Chuck Yeager, first man to break sound barrier, has died

After test pilot Chuck Yeager became the first man to break the sound barrier, he confessed to the highly un-Yeager-like emotion of fear. Suddenly, the Mach needle began to fluctuate, then tipped right off the scale.” For 18 seconds on Oct. 14, 1947, Yeager was supersonic — a feeling he later likened to “a poke through Jell-O.” The achievement made Yeager an aeronautic legend — “the foremost in the Olympus,” according to author Tom Wolfe, “the most righteous of all the possessors of the right stuff.” Yeager, who came to personify the coolheaded flyboy and whose wisecracking West Virginia twang became a standard accessory for generations of pilots to come, died Monday, his wife, Victoria Yeager, said on Twitter. While Yeager went on to lead an Air Force training program for astronauts, his supersonic mission was “about being able to make an aircraft go faster and faster, particularly for combat reasons,” F. Robert van der Linden, chairman of the aeronautics department at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, said in a 2013 Times interview. Part of two burned fingers came with it.” Yeager lost two fingertips and was hospitalized with other injuries for nearly a month, an ordeal he later described as “getting away cheap.” Famously unflappable, Chuck Yeager braved danger first in combat and then on the fringes of space, surviving a horrendous 1963 crash he later described in his autobiography. “Even though he lacked a college education, that didn’t make a lick of difference,” said the Smithsonian’s van der Linden, who, with his Smithsonian colleague Dom Pisano, wrote a 2006 history, “Chuck Yeager and the Bell X-1: Breaking the Sound Barrier.” “Yeager had an innate understanding of all things mechanical, and engineers on the ground really liked that,” van der Linden said.