Yeager Remembered: Highs & Lows

The death this week of 97-year old super-pilot Chuck Yeager, the World War II ace who first broke the sound barrier, later helped improve U.S. fighter designs and set the stage for America’s race to space, prompts posting these conversations from the Newsweek On Air radio show.

“The Right Stuff”- film and facts, https://archive.org/details/newsweekonair_850623_complete at 13:23

The space shuttle Challenger disaster and beyond, https://archive.org/details/newsweekonair_860202_complete at 01:07

Was he ever nervous on a commercial flight? No,” Yeager told the Huntington Quarterly in 2018. “I don’t worry that I’ll arrive at the scene of the accident first, if that’s what you mean. (Laughs) There’s nothing safer than the commercial airlines. Those pilots are well trained, and…fly one airplane day in and day out.”

Yeager agreed it was extraordinary 20/10 vision that made him a great dog-fighter. “Because during World War II there was no radar,” he said. “To pick up the enemies back then, everything depended on your eyesight and visual acuity. When I was flying I could spot the enemy from 25 or 30 miles away. That’s a lot farther than the other guys could…Technology has advanced so much and communication is so good that [now] everyone knows everything that’s going on.”

Yeager confirmed that lack of a college degree kept him out of the NASA astronaut program, but also said he didn’t want to be “spam in a can,” as the first astronauts -- largely captives in their high-flying capsules – were often called.

Still, he noted, “back in 1960, the Air Force was responsible for space...My job was commandant of the astronaut school, which was attended by military test pilots. [But] in 1965, they transferred all the responsibility of space training to NASA…I thought we managed the program a hell of a lot better…”

And he stressed that all he had become he owed to the Air Force. “They took an 18-year-old kid out of the hills of West Virginia with a high school education, and they taught me everything I needed to know,” he said.

In his autobiography, “Yeager,” he wrote: “I’ve had a full life and enjoyed just about every damned minute of it because that’s how I lived.”

See https://huntingtonquarterly.com/2018/09/27/issue-77-hqa-a-chat-with-chuck-yeager/