At the time, nobody knew if challenging the sound barrier meant that the sound barrier would slap back, ripping to pieces any plane that tried to defy it. The achievement was more than just the stuff of record-setting. 14, 1947 when Yeager truly chiseled his name in history, flying a Bell X-1 aircraft 13,000 m (43,000 ft.) above the Mojave desert, gunning his jet to nearly 1,125 km/hr (700 mph), thereby exceeding the speed of sound and producing the first sonic boom ever created by human beings. And you don’t return to battle during the Vietnam War, at age 43 flying 127 missions, if you are easily unsettled by such existential matters as injury and death.Īll of that was true of Yeager, and all of that would have been enough to earn him his own spot on aviation’s more modest Rushmore.
You don’t get shot down over France, suffering leg and head wounds, and elude capture by the German Army by hiking across the Pyrenees with French partisans, making it to neutral Spain and eventually returning to England, by being easily moved. You don’t fly 64 combat missions in World War II-shooting down 13 German planes, including five in one day to earn the honorific of “flying ace”-without a tough hide. If Yeager was gruff, and he was if he was unsentimental, and he was if he was brusque and dismissive and impossible to rattle but easy to annoy-and he was-there was almost no other way he could be. “Well Borman,” he said, “You can kiss your Air Force career goodbye.” Then he looked back down at his work.
Yeager said nothing at first, merely nodding.
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