Yeager is essentially a German word for “hunter”
And it is hard to find an individual with a better familial name than Chuck Yeager who embodied all that being a true “hunter” entails. Honorable, courageous, taciturn, results driven and so on.
I won’t regurgitate the many items that will be stated in his common obits being promulgated across the web…those are superficial and don’t truly portray the heart of the man…nor does his Wikipedia page which laundry lists his accomplishments and highlights.
He was a member of the Rogers Commission…the Reagan designated group of luminaries and experts tasked with “investigating” the Challenger disaster. As was Neil Armstrong, Sally Ride and Richard Feynman among others…Yeager in contrast to the others took the nomination and did…almost nothing. He attended only two meetings of the commission and was almost stricken from the signatures signing off on the results (may or may not have been true). And he could have cared less. Yeager saw it largely for what it was…a political farce designed to give cover for the program which had been focused more on PR than results for a bit of time. Led by Rogers from a governance side and Armstrong from a PR side you likely couldn’t have put enough space between the commission and Yeager for his feelings. At the end of it when asked if it bothered him that his name might be stricken he had a one word response “Nope”.
His end opinion focused more on the results than the cause, mirroring his “Damn the torpedoes” attitude expressing ″They got caught with temperature and with lack of communication″ that cold was a problem, Yeager said, and there would be no reason not to ″fly again tomorrow″ in warm weather. I don’t see the accident by the space shuttle any differently than the crash of a military or commercial flight. All are tragic but also bring problems to the surface that otherwise would remain hidden. Like with the shuttle accident, an accident brings people out of the woodwork and they say a lot of words, many of them meaningless,″ he said, but he added later, ″the system will be a lot better off after this investigation is over.″
A true iconoclast he turned down the opportunity to be an astronaut and potentially one of the first to land on the moon because he viewed astronauts as merely monkeys in a can, not true pilots. He would go far beyond simply breaking the sound barrier and by the end of his career was rightly considered the best pilot of all time. Having flown at least 360 different types of airplanes (that are able to be publicly acknowledged) he was also a double ace shooting down 13 Nazi planes including one of the first to shoot down a ME 262 jet fighter. But that wasn’t it…He was shot down himself, went on the run, hid in a barn and hiked over frozen mountains of the Pyrenees (assisting a wounded compatriot) to Spain and eventually back to England where he pestered his commanders into being put back in a plane against then current orders and back into the fight. Oh, and in his time on the run in France? He assisted the French Resistance in making bombs to blow up key bridges along the way…
Other more rarely mentioned accomplishments include his stint in Pakistan in 1971-1973 training the burgeoning Pakistan air force as the US attempted to move closer to China at the time and assist their common enemy against India (the old enemy of my enemy theory). He later claimed the Pakistan pilots were some of the best he ever served with, largely to the pace of operations demanded in that theater and is known in Pakistan to this day as a hero and one of the “fathers” of their air force (his quotes remain up on the Pakistan Air Force recruiting website at this moment).
You’ll note the above date—1973 is some 30 years after he was shooting down Nazis over France and 25 years after he broke the sound barrier. Lesser men would have long since retired…and he didn’t live an easy life. When in the California desert setting speed records he and his wife were living in a wooden cabin he had built by himself devoid of electricity and running water. He had grown up a hard scrabble Appalachian mountains life in West Virginia amongst the poorest of the poor with nothing given and nothing asked and retained his love of HUNTING all his life.
Whether it was piloting an F4 in Korea and flying it to Vietnam to visit his son, bombing runs on North Vietnam, palling around with the Oak Ridge Boys in his later years, sticking a finger in the eye of his beloved Air Force when they chose the F-16 over his beloved F-20 Tigershark he remained a piece of sand in the eye of traditional authority and political correctness until the day of his passing. Even more recent generations had discovered his wit and acerbic nature in the last few years as Yeager had taken to Twitter of all things to express his opinions and put the younger folk in their place.
Yeager broke the sound barrier, flew combat missions in WWII, Korea, Vietnam, and Pakistan…yet its a completely different flight that exemplifies his spirt better. In 1948 he had returned home to West Virginia and was flying a Lockheed P-80 Shooting Star at the time. After showing his dad the controls for a bit he took off from the Charleston, WV airport and was headed out to Dayton, Ohio. Along the way was a bridge on the Kanawha River. Now this is no giant skydiving bridge. Hell, I don’t think' you’d get much more than a bruise jumping into the river from it….But piloting the first operational jet fighter in the US Air Force, Yeager took the Shooting Start up to 500 knots and, buzzing the boat traffic on the river that day, flew UNDER the bridge using the hedge hopping flying prowess he had acquired over Europe….just because he was that…damn…good…
Vaya con dios Chuck.
If you want to read about the man in his own words, I can’t suggest a better book than his autobiography “Yeager” which you can find on Amazon…Order it and enjoy one of the best: AmazonSmile: Yeager: An Autobiography (9780553256741): Chuck Yeager: Books