Reply With QuoteAn extraordinary man and a life right out of Boys Own adventure stories.
An incredible pioneer in aviation and the Space Programme, now sadly gone
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-55225903
An extraordinary man and a life right out of Boys Own adventure stories.
Incredible bravery and achievements...
There's already a thread for Chuck.
David
Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations
My childhood hero. He led a life very few can ever compare too. A life full of remarkable achievements.
He was shot down over France but escaped back to the UK through Spain (helping build explosives for the french resistance whilst he was in France), whilst escaping helped another US airman across the border helping him also escape.
Becoming ‘ace in a day’ by shooting down 5 German aircraft in a day (2 without firing a shot)
Shooting down one of the first (if not the first) ME262 jet - possibly the first jet victory in history, whilst in a piston engine aircraft. (He ended up with 11.5 confirmed kills)
The first man to break the sound barrier in level flight
Test pilot.
He was the fastest man on earth at least twice
He flew combat missions over Vietnam
He was still flying for the USAF in 2012. His last supersonic flight was at the age of 89,
All from a man that did not meet the criteria to start pilot training because he did not have a degree.
Apparently, He didn’t like the English - but nobody is perfect...
Last edited by Sinnlover; 8th December 2020 at 10:51.
Sad. Also, reminds me that it is time to re-read "The Right Stuff".
Funnily enough I read it not so long ago and watched the film again, both of which features Yeager quite heavily.Originally Posted by Andrzej
The Nat Geo channel TV series, in contrast, makes no reference (that I recall) to him at all. It (the series) is rather different to the book and film in many ways though, painting all the astronauts (especially Glenn) in a far less positive light.
Anyway, RIP Yeager, even if you didn't like the English!
M
Breitling Cosmonaute 809 - What's not to like?
Not a lot of people know that although the first human to break the sound barrier was Chuck Yeager, a fox called Basil Brush did it first. Boom boom.
Joking aside, what a legend. RIP.
Pedantically, he wasn't the first to break the sound barrier, either, but he was the first to do it in level flight (at least to live to tell the tale!)
Basil was a bit of a legend too, though
M
Breitling Cosmonaute 809 - What's not to like?
Astonishing that someone who took so many risks should have lived to such a ripe old age - truly one of few. RIP Chuck.
At 97 you clearly were made of the "The Right Stuff".
RIP Chuck
RIP to the great Chuck Yeager. Took life into extra innings!
You have to admire his optimism. Wearing a parachute whilst sitting in the X1. There no way he would have been able to bail out if it went wrong. Still he needed to sit on something.Astonishing that someone who took so many risks should have lived to such a ripe old age - truly one of few. RIP Chuck.
Yeager had taken the NF-104 up for three checkout flights, edging it up gradually toward 100,000 feet, where the limits of the envelope, whatever they were, would begin to reveal themselves. And now he was out on the flight line for the second of two major preliminary flights. Tomorrow he would let it all out and go for the record. It was another of those absolutely clear brilliant afternoons on the dome of the world. In the morning flight everything had gone exactly according to plan. He had taken the ship up to 108,000 feet after cutting in the rocket engine at 60,000. The rocket had propelled the ship up at a 50-degree angle of attack. One of the disagreeable sides of the ship was her dislike of extreme angles. At any angle greater than 30 degrees, her nose would pitch up, which was the move she made just before going into spins. But at 108,000 feet it was no problem. The air was so thin at that altitude, so close to being pure "space," that the reaction controls, the hydrogen-peroxide thrusts, worked beautifully. Yeager had only to nudge the sidearm hand controller by his lap and a thruster on top of the nose of the plane pushed the nose right down again, and he was in perfect position to re-enter the dense atmosphere below. Now he was going up for one final exploration of that same region before going for broke tomorrow.
At 40,000 feet Yeager began his speed run. He cut in the afterburner and it slammed him back in his seat, and he was now riding an engine with nearly 16,000 pounds of thrust. As soon as the Machmeter hit 2.2, he pulled back on the stick and started the climb. The afterburner would carry him to 60,000 feet before exhausting its fuel. At precisely that moment he threw the switch for the rocket engine… terrific jolt… He's slammed back in his seat again. The nose pitches up to 70 degrees. The g-forces start rising. The desert sky starts falling away. He's going straight up into the indigo. At 78,000 feet a light on the console… as usual… the main engine overheating from the tremendous exertion of the climb. He throws the switch, and shuts it down, but the rocket is still accelerating. Who doesn't know this feeling if he doesn't! The bastards are fantastic!… One hundred thousand feet… He shuts down the rocket engine. He's still climbing. The g-forces slide off… makes you feel like you're pitching forward… He's weightless, coming over the top of the arc… 104,000 feet… It's absolutely silent… Twenty miles up… The sky is almost black. He's looking straight up into it, because the nose of the ship is pitched up. His angle of attack is still about 50 degrees. He's over the top of the arc and coming down. He pushes the sidearm control to bring down the nose of the ship. Nothing happens… He can hear the thruster working but the nose isn't budging. It's still pitched up. He hits the thruster again… Shit!… She won't go down!… Now he can see it, the whole diagram… This morning at 108,000 feet the air was so thin it offered no resistance and you could easily push the nose down with the thrusters. At 104,000 feet the air remains just thick enough to exert aerodynamic pressure. The thrusters aren't strong enough to overcome it… He keeps hitting the reaction controls… The hydrogen peroxide squirts out of the jet on the nose of the ship and doesn't do a goddamned thing… He's dropping and the nose is still pitched up…The outside of the envelope!… well, here it is, the sonofabitch… It doesn't want to stretch… and here we go!… The ship snaps into a flat spin. It's spinning right over its center of gravity, like a pinwheel on a stick. Yeager's head is on the outer edge of the circle, spinning around. He pushes the sidearm control again. The hydrogen peroxide is finished. He has 600 pounds of fuel left in the main engine but there's no way to start it up. To relight the engine you have to put the ship nose down into a dive and force air through the intake duct and start the engine windmilling to build up the rpms. Without rpms there's no hydraulic pressure and without hydraulic pressure you can't move the stabilizer wings on the tail and without the stabilizer wings you can't control this bastard at the lower altitudes… He's in a steady-state flat spin and dropping… He's whirling around at a terrific rate… He makes himself keep his eyes pinned on the instruments… A little sightseeing at this point and it's vertigo and you're finished… He's down to 80,000 feet and the rpms are at dead zero… He's falling 150 feet a second… 9,000 feet a minute… And what do I do next?… here in the jaws of the Gulp… I've tried A!—I've tried B!—The damned beast isn't making a sound… just spinning around like a length of pipe in the sky… He has one last shot… the speed brakes, a parachute rig in the tail for slowing the ship down after a highspeed landing… The altimeter keeps winding down… Twenty-five thousand feet… but the altimeter is based on sea level…He's only 21,000 feet above the high desert… The slack's running out… He pops the speed brake… Bango!—the chute catches with a jolt… It pulls the tail up… He pitches down… The spin stops. The nose is pointed down. Now he only has to jettison the chute and let her dive and pick up the rpms. He jettisons the chute… and the beast heaves up again! The nose goes back up in the air!… It's the rear stabilizer wing… The leading edge is locked, frozen into the position of the climb to altitude. With no rpms and no hydraulic controls he can't move the tail… The nose is pitched way above 30 degrees… Here she goes again… She's back into the spin… He's spinning out on the rim again… He has no rpms, no power, no more speed chute, and only 180 knots airspeed… He's down to 12,000 feet… 8,000 feet above the farm… There's not a goddamned thing left in the manual or the bag of tricks or the righteousness of twenty years of military flying… Chosen or damned!… It blows at any seam! Yeager hasn't bailed out of an airplane since the day he was shot down over Germany when he was twenty… I've tried A!—I've tried B!—I've tried C!… 11,000 feet, 7,000 from the farm… He hunches himself into a ball, just as it says in the manual, and reaches under the seat for the cinch ring and pulls… He's exploded out of the cockpit with such force it's like a concussion… He can't see… Wham… a jolt in the back… It's the seat separating from him and the parachute rig… His head begins to clear… He's in midair, in his pressure suit, looking out through the visor of his helmet… Every second seems enormously elongated… infinite… such slow motion… He's suspended in midair… weightless… The ship had been falling at about 100 miles an hour and the ejection rocket had propelled him up at 90 miles an hour. For one thick adrenal moment he's weightless in midair, 7,000 feet above the desert… The seat floats nearby, as if the two of them are parked in the atmosphere… The butt of the seat, the underside, is facing him… a red hole… the socket where the ejection mechanism had been attached… It's dribbling a charcoal red… lava… the remains of the rocket propellant… It's glowing… it's oozing out of the socket… In the next moment they're both falling, him and the seat… His parachute rig has a quarter bag over it and on the bag is a drogue chute that pulls the bag off so the parachute will stream out gradually and not break the chute or the pilot's back when the canopy pops open during a high-speed ejection. It's designed for an ejection at 400 or 500 miles an hour, but he's only going about 175. In this infinitely expanded few seconds the lines stream out and Yeager and the rocket seat and the glowing red socket sail through the air together… and now the seat is drifting above him… into the chute lines!… The seat is nestled in the chute lines… dribbling lava out of the socket… eating through the lines… An infinite second… He's jerked up by the shoulders… it's the chute opening and the canopy filling… in that very instant the lava—it smashes into the visor of his helmet… Something slices through his left eye… He's knocked silly… He can't see a goddamned thing… The burning snaps him to… His left eye is gushing blood… It's pouring down inside the lid and down his face and his face is on fire… Jesus Christ!… the seat rig… The jerk of the parachute had suddenly slowed his speed, but the seat kept falling… It had fallen out of the chute lines and the butt end crashed into his visor… 180 pounds of metal… a double visor… the goddamned thing has smashed through both layers… He's burning!… There's rocket lava inside the helmet… The seat has fallen away… He can't see… blood pouring out of his left eye and there's smoke inside the helmet… Rubber!… It's the seal between the helmet and the pressure suit… It's burning up… The propellant won't quit… A tremendous whoosh … He can feel the rush… He can even hear it… The whole left side of the helmet is full of flames… A sheet of flame goes up his neck and the side of his face… The oxygen!… The propellant has burned through the rubber seal, setting off the pressure suit's automatic oxygen system… The integrity of the circuit has been violated and it rushes oxygen to the helmet, to the pilot's face… A hundred percent oxygen! Christ!… It turns the lava into an inferno… Everything that can burn is on fire… everything else is melting… Even with the hole smashed in the visor the helmet is full of smoke… He's choking… blinded… The left side of his head is on fire… He's suffocating… He brings up his left hand… He has on pressure-suit gloves locked and taped to the sleeve… He jams his hand in through the hole in the visor and tries to create an air scoop with it to bring air to his mouth… The flames… They're all over it… They go to work on the glove where it touches his face… They devour it… His index finger is burning up… His goddamned finger is burning!… But he doesn't move it… Get some air!… Nothing else matters… He's gulping smoke… He has to get the visor open… It's twisted… He's encased in a little broken globe dying in a cloud of his own fried flesh… The stench of it!… rubber and a human hide… He has to get the visor open… It's that or nothing, no two ways about it… It's smashed all to hell… He jams both hands underneath… It's a tremendous effort… It lifts… Salvation!… Like a sea the air carries it all away, the smoke, the flames… The fire is out. He can breathe. He can see out of his right eye. The desert, the mesquite, the motherless Joshua trees are rising slowly toward him… He can't open his left eye… Now he can feel the pain… Half his head is broiled… That isn't the worst of it… The damned finger!… Jesus!… He can make out the terrain, he's been over it a million times… Over there's the highway, 466, and there's Route 6 crossing it… His left glove is practically burned off… The glove and his left index finger… he can't tell them apart… they look as if they exploded in an oven… He's not far from base… Whatever it is with the finger, it's very bad… Nearly down… He gets ready… Right out of the manual… A terrific wallop… He's down on the mesquite, looking across the desert, one-eyed… He stands up… Hell! He's in one piece!… He can hardly use his left hand. The goddamn finger is killing him. The whole side of his head… He starts taking off the parachute harness… It's all in the manual! Regulation issue!… He starts rolling up the parachute, just like it says… Some of the cords are almost melted through, from the lava… His head feels like it's still on fire… The pain comes from way down deep… But he's got to get the helmet off… It's a hell of an operation… He doesn't dare touch his head… It feels enormous… Somebody's running toward him… It's a kid, a guy in his twenties… He's come from the highway… He comes up close and his mouth falls open and he gives Yeager a look of stone horror…
"Are you all right!"
The look on the kid's face! Christalmighty!
"I was in my car! I saw you coming down!"
"Listen," says Yeager. The pain in his finger is terrific. "Listen… you got a knife?"
The kid digs into his pocket and pulls out a penknife. Yeager starts cutting the glove off his left hand. He can't bear it any more. The kid stands there hypnotized and horrified. From the look on the kid's face, Yeager can begin to see himself. His neck, the whole left side of his head, his ear, his cheek, his eye must be burned up. His eye socket is slashed, swollen, caked shut, and covered with a crust of burned blood, and half his hair is burned away. The whole mess and the rest of his face and his nostrils and his lips are smeared with the sludge of the burning robber. And he's standing there in the middle of the desert in a pressure suit with his head cocked, squinting out of one eye, working on his left glove with a penknife… The knife cuts through the glove and it cuts through the meat of his finger… You can't tell any longer… It's all run together… The goddamn finger looks like it's melted… He's got to get the glove off. That's all there is to it. It hurts too goddamned much. He pulls off the glove and a big hunk of melted meat from the finger comes off with it… It's like fried suet…
"Arrggghhh…" It's the kid. He's retching. It's too much for him, the poor bastard. He looks up at Yeager. His eyes open and his mouth opens. All the glue has come undone. He can't hold it together any longer.
"God," he says, "you… look awful!" The Good Samaritan, A.A.D,! Also a Doctor! And he just gave his diagnosis! 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 the screen doors bang and the pictures of a hundred dead pilots rattle in their frames:
"My God!… you look awful."
A few minutes later the rescue helicopter arrived. The medics found Yeager standing out in the mesquite, him and some kid who had been passing by. Yeager was standing erect with his parachute rolled up and his helmet in the crook of his arm, right out of the manual, and staring at them quite levelly out of what was left of his face, as if they had had an appointment and he was on time.
At the hospital they discovered one stroke of good luck. The blood over Yeager's left eye had been baked into a crustlike shield. Otherwise he might have lost it. He had suffered third- and second-degree burns on his head and neck. The burns required a month of treatment in the hospital, but he was able to heal without disfigurement. He even regained full use of his left index finger.
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