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Retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Charles “Chuck” Yeager, the World War II fighter ace who displayed “the right stuff” when he became the first aviator to break the sound barrier nearly three quarters of a century ago, died Monday night in a Los Angeles hospital. He was 97.
“My life love General Chuck Yeager passed just before 9 pm ET,” his widow, Victoria, tweeted. “An incredible life well lived, America’s greatest pilot & a legacy of strength, adventure”
NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine called his 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,” Bridenstine said in a statement.
“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 added.
Maj. Gen. Curtis Bedke, commander of the Flight Test Center at Edwards Air Force Base, called Yeager “the most righteous of all those with the right stuff.”
The phrase had been the title of a nonfiction book by Tom Wolfe that was made into a film whose stars included Sam Shepard as Yeager, with a cameo by the man himself (as Fred, the bartender at “Pancho’s Place”).
“Living to a ripe old age is not an end in itself. The trick is to enjoy the years remaining,” he wrote in “Yeager: An Autobiography.”
“I haven’t yet done everything, but by the time I’m finished, I won’t have missed much,” Yeager added. “If I auger in (crash) tomorrow, it won’t be with a frown on my face. I’ve had a ball.”
Born in the West Virginia town of Myra, Yeager packed those good times into 60 years of flying, including piloting an X-15 that hit nearly 1,000 mph at Edwards AF Base in October 2002, when he was 79.
Back in 1947, Yeager, then a captain, flew a Bell X-1 rocket plane dubbed “Glamorous Glennis” beyond 660 mph, the first time anyone had flown faster than sound.
He said the feat was “nice, just like riding fast in a car.”
“It wasn’t a matter of not having airplanes that would fly at speeds like this. It was a matter of keeping them from falling apart,” Yeager said.
The U.S. government kept his extraordinary accomplishment a secret for nearly a year.
In October 2012 – 65 years after that flight – Yeager sat in the back seat of an F-15 Eagle as it broke the sound barrier over California’s Mojave Desert.
"All that I am ... I owe to the Air Force,” he once said.
Yet Yeager’s also said he regretted missing out on becoming an astronaut because he didn’t go to college.
Yeager enlisted instead in the U.S. Army Air Corps right out of high school in 1941 and initially worked as a mechanic before signing up to fly. Yeager reportedly shot down more than a dozen German plans during World War II, including five in one mission.
Yeager was shot down over what was then German-held France, only to escape with help from French partisans.
He became a test pilot after the war, then returned to service for bombing and strafing runs during the Vietnam War.
By his own estimate, Yeager flew 341 types of military planes in every country in the world and logged about 18,000 hours.
“My beginnings back in West Virginia tell who I am to this day,” Yeager wrote. “My accomplishments as a test pilot tell more about luck, happenstance and a person’s destiny. But the guy who broke the sound barrier was the kid who swam the Mud River with a swiped watermelon or shot the head off a squirrel before going to school.”
Yeager, who received a Silver Star, Distinguished Flying Cross, Bronze Star, Air Medal and Purple Heart, also received a Collier air trophy a year after he broke the sound barrier and a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1985.
The father of four finally retired from military service in 1975 after 33 years of active duty and bought a California ranch while consulting for the Air Force and Northrop Corp.
Ten years later, President Reagan appointed Yeager to the Rogers Commission, which investigated the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger.
Yeager’s first wife, Glennis Dickhouse, died in 30 years ago this month. They’d been married 45 years.
He married Victoria Scott D’Angelo in 2003.
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