' Chuck Yeager, first person to break sound barrier, dies at 97

[Geee]

USA Today

 

Chuck Yeager, the first person to break the sound barrier and one of the U.S. Air Force's most decorated test pilots, died Monday. He was 97.

Yeager's death was announced on his official Twitter account in a tweet attributed to his wife Victoria Scott D'Angelo.

"It is w/ profound sorrow, I must tell you that my life love General Chuck Yeager passed just before 9pm ET," the tweet said. "An incredible life well lived, America’s greatest Pilot, & a legacy of strength, adventure, & patriotism will be remembered forever."

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine called Yeager's death "a tremendous loss to our nation."

“Gen. Yeager’s pioneering and innovative spirit advanced America’s abilities in the sky and set our nation’s dreams soaring into the jet age and the space age. He said, ‘You don’t concentrate on risks. You concentrate on results. No risk is too great to prevent the necessary job from getting done,'” Bridenstine said in a statement.

[Valin]

The Right Stuff

Tom Wolfe

Chapter 3

3 - Yeager

Anyone who travels very much on airlines in the United States soon gets to know the voice of the airline pilot... coming over the intercom... with a particular drawl, a particular folksiness, a particular down-homecalmness that is so exaggerated it begins to parody itself(nevertheless!—it's reassuring)... the voice that tells you, as the airliner is caught in thunderheads and goes bolting up and down a thousand feet at a single gulp, to check your seat belts because "it might get a little choppy"... the voice that tells you (on a flight from Phoenix preparing for its final approach into Kennedy Airport, New York, just after dawn): "Now, folks,uh... this is the captain... ummmm... We've got a little ol' red light up here on the control panel that's tryin' to tell us that the landin' gears're not... uh... lockin' into position when we lower em.... Now... I don't believe that little ol' red light knows what it's talkin' about—I believe it's that little ol' red light that iddn' workin' right"... faint chuckle, long pause, as if to say, I'm not even sure all this is really worth going into—still, it may amuse you... "But... I guess to play it by the rules, we oughta humor that little ol' light... so we're gonna take her down to about, oh, two or three hundred feet over the runway at Kennedy, and the folks down there on the ground are gonna see if they caint give us a visual inspection of those ol' landin' gears"—with which he is obviously on intimate ol'-buddy terms,as with every other working part of this mighty ship—"and if I'm right... they're gonna tell us everything is copacetic all the way aroun' an' we'll jes take her on in"... and, after a couple of low passes over the field,the voice returns: "Well, folks, those folks down thereon the ground—it must be too early for 'em or somethin'—I 'spect they still got the sleepers in their eyes... 'cause they say they caint tell if those ol' landin' gears are all the way down or not...

(Snip)

Well!—who doesn't know that voice! And who can forget it!—even after he is proved right and the emergency is over.That particular voice may sound vaguely Southern or Southwestern, but it is specifically Appalachian in origin.It originated in the mountains of West Virginia, in the coal country, in Lincoln County, so far up in the hollows that, as the saying went, "they had to pipe in daylight."In the late 1940's and early 1950's this up-hollow voice drifted down from on high, from over the high desert of California, down, down, down, from the upper reaches of the Brotherhood into all phases of American aviation.It was amazing. It was Pygmalion in reverse. Military pilots and then, soon, airline pilots, pilots from Maine and Massachusetts and the Dakotas and Oregon and everywhere else, began to talk in that poker-hollowWest Virginia drawl, or as close to it as they could bend their native accents. It was the drawl of the most righteous of all the possessors of the right stuff: ChuckYeager.

(Snip)

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 Who's The Geezer?

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Dec. 9 2020