From a New York Times obit by Richard Goldstein about flying ace Chuck Yeager:
Chuck Yeager, the most famous test pilot of his generation, who was the first to break the sound barrier and, thanks to Tom Wolfe, came to personify the death-defying aviator who possessed the elusive yet unmistakable “right stuff,” died on Monday in Los Angeles. He was 97.
General Yeager came out of the West Virginia hills with only a high school education and with a drawl that left many a fellow pilot bewildered. . . .
But he became a fighter ace in World War II, shooting down five German planes in a single day and 13 over all. In the decade that followed, he helped usher in the age of military jets and spaceflight. He flew more than 150 military aircraft, logging more than 10,000 hours in the air.
His signal achievement came on Oct. 14, 1947, when he climbed out of a B-29 bomber as it ascended over the Mojave Desert in California and entered the cockpit of an orange, bullet-shaped, rocket-powered experimental plane attached to the bomb bay.
An Air Force captain at the time, he zoomed off in the plane, a Bell Aircraft X-1, at an altitude of 23,000 feet, and when he reached about 43,000 feet above the desert, history’s first sonic boom reverberated across the floor of the dry lake beds. He had reached a speed of 700 miles an hour, breaking the sound barrier and dispelling the long-held fear that any plane flying at or beyond the speed of sound would be torn apart by shock waves. . . .
His feat put General Yeager in the headlines for a time, but he truly became a national celebrity only after the publication of Mr. Wolfe’s book “The Right Stuff” in 1979, about the early days of the space program, and the release of the movie based on it four years later, in which General Yeager was played by Sam Shepard. He was depicted breaking the sound barrier in the opening scene.
In his portrayal of the astronauts of NASA’s Mercury program, Mr. Wolfe wrote about the post-World War II test pilot fraternity in California’s desert and its notion that “a man should have the ability to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and put his hide on the line and then have the moxie, the reflexes, the experience, the coolness to pull it back in the last yawning moment — and then go up again the next day, and the next day, and every next day.”
That quality, understood but unspoken, Mr. Wolfe added, would entitle a pilot to be part of “the very Brotherhood of the Right Stuff itself.”
Mr. Wolfe wrote about a nonchalance affected by pilots in the face of an emergency in a voice “specifically Appalachian in origin,” one that was first heard in military circles but ultimately emanated from the cockpits of commercial airliners.
“It was,” Mr. Wolfe said, “the drawl of the most righteous of all the possessors of the right stuff: Chuck Yeager.”. . .
In his memoir, General Yeager wrote that through all his years as a pilot, he had made sure to “learn everything I could about my airplane and my emergency equipment.”
It may not have accorded with his image, but, as he told it: “I was always afraid of dying. Always.”
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From Wikipedia: The sound barrier or sonic barrier is the sudden increase in aerodynamic drag and other undesirable effects experienced by an aircraft or other object when it approaches the speed of sound. When aircraft first approached the speed of sound, these effects were seen as constituting a barrier making faster speeds very difficult or impossible. The term sound barrier is still sometimes used today to refer to aircraft reaching supersonic flight. Breaking this sound barrier produces a sonic boom.
A sonic boom is the sound associated with the shock waves created whenever an object travels through the air faster than the speed of sound. Sonic booms generate enormous amounts of sound energy, sounding similar to an explosion or a thunderclap to the human ear. Sonic booms due to large supersonic aircraft can be particularly loud and startling, tend to awaken people, and may cause minor damage to some structures. They led to prohibition of routine supersonic flight over land.
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