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 Yeager's death was announced on
his twitter account by his wife, Victoria.
"It is w/ profound sorrow, I must tell you that
my life love General Chuck Yeager passed just
before 9pm ET. An incredible life well lived,
America’s greatest Pilot, & a legacy of
strength, adventure, & patriotism will be
remembered forever," Victoria Yeager said in the
tweet.
Yeager, an unlikely candidate to become one of
the most famous aviators in history, joined the
U.S. Army Air Corps in 1941 just to work on the
engines of airplanes, not to fly them. His first
plane ride made him throw up.
Yeager was passed over for the burgeoning U.S.
space program because he never went to college
but he was hardly heartbroken not to become an
astronaut. He considered them mere passengers
"throwing the right switches on instructions
from the ground."
Author Tom Wolfe was so impressed by the mien of
the rough-hewn man from Hamlin, West Virginia,
that he made Yeager a prominent character in
"The Right Stuff," his 1979 book about the early
days of the space program.
Wolfe said Yeager was blessed with "the right
stuff" that made him a legendary test pilot but
Yeager said it was more a matter of luck,
better-than-average vision and a thorough
knowledge of his planes.
Those attributes served Yeager well in World War
Two. Flying a P-51 Mustang named Glamorous
Glennis in tribute to his girlfriend, Glennis
Dickhouse, he was credited with 12 "kills" of
German planes - including five in a single
dogfight.
After the war he became a test pilot and was
assigned to Muroc Air Force Base in California
as part of the secret XS-1 project, which had a
goal of hitting Mach 1, the speed of sound.
Yeager was a 24-year-old captain, testing out a
dozen planes a week, when he first outraced
sound on Oct. 14, 1947, in the bright orange
Bell X-1 craft.
NOT DETERRED BY BROKEN RIBS
He had broken two ribs in a horseback riding
accident a few days before but did not tell his
superiors for fear they would ground him.
Because of the pain, he had to use a sawed-off
broomstick to close the X-1's cockpit before
takeoff.
A B-29 bomber carried the X-1 26,000 feet (7,925
m) over California's Mojave Desert and let it
go. Neither Yeager nor aviation engineers knew
if the plane - or the pilot - would be able to
handle the unprecedented speed without breaking
up. But Yeager took the 31-foot (10 meter) X-1,
powered by liquid oxygen and alcohol, to Mach
1.06, about 700 mph (1,126 kph) at 43,000 feet
(13,000 meters), as if it were a routine flight.
He then calmly brought the craft, which was also
named for Glennis, who was by then his wife,
gliding down to a dry lake bed, 14 minutes after
it had been cut loose on a flight that was a
significant step toward space exploration.
[to top of second column]
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 Yeager said he had noted a Mach
0.965 reading on his speedometer before it
jumped off the scale without a bump.
"I was thunderstruck," he wrote in his 1985
autobiography "Yeager." "After all the anxiety,
breaking the sound barrier turned out to be a
perfectly paved speedway."
Yeager was unfazed by having a job that took him
to the brink of death with every outing - such
as the 1953 flight on which he safely landed his
X-1A after hitting Mach 2.4 and then losing
control of the aircraft for 51 seconds.
"It's your duty to fly the airplane," he told an
interviewer. "If you get killed in it, you don't
know anything about it anyway so why worry about
it?"
Charles Elwood Yeager was born in Myra, West
Virginia, on Feb. 13, 1923, one of five
siblings. As a schoolboy, he liked math and
could type 60 words per minute - an indication
of the hand-eye coordination that would serve
him so well in the cockpit.
Yeager had no interest in airplanes as a youth -
he did not even see one until he was 18, when he
joined the U.S. Army Air Corps to be a mechanic.
After his test pilot heyday, Yeager commanded
fighter squadrons and flew 127 combat missions
during the Vietnam War.
In the early 1960s, he was in charge of
astronaut-style training for Air Force personnel
but that program ended when the U.S. government
decided not to militarize space. Still, 26
people trained by Yeager went into orbit as NASA
astronauts. Yeager reached the
rank of brigadier general and in 1997 he marked
the 50th anniversary of his historic flight by
taking an F-15 past the speed of sound. He then
announced that it was his last military flight.
Yeager became something of a social media
sensation in 2016 at age 93 when he began
fielding questions from the public on Twitter
and responding in a curt and sometimes
curmudgeonly manner. When asked what he thought
about the moon, he replied, "It's there."
Yeager and Glennis, who died of cancer in 1990,
had four children. He married Victoria Scott
D'Angelo in 2003.
(Writing and reporting by Bill Trott; Additional
reporting by Dan Whitcomb and Shubham Kalia;
Editing by Diane Craft and Raju Gopalakrishnan)
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