Chuck Yeager, pilot who was first to break sound barrier, dies at 97

Chuck Yeager, the American test pilot who became the first person to break the sound barrier and was later immortalised in Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, has died aged 97.

The feat that guaranteed Yeager’s fame came in 1947 when the former second world war fighter ace climbed into a small Bell X-1 experimental rocket plane named Glamorous Glennis that was loaded in the bomb bay of B-29 bomber and released over the Mojave desert.

Neither Yeager, who had broken severals ribs in a horse riding accident shortly before the flight, nor aviation engineers knew if the plane – or the pilot – would be able to handle the unprecedented speed without disintegrating.

Instead, he reached a speed of over 700 miles an hour, generating the first man made sonic boom, landing his orange painted aircraft safely and without incident in a moment compared to the Wright brothers first motor powered flight.

Announcing his death on Twitter, his wife Victoria said: “It is [with] profound sorrow, I must tell you that my life love General Chuck Yeager passed just before 9pm.”

She added: “An incredible life well lived, America’s greatest pilot, and a legacy of strength, adventure, and patriotism will be remembered for ever.”

The fact of the first supersonic flight was one thing. It was Yeager’s depiction in Wolfe’s book, however, chronicling the early days of the US space programme and the first test pilots who peopled the early ranks of astronauts, that cemented the myth, reinforced by his depiction by Sam Shephard in the subsequent film.

While Wolfe never succinctly defined what he meant by “the right stuff” or “righteousness,” Yeager, who grew up in the hills of West Virginia, encapsulated it for him as the man who was “the most righteous of all the possessors of the right stuff”.

“A career in flying was like climbing one of those ancient Babylonian pyramids made up of a dizzy progression of steps and ledges,” wrote Wolfe, “a ziggurat, a pyramid extraordinarily high and steep; and the idea was to prove at every foot of the way up that pyramid that you were one of the elected and anointed ones who had the right stuff.”

Yeager cut his teeth in aviation flying Mustangs in the second world war, shooting down at least 12 German planes in aerial combat, including five in a single day. Joining the airforce straight from high school as a mechanic, it was not clear at first that flying was his future, vomiting from motion sickness as a passenger on his first flight.

Chuck Yeager in a test plane in 1948. Photograph: AP

Looking back on his achievements Yeager wrote: “I haven’t yet done everything, but by the time I’m finished, I won’t have missed much. If I auger in (crash) tomorrow, it won’t be with a frown on my face. I’ve had a ball.”

Although his lack of a college education meant he was not chosen for Nasa’s burgeoning astronaut program, he and many of his air force colleagues regarded pilots in Project Mercury – the main focus of Wolfe’s book – as “spam in a can” who did not do any proper flying.

They were, to Yeager and his cohort, mere passengers “throwing the right switches on instructions from the ground”.

Yeager, however, would go on to join Nasa’s Gemini and Apollo programmes. Throughout his life, he broke numerous speed and altitude records, including becoming the first person to travel 21/2 times the speed of sound.

Chuck Yeager and the Bell X-1 plane in which he broke the sound barrier. Photograph: USAF/AFP/Getty Images

Writing of his supersonic flight in his best selling 1985 book Yeager, he described the moment of breaking the speed of sound as oddly underwhelming in terms of the actual physical experience, if not the psychological one, underlining Wolfe’s point of the “right stuff’ being a combination of small iterative steps and tests.

“After all the anticipation to achieve this moment, it really was a letdown,” he wrote “There should’ve been a bump in the road, something to let you know that you had just punched a nice, clean hole through the sonic barrier.

“The Unknown was a poke through Jell-O. Later on, I realised that this mission had to end in a letdown because the real barrier wasn’t in the sky but in our knowledge and experience of supersonic flight.”

Chuck Yeager and actress Barbara Hershey at a special 20th anniversary screening of The Right Stuff in Hollywood in 2003. Hershey played his wife, Glennis, in the film. Photograph: Robert Mora/Getty Images

Ironically while the story of his first supersonic flight is now well known, at the time it was initially kept secret by the US Air Force because of its military significance, with details leaking out a few months later.

Yeager was less certain of the notion of the right stuff as a gift – dismissing it in one interview as not worth a “rat’s fanny” – preferring to emphasise the hard work involved.

“All I know is I worked my tail off learning to learn how to fly, and worked hard at it all the way,” he wrote. “If there is such a thing as the right stuff in piloting, then it is experience. The secret to my success was that somehow I always managed to live to fly another day.”

Yeager, however, would go on to train some 26 people who went into orbit as Nasa astronauts as part of the Gemini and Apollo programmes.

Scott Kelly, a Nasa astronaut, said Yeager was a “true legend with the right stuff”.

After his test pilot heyday, Yeager commanded fighter squadrons and flew 127 combat missions during the Vietnam war.

Yeager became something of a social media sensation in 2016 at age 93 when he began fielding questions from the public on Twitter and responding in a curt and sometimes curmudgeonly manner. When asked what he thought about the moon, he replied: “It’s there.”

Yeager prepares to board an F-15D Eagle fighter plane in 2012. Photograph: Master Sgt. Jason W Edwards/US AIR FORCE/AFP/Getty Images

Yeager and Glennis, who died of cancer in 1990, had four children. He married Victoria Scott D’Angelo in 2003.

Reuters and Associated Press contributed to this report.