Posted on Tuesday, 14 February 2012

i12bent: No big OF spotlight tonight, just a lone American hero… Chuck Yeager (b. Feb. 13, 1923) was a test pilot in the early days of jet and rocket planes. He became the first man to break the sound barrier in 1947, flying a Bell X-1 plane - named Glamorous Glennis, after his wife, of course… Yeager continued flying and setting records long after his formal retirement. His exploits were memorably described in Tom Wolfe’s book The Right Stuff… “That’s all a man needs… To be forty years old and to fall one hundred goddamned thousand feet in a flat spin and punch out and make a million-dollar hole in the ground and get half his head and his hand burned up and have his eye practically ripped out of his skull and have the Good Samaritan, A.A.D., arrive as if sent by the spirit of Pancho Barnes herself to render a midnight verdict among the motherless Joshua trees while screen doors bang and the pictures of a hundred dead pilots rattle in their frames: ‘My God!… you look awful.’” —Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff Above - Chuck Yeager with the Douglas X-3. (U.S. Air Force photo)

i12bent:

No big OF spotlight tonight, just a lone American hero…

Chuck Yeager (b. Feb. 13, 1923) was a test pilot in the early days of jet and rocket planes. He became the first man to break the sound barrier in 1947, flying a Bell X-1 plane - named Glamorous Glennis, after his wife, of course…

Yeager continued flying and setting records long after his formal retirement. His exploits were memorably described in Tom Wolfe’s book The Right Stuff…

“That’s all a man needs… To be forty years old and to fall one hundred goddamned thousand feet in a flat spin and punch out and make a million-dollar hole in the ground and get half his head and his hand burned up and have his eye practically ripped out of his skull and have the Good Samaritan, A.A.D., arrive as if sent by the spirit of Pancho Barnes herself to render a midnight verdict among the motherless Joshua trees while screen doors bang and the pictures of a hundred dead pilots rattle in their frames: ‘My God!… you look awful.’” —Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff

Above - Chuck Yeager with the Douglas X-3. (U.S. Air Force photo)

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