The Man Who Broke the Sound Barrier: Brig. Gen. Chuck Yeager

Ken Harbaugh:

If you like listening to Warriors In Their Own Words, check out our other show, the Medal of Honor Podcast. The link is in the show description.

I’m Ken Harbaugh, host of Warriors In Their Own Words. In partnership with the Honor Project, we’ve brought this podcast back at a time when our nation needs these stories more than ever.

Warriors in Their Own Words is our attempt to present an unvarnished, unsanitized truth of what we have asked of those who defend this nation. Thank you for listening, and by doing so, honoring those who have served.

Today, we’ll be hearing from Brigadier General Chuck Yeager. In this interview, Yeager talks about serving in World War II, breaking the sound barrier in 1947, and his role as commandant of the Aerospace Research Pilot School, where all military astronauts are trained.

Brig. Gen. Chuck Yeager:

I really never was exposed to airplanes, as a kid. I never saw them on the ground. I never rode in one, until I enlisted in the Army Air Corps, back in 1941. Then, was a crew chief on an AT-11. But, when I got in military, in September 1941, and became a crew chief and worked on airplanes and I noticed we bust our knuckles, when the pilots had a Hell of a lot more fun than we did and made a lot better money than the $21.00 a month I was getting. And so, I saw a notice on the bulletin board, in, I think, about October '41, for... What they had done, lowered the requirements to get into pilot training. They were not getting enough applicants, under the Flying Cadet program, which required two years of college and 20 years of age, so they lowered the requirements to a high school graduate and 18. I fit that. And I said, "Well," I sent home for my birth certificate in high school diploma and I applied. And I took my physical on December the 4th, three days before the war started. And then, I'd never been in an airplane.

So, then, I became a crew chief on AT-11s and moved to Victorville, California. And I changed the engines on my airplane and the engineering officer came up to run a flight test on the airplane and said, "Come and go with me." And I said, "Yeah. I've never been in one of these things, in the air." And, "Ah, you'll enjoy it," so I got in. It was interesting, when he got airborne, it's like looking over a cliff, back in West Virginia.

But, then, after about a half an hour, he started shooting touch and go landing on one of the El Mirage dry lakes. And, man, I got sick and I puked all over my airplane. And the thing that went through my mind, when I came back and landed, that, "You've made a big mistake." You know? I applied for pilot training. I didn't think that was for anybody.

But I fooled around, I never rode again in an airplane, until I think about August '42, when I was called up for pilot training. And then, when I was flying the airplane and first flight or two, I was a little woozy, but then it went away and I enjoyed it. And that's how I got into flying. And it didn't mean anything to me. And really, even today, the thrill that you get out of flying is doing a good job. That's basically the way you look at it.

We had 400 or 500 hours in P-39s, which was a liquid cooled Allison engine and basically had the coolant radiators, so we were familiar with them. And it was a tricycle gear, so it was real easy to fly. Then, we got our hands on the P-51, when we went to England, and we were the first Mustangs in the Eighth Air Force. And, basically, it was a little tougher airplane to fly, but since we're familiar with liquid cold engines, there was no problem transitioning into them.

But the main thing that happened, I think, was a performance of the Mustang, with the two-stage blower. Man, and the range, we were really, really pleased with that airplane. And, when we started escorting B-17s, like your dad's airplane, all the way to the target and back, on eight-hour missions, the Germans were flabbergasted, that they woke up one morning, we're sitting on the Russian border in Mustangs, 800 miles away from home, and they couldn't believe it. And it was an excellent airplane, for what we used it for. We flew a lot of missions, setting up at 36,000 to 38,000 feet. It had eight hours of endurance, carried 30 seconds of firepower and six 50 calibers. And it could outrun, out-dive, and out-climb, most everything that the Germans threw at us, except the Me 262, in the summer and fall of '44, which was a very fast airplane, about 100 miles an hour faster than our Mustangs.

Well, we picked up our P-51s at an assembly plant, flew them for about an hour and a half, landed back to our base. The next morning, we were sitting over Germany in a second flight. I underestimated the performance of the airplanes, compared to the Mustang. And, I remember, I spotted this 109, right over the middle of Berlin, I think, it was on March the 4th, 1944. And he was under me, about 5,000 feet. And my eye opened up, that P-51. And, God, and that thing filled my windshield, so fast, I couldn't believe it. You know? And so, I cut the power back, I rolled a big roll, come in under the guy and opened up and pieces flew off of him and blew up. You know? I was surprised at the amount of damage that a 50 caliber does, when it concentrates your firepower, out to 50 to 100 yards in front of you. And you have to be careful, the pieces will hit you. And I was surprised about the difference in the performance of the P-51s and the 109. But I don't think the guy ever saw me, and which is a case in probably about 80% of all the airplanes shot down, you never see the guy get you.

We were escorting B-24s, down to the South of Bordeaux and got jumped by a bunch of 190s. And I was flying tail-end Charlie, on a flight of four. And I saw them come in. We broke back into them and I made a head on pass with three 190s. And I think all three of them hit me. Anyway, my airplane prop flew off, part of the left wing caught on fire, so I jumped out.

The guys that took care of me, the Macquis or Free Frenchmen, The Underground, they are in a very risky business and Germans killed a lot of them, executed them. And the policy was, if when you came back from a neutral country... There were three neutral countries in Europe, during the war, Sweden, Switzerland and Spain. And if you got into a neutral country, you were interned. You didn't fight anymore, but you were interned, until the end of the war was. Spain had a lot of airmen, as Switzerland did, and Sweden did also.

And, consequently, when I made it to Gibraltar and the British flew me back to England and the policy was, "Go home," and rightly so, because if you flew again and were captured by the Germans, then you compromised the system, The Underground system. And I didn't want to come home, because, of course, I was just a flight officer, I had eight missions, shot down one airplane and all of my friends were still there, fighting. And I worked my way all the way up to see the General Eisenhower. And I saw him, about five days before the invasion. He knew the invasion was coming. And, once the invasion occurred, all The Underground surfaced. And then, you no longer risked their security. And he let me go back on combat.

By the time I made it back, a lot of the guys had gotten shot down or finished their tours and went home. And, here I am, still a flight officer, because, see, I went through flying school as a sergeant pilot and I'm still a flight officer, I'm not even a second lieutenant, but I'm an old head and I've got good eyes and can fly. Well, they let me lead a few missions in my squadron. And, basically, I was up front, all the time, so it made it easy for me to be the first one in the middle of a dogfight and it worked out very well. In fact, I had one whole group lead, where I was leading two other squadrons and my own, so...

Basically, a dogfight, they're for every situation you get involved in, to try and get on some guy's tail, anything he does, there's 1,000 different maneuvers he can make. And you got to think ahead of him and also have an airplane and be capable, because of your experience, of out-turning him, or out-running him, or out-diving him. But you got to realize, you're not the only guy up there, and he's not the only guy up there. There's about... In one case, there were 200 Germans with our 48 Mustang. And, man, there's guys all over the sky trying to shoot you down. And you'd turn and try to shoot them down. It's a busy arena. And you have a wingman, whose job is to watch your tail and his tail too. And if some guy is coming in, he'll call it out and you break into him. And, also, that way, you can concentrate on shooting guys down, while he watches your tail. And it's a busy arena. It all happens in very short minutes. And some guys get killed, some don't.

I was leading the squadron and we ran into about 22 109s. I picked them up. I also had very good visual acuity and could see probably a Hell of a lot better than most of the guys who were flying with me. And I picked them up and we were able to maneuver around and come in, out of the sun, and close up behind them, before they... I don't know, really, whether they seen us or whether they thought we were 16 Focke-Wulf 190s, that I later saw, that were supposed to rendezvous with them. But we were out in front of the bomber stream, quite a ways, about 80 miles. And we came in close and I closed up, down to 200 yards and shot down the first two. They never even broke. And then, when, of course, a couple of them blew up and then they broke. And then, airplanes were going every which way and you have to... I remember, I hammered one guy and he blew up, but his wingman had cut the power back, trying to get behind me. And so, I cut the power back on the 51, rolled it over, come in real close, about 50 yards back and just almost cut him in two, at that close range.

And then, another chased another guy down at the deck and blew him up. And it was, I think, just a matter, like I said, the Mustang had a lot of ammunition. And being fast, it did a very good job. And that's basically later on in... Let's think. November of '44, I shot down four 190s, like Andy and I, our group was, we were setting really high, up 36,000 feet, and we ran into 50 109s and 150 190s, with our group, and it was a real rat race.

Obviously, speed is very important, in that if you can outrun the guy, you'll catch him. If you can't, you won't. It's that simple. Or, if you're trying to get away from somebody, if you can outrun him, good if you can't, you don't. Speed is something that it's all relative. You know? Like, a ME 262, we didn't have a chance of staying up with a 262. And so, you were dead lost, unless you could find a guy in a traffic pattern, which was unsportsmanlike. But what the Hell?

When I returned home in January or February of '45, I was made a basic instructor in Texas. And I was fooling around there, until the summer of '45, when the war ended in Europe. See, and all of those guys who had been shot down and were prisoners of war, or evadees, being shot down and escaped, were given the opportunity to go, to select any base in the United States. Well, I fit that category, since I was an evadee. And so, I asked for Wright Field because it was the closest air base to my home in West Virginia. That's the only reason I asked for it. And when, I reported in, the personnel type looks at my record and I was a 22-year-old fighter pilot, but the thing that caught their eye was an engineering officer. I was the maintenance officer in my squadron, I'd been a crew chief and I basically was a qualified mate. They had an opening in the fighter test section, for a maintenance officer. That's where they assigned me. It was really a wonderful job. I had two hangars full of fighters. Everything, the P-59s, the P-80s. You know? P-51s, 38s, Jugs. And had a bunch of German airplanes, they had brought back, the Me 262 and 109s and 190s. And Japanese equipment, brought back in the summer of '45. And I got to fly all that stuff. It was a very interesting job. And put on a lot of airshows.

And, finally, the old man kind of noticed me, I could fly airplanes, but I wasn't very well-educated. And so, he asked, did I want to go to test pilot school. I said, "You know? It's be interesting," so he sent me in January of '46. And when I came out of test pilot school, I got involved in flight testing.

Well, I had been flying the P-49 and the P-89. And the 262 is very similar to the P-80, .8 Mach airplane, straight and level. Ran a little bit of buffing. Had an hour's endurance, at altitude. And, see, in January of 1945, well before the war ended, we had three P-80's in England and we were trying to get them involved in combat and we lost all three of them, over there. And so, consequently, we could have had the P-80, flying out of England, in squadron strength, by the summer of 1945, but the war ended. So, basically... And I had a lot of P-80 time. And the airplanes were very similar, speed-wise, altitude-wise, and endurance. And it was a pretty good airplane. It was very difficult to maintain with the Jumo 004 engine. It had a little 10-horsepower re-ship engine that stuck for the starter. You had to start the little two-cycle engine first and things like this. But it was an interesting airplane.

See, my problem was that when I went to Muroc, I was TDY, or temporary duty. If you're TDY test base, you're not authorized to take your family. Well, I said, "Hell, I'm going out there on the X-1, in 1947," I said, "This looks like a couple-year program." You know? So, I took Glennis out and my oldest son and, man, it's a problem. You can't use the commissary, the hospital, because you're not authorized to have a family out there, but I did anyway. It was difficult finding housing. It was a pretty sorry place, but the flying was very good.

Well, that's where all of the fly testing was done for Wright Field, because of Rogers Dry Lake. And I was sent out there, the first time, in August 1945, on the first P-80 service test. I was a maintenance officer and I flew. And, since the maintenance officer, when an airplane goes into maintenance, when it comes out, you fly it, as the maintenance officer, check out the system. I flew, I was flying more than the test pilots were because the airplanes were in maintenance a lot. And I enjoyed it. But, see, I'd been trained at Tonopah, Nevada, in P-39s. I knew the desert. And, when I got on Rogers Dry Lake, out there at Muroc, it was a marvelous facility. So, I flew off the lake bed a lot, in '45, '46. And, consequently, it was marvelous place to do flight test work.

Basically, we encountered the effects of the speed of sound with Mustangs, in combat, because the airplane would get up to about 8.81 Mach number, or 81% of the speed of sound, because of the thick wings on the airplane, when the air had to go around the wing, at 0.81 Mach, brought us relative velocity, up to the speed of sound. And that point of shock wave, formed on the thickest part of the wing. Behind the shock wave, you had turbulent air. The Army Air Corps realized that, back in 1944, though. They let a contract to Bell Aircraft Company, to build a research airplane called XS-1. X meant research. S, Supersonic. 1, first contract, that the Army Air Corps let for a research airplane.

Now, when the X-1 came off, out of Bell, the military had never been allowed to do research flying. It was always done by civilian pilots. NACA, the forerunner to NASA, had the charter. They had always had it. And here, when the X-1 came out, the Army Air Corps paid for the airplane, they contracted for it. And so, who was flying it? Civilian pilots. NACA maintaining the instrumentation, running the program, and we sat and watched it. We couldn't get our hands on it because we weren't authorized. Now, that went on for a year, almost a year and a half, and they took it 20 powered flights out the 0.8 mock.

Now, phase two called to take the airplane supersonic. You're talking about big bonus money that those civilian pilots operated. Like Slick Goodland now, the battle test pilots flying the X-1, and reportedly $150,000 bonus he wanted paid over a five-year period. Well, hell, there wasn't that much money in the program for Christ's sakes after the war budget was cut back. So, the Air Force Finance, by 1947, when the program was being delayed, said, "Hey, man, what's wrong with our military pilots doing the flight test work on the X-1?" And there's no reason why not. It's their airplane.

So, they took the airplane back, assigned… There was probably 25 test pilots in the fighter test section who were authorized to do flight test work on the X-1. They were fighter types. I was a very junior test pilot, having just graduated in the fall of '46, and this is a late spring of '47 when they took it over. But I had one thing going for me. I could fly an airplane obviously. That's neither here nor there. But the thing that got me into the X-1 program was I had a maintenance background, understood systems, and obviously could fly. That really got me into the X-1 when my commander picked me.

Bob Hoover, who's one of the greatest aerobatic airplane pilots in the world, was my backup pilot, because Bob was a very, very good test. We both were classmates in the test pilot school, but we were very junior. The older test pilots who had been there for two or three years kind of got their nose out of shape, because here's a couple young squirts getting into a test program that really had promise, but they weren't combat pilots. We were combat veterans. We knew how to fly and we understood systems.

Now what happens? Military didn't have any instrumentation for research flying, so we have to call NACA again. I'll tell you, NACA resisted us with a great deal of enthusiasm getting into their business. But we had a mission to perform and we were sent to Miroc with the X-1. The old man's very specific said, "Don't bust your butt," because number one, the British had the DH108, that Havilland Swallow, just in 1946 that killed Jeffrey de Havilland, fooling around at high Mach number. So, they stopped all research flying and Colonel Boyd was very specific, "Don't screw it up because we don't want to stop our research here in the United States." So, that basically, he gave us to Captain Jack Ridley, who was a flight test engineer with a master's degree under Dr. Von Karma at Caltech. Marvelous test pilot and really a brain. The three of us were sent out there at the airplane, told to break Mach 1, and we did. It's that simple.

Now, what came out of the X-1? What were the problems? See, the problem was we had never flown in an airplane much above 82 or 83% of the speed of sound. There were no data, nobody had any data about what was going to happen. So, it was a trial and error deal. We were given carte blank, I'd say, for Colonel Boyd to do it.

As I mentioned, nothing was known. And there'd been problems like the British killing the pilots and other guys running into problems of high Mach dives. So, it's all unknown. That's one thing about Colonel Boyd. When he came in and took over the flight test division there at Wright Field in the summer of 1945, he's really a stern old man but he was an outstanding pilot and he understood flight test work. Many of the techniques that we use today at Edwards, he was the father of. When he called us in and made this selection and gave it, he was very stern. Said, "Don't screw it up, number one, but don't bust your butt." And so, he was a very stern guy. But the nice thing about him, he gave us carte blank. He said, "Ridley, you and Yeager and Hoover, you work together, and whatever you work out, I'll go along with." And it worked out.

Now, NACA is involved in this to a point of where they're running the instrumentation in the X-1, and they tried to get into making decisions. The okay, you shouldn't do this, you should do... Hell, we do what we want to because we were running the test program. They were a big help because they had a wind tunnel laid up to 0.9, but beyond that, nobody knew. Nobody knew what would happen. Basically, I would say 50% of the aerodynamicists in the United States didn't give us any chance at all of getting above Mach 1.

Ever since the Wright brothers first flew in 1903, everybody, we've been limited by the sound barrier. We couldn't get faster and jets were coming out and airplanes that were designed to go faster, but we were hamstrung. So, if we could solve these problems and get up to supersonic speed, that opened up space to us. It was that simple.

A lot of people say, "Why do you do things like that?" It's very simple. It's duty. Just like flying combat, and same way as being a test pilot. You're asked to do things that no other person is. Why do you do it? Because it's duty. It's got to be done, you're the one that's to do it, and that's the way you look at it. That's why I looked at the X-1. I figured that the X-1 would never bite me without giving me a little warning. The airplane was stressed for 18 Gs, positive or negative, which was a lot more than a pilot could take. When I first got exposed to the X-1, I said, "Hey, man, this is a piece of cake." When you look at the dome regulators that regulated us, 5000 pounds of nitrogen gas pressure through a dome regulator reduced to 5000 pounds of run of gear up and down, and then to 380 to two more dome regulators. Those dome regulators were the same dome regulators that I changed the diaphragms in when I was a teenager for my father in the gas fields of West Virginia. And so, I was a natural in the systems. It was easy for me because I understood the systems, and I figured that airplane would never bite me without giving me a little warning.

You were operating in a spherical liquid oxygen tank and a water alcohol tank of around 330 to 335 pounds of pressure inside this tank that was only designed for 340 pounds of pressure. You had to operate that close to the limits to get the thrust you were after. You had no way of getting out of the airplane. Also, if you didn't get rid of your fuel, you're going to cream it on landing. It wasn't designed to land with a full load of fuel cause it stalled at 240 miles an hour fully loaded. It was a tricky airplane to fly.

Well, there were no ejection seats. Basically, we developed pressure suits that I used later in the X-1A, and it was the nice thing about G-suit development. I've worn G-suits in World War 2 against the Germans and we used them in high G arenas a lot. Yeah. But the main thing I think, our aeromedical people, the flight surgeons, they kept abreast of our requirements. But here again, the X-1 was designed in 1944. That's way before ejection seats. But it was funny, like when the NACA got their number two, the number two X-1, I flew it and gave it to them, they wouldn't fly until they put an ejection seat in it and a jettisonable canopy and all that crap. But that's the NACA.

Basically we didn't have any hard hats or crash outs, you would call them. So what we did, we just used to used World War 2 leather helmet that we wore in the Mustangs and took a tank war helmet and took the top off it and put four snaps. That kept you from banging your head against the top of hurting your head bone.

I learned early in life flying combat and was very disciplined. If you have no control over the outcome, forget it. That's the way I looked at the X-1 door. Had it presented itself to me to get out of the airplane, yeah, I'll try it, but your chances of living are very nil. But then again, I ain't wasting any time thinking about it because I wasn't exposed to that. In the same way, you don't worry about anything because you're wasting your time. Hell, if you get killed, you don't know anything about it anyway, so that's the way you look at it.

I was flying when I got married and she understood that. The main thing that she did all through the X-1 program was I was operating so close to the ragged edge, that it required my constant concentration. All of it. She took everything off my back that would interfere with my concentrating on staying alive, and she was very good at that.

Well, Glennis and I, on Sunday night had been out riding horses, and I ran into a gate with a horse and fell and broke a couple of ribs. But that's neither here nor there. I made a decision to fly. It was no problem. It hurt, but…

Well, basically to lock a door, he would hold against it. And it had a lever, like at the head, he had to raise it. I couldn't because I had my rib, two ribs broken, that side of my arm was hurt. He said, "Well, do it with your left hand." I said, "I can't reach it." He said, "I'll fix that." He gave me a 10-inch piece of broomstick and you'd stick it in and flop it up. We're good.

Now realize, nobody's ever been in this arena, at this region. We ran into buffeting at 0.88 Mach number because of thin wings and that buffeting was on the tail, it was on the wings. The airplane's buffeting pretty heavy. Now, at 0.94 Mach number, this shockwave, which had formed on the thickest part of the horizontal stabilizer at 0.88, as we increase our Mach number, the shockwave moves back on the airfoil and it's laying down. And a 94 Mach number, I used to... When I hit the max Mach I was looking for that day, I'd roll the airplane over and load it up to give me a feel for what would happen maybe at a higher Mach number, straight and level. Well, man, I'd come back on the controls and the airplane just went the way it was headed and then flopped the control back and forth. We got a problem.

So, I raked the rockets off and jettisoned fuel, came down and got Ridley. I said, "Ridley, we got a big problem." "What the hell's your problem?" I said, "We lost control of the airplane." "What do you mean?" I said, "Well, we have no elevator effectiveness." "Well, yeah, that's a problem." And so, we looked and the shockwave, which was that moved back, was at the hinged point of the elevator.

Now, we had never used the capability that Bell had built into the airplane of changing the angle of incidence of the whole tail plane, the whole horizontal stabilizer. This is the way we did it. We took the panels off the side, squirted some 3-in-1 oil on it, and ran it up and down a few times. This thing maybe, Ridley, it was his idea, said, "You know, this is a crude way to fly an airplane, but I think if you can handle the airplane with this crude horizontal stabilizer, you may be able to control it through Mach 1." It was that simple.

So, we took the airplane up and took the airplane out, and I sat in there looking at 94 on the Machmeter. Our Machmeter only went to 1.0. Consequently, when I got out to 94, I pulled back on the control, nothing happened. But I cranked the leading edge down on the horizontal stabilizer, boy, the airplane pulled 3Gs. I say, "Wow, I can control it with this horizontal stabilizer." So we came down and looked at the data, and Jack and I talked about it and said, "Hey, good luck."

The next flight, we took it up to about 96 and I still had horizontal stabilizer control. Then, the next flight was October the 14th. I just let it ride on out to, it goes up to 96 in buffet, and the Machmeter fluctuated and went off the scale. When it did, all the buffeting quit because supersonic flow over the whole airplane. The airplane was beginning the nose down. I cranked the leading edge down on the horizontal stabilizer, kept the nose up, kept it out there at about 106 or 107 for about 20 seconds, and then shut the rockets off and decelerated back. Got into buffeting, I backed up through Mach 1, it came down and landed.

And really, that was the biggest thing that came out of the whole X-1 program was finding out if you're going to operate in the region of the speed of sound or at supersonic speed, you've got to have a flying tail. We found that out. Now, the Air Force classified the X-1 program. We didn't release to the rest of the world for about nine months that we really had even flown at supersonic speed. The one thing that was nice about it, we finally admitted, yeah, we've flown at supersonic speed. We didn't tell the rest of the world how we had flown at supersonic speed. It was amazing to me, having worked on French airplanes, British airplanes, and Mig-15s. It took the British and the French and the Soviet Union five years to find that out about a flying tail. Gave us a quantum jump on the rest of the world, and that's the way research is done. When we got above Mach 1, I flew the airplane some 40 flights and got it out to 1.5 Mach there. Let Jack Ridley fly it and other guys.

You can almost say I was disappointed it didn't blow up because of so much anticipation that people had put into the program. But there again, once we got out there and back, really, I think I just had a feeling of accomplishment. You got to realize, the X-1 was one of about 10 different test programs that I was working on. We were working seven days a week, 16, 18 hours a day, flying our tail off. I think on the way down to land on the lake bed, I said, "Man, that's finished. I can go back. I can go work on some more programs now," and that's the way you looked at it.

Nobody put any pressure on us because General Boyd made damn sure they didn't. Secondly, he's the guy that said, "Don't bust your butt. If you don't like something, give me a call." It was that simple. There's no pressure on us to get above Mach 1 because we've seen what the British had done and when they stopped all of their research flying. We'd also seen the effects of a lot of guys who were fooling around at high Mach number and killed themselves. They named the streets at Edwards, you're driving on them all the time. So, you know. You paid attention to what you were doing. All it did was double my workload. I had to go give talks, as well as flying every day busting my butt. That's the only thing that I did. I didn't really pay any attention to it, and I never have. And really, a lot of people say, "Well, weren't you disappointed that you didn't get the publicity?" That wasn't the reason I flew the X-1. I flew it because of my duty. Publicity doesn't make a hoot to me. That and 50 cents will get you a cup of coffee.

Yeah, from '47 up, '45 through '54, a lot of guys got killed out there because doing research was dangerous. But that was the only way we could get the data, and we figured it was worth it.

Well, some of them were out of their ... shouldn't have been flying what they were flying, like a bomber pilot flying a fighter or vice versa. And you really don't pay much attention to it. You just say to yourself, "Well, I'm glad that wasn't me." And you find out what caused the accident and you learn from things like that.

Basically, you hate to see a guy kill himself, but secondly, you hate to see him tear up a good airplane. And that's the way you look at it. And really, I don't think you really pay much attention to it other than to catalog what caused it. You stay out of that area

Obviously, some of the guys that got killed, put into a situation where it was impossible for them to get out. But I obviously had a maintenance background, understood the system. That helped me a great deal in it. I understood the machinery that was flying. Secondly, I made it a point to know everything I could about egress systems, the ejection seats, pressure suits, parachutes, and things like that. Because when you have to use them, you're usually in a semi-conscious state. And basically, I survived because I knew those systems.

It was an interesting time, and there's a lot of activity. The Cold War's beginning, and we're developed afterburners for jet engines, swept wings, delta wings, thin wings. We're operating out beyond Mach 2 and 3 and with research airplanes on out to Mach 5 and Mach 6, and then into space. And that's everything. There's no end to what you can do.

Well, that basically SR-71 was a reconnaissance airplane, strategic reconnaissance, and we developed the capability with bypass engines and titanium metal. We found that out with the X-1A. Man, we was smoking off at two and a half times the speed of sound. Damned airplane about melted on us.

Flight testing is a competitive world. Operational flying, teamwork. You got a squadron commander, things like that. When the military got involved in research flying, and we started with the X-1, we proved, "Hey, the military guys do a hell of a lot better job than the NACA does." And then the civilian pilots had a lot less expensive job. And consequently, when the X-1A came out in 1953, they're back to the same old program. Bell had a civilian test pilot who should never have been in the airplane and got it ... Skip Ziegler. He's a North American desk pilot and went to work for Bell. Skip flew the X-1A, four-powered flight. I chased him in a F-86D. I was sitting on his wing sitting there at a .93, .94 Mach number heavy buffeting. He would never take the airplane super sonic because he didn't know what he was doing.

And finally he went back to the Bell plant and was working on the X-2, and was blown out of the bomb bay, had an explosion in the airplane, blew it out and killed him. So now Bell's got an X-1A with no pilot. So they came to the Air Force, said, "It's yours," and I was selected to do the work. And Ridley and I, all we were doing when we flew with the first flight of the X-1A, NACA had gotten their hands on the D-558 Phase 2. And Scott Crossfield had gotten it out barely to Mach 2. Well, you're coming up on December the 12th, 1953, 50th anniversary of the Wright Brothers first flight. So when Scott got up to Mach 2, the press, christ, made big documentaries, and they're exploiting this for the 50th anniversary of powered flight.

So we had a couple months to shoot them down with the X-1A. We knew the airplane would go well beyond Mach 2. I was selected to fly it. Ridley and I sat down, worked out a profile. The first flight I flew in the airplane, I took it out to 1.3 Mach number, flew just like the X-1 did. Different airplane. You got a canopy on top, you sat down in the seat, they bolted a canopy on it, still no ejection seat. And first time, I took it out to 1.3. Then we figured if we dropped to 30,000 feet, fired off three chambers of the four available, accelerated out, climbed to 45,000 feet, level out, fired the fourth chamber, now we're getting maximum thrust out of this thing. Go out to about 1.2 Mach number, then pull it up to about a 45-degree climb angle, go through 50 at 1.3, 55 1.5, and at 60 start a pushover and becoming level at 70, we knew we'd get the airplane well above Mach 2.

Now X-1A at a relatively small tail, just like the X-1. Bell said, "You better be careful above 2.3." Because conical shock wave is forming an airplane getting narrower and narrower. And when it comes in about the tip of the horizontal stabilizer and the vertical stabilizer, it's questionable whether or not the airplane's got enough stability to make it go straight. And t he third powered flight, I took it out to 1.9 and I had a lot of fuel left. And the fourth powered flight, I had a pressure suit on. It was kind of hard to see out of, and the light was bad. And so instead of climbing at 45 degrees, I was up about 55 degrees. When I started to push over at 60, I floated on up to 80,000 feet. At about there, I was looking at 1.9. So I dropped the nose a little bit and went through Mach 2, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3. We were accelerating about 31 miles per hour per second because we had no drag and a lot of good thrust weight ratio. And when I went through 2.3 Mach number, the airplane began to yaw. I didn't understand what was happening. I pushed full opposite rudder, tried to get the nose back. Nothing happened. The airplane finally yawed about 35 to 40 degrees. The outside wing, because of the dihedral effect, came up and the airplane flipped, inverted. And that then really got wound up. I had no idea what was going on. The canopy busted out. The inner liner on the canopy busted out when we went negative G and losing pressurization. I had a pressure suit on. My visor was fogged up, and I couldn't get the rear set up. It was a hairy ride, and I rode it. And the first thing I remember recognizing was that in all this tumbling, we were ... See, when airplanes yaw like this, rolling so fast, you get about nine positive Gs, two Gs side load, three negative, two side load, nine positive. Well, you do this twice a second, it really beats you up. So I rode the thing in, and finally the first thing I recognized when I got the rear set up on my visor to clear the fog off of it, well, I'm in an inverted spin at about 35,000 feet. So that was easy. I spun airplanes all my life. And so I flipped it into a normal spin by putting a controlled width to spin direction. And here I'm in a normal spin right side up, and I popped it out with four forward stick and an opposite rudder and recovered at about 25,000 feet. And then I got to find myself. So I'm over to Hatchby, and I finally picked up Rogers Dry Lake. And I made a long straight glide and landed. That's the fourth and last flight I made in the airplane. We got out to almost 2.5 Mach number, but the Bell engineers were right. The airplane lost stability on all three axes because of the speed.

And also we got involved in heat on the side of the nose or the airplane at high speed. After the X-1A, they never took it out to Mach number like that again. Did some high altitude work up to 90,000 feet with it. But then they built the X-2, made it out stainless steel instead of aluminum like the X-1A. And they operated that airplane out beyond Mach 3.

When you start talking about speed records on the land, on water, in the air, it's publicity. Hell, there's a thousand different classes of airplanes today and there's a thousand different speed records. In fact, it's almost so confusing, it loses its attractiveness. And so what if a guy goes out here in a car and goes above Mach 1? What's he accomplishing? Just it's just speed.

See, I never owned a speed record in my life, as far as speed is concerned. I flew a hell of a lot faster than other people were because I was in research programs for a reason. That reason was to find out data to fight. And so that was my life. But guys that go out and try to set... It's becoming so saturated that really it loses its attractiveness. And that's what you tell new pilots who fly. You can't do anything with an airplane that hadn't already been done, and that includes making a smoking hole. See, half the people don't even turn around and look at it anymore. It's that simple.

Well, basically, as I mentioned before, we, at a very accelerated rate, worked out beyond Mach 3, 4, 5, 6, and then Mach 25 into space. Well, as I mentioned before, speed really doesn't mean that much today because of the precision-guided missiles that you carry have tremendous speeds and they do a lot of damage. And so we don't operate above Mach 2 in military aircraft. SR-71, a 3.27 Mach number. That's the fastest I ever had the airplane.

People today don't realize what the women pilots did for us in World War II because they don't think back. And basically, we had about 1100 women pilots that flew everything we did in World War II, ferrying them from the factory to operational units. They didn't fly combat because the law didn't allow them to fly combat. Hell, they'd probably done as good a job as we did, if not better because they're more vicious sometimes. And Jackie Cochran was the head of the WASPs. I met her in 1947 after breaking Mach I. I didn't know who she was. I led a rather isolated life in the military, either in combat or flight test, and you don't get exposed to a lot of outside world. I met her at the Pentagon when I was back there in '48, flouted because of what we'd done with the X-1 when they released it. And I met her, and she was an interesting gal. And I found out later, she's a hell of a pilot, too. And she owned airplanes.

Jackie, of course, she was married to Floyd Odlum, who was the head of Atlas Corporation, owned Canadair in Canada, who built the F-86s and RKO, movie companies, and things like that. And Jackie flew in races, Bendix races and Mustangs. She owned Mustangs. She flew early P-43s and early airplanes in the '30s. And she was quite a bit older than I was, but she was an excellent pilot, had a lot of experience and went ... Oh, I met her in '48, I think it was. And basically I didn't get to know her because I was at Edwards and working my tail off. And finally, in 1953, she wanted to fly the F-86 and dive it up to the speed of sound or make a sonic boom and set some records in it. Well, she used a Canadair airplane, and she was hired as a test pilot by Canadair. But she had never flown a jet. So Air Force said she was a reserve pilot having served in the WASPs. And I got to know her quite well. She invited Glennis and I down to her ranch at [inaudible] in, I don't know, '49, '50, '51. And so I was sort of assigned as her instructor, and I took her in T-33s, taught her how to fly jet airplanes, and then checked her out in F-86 single cockpit, and chased her on her wing. And she did a very good job. And we took, I think, about her sixth powered flight, took her up to about 45,000 feet and got her to get the airplane straight down and she got a sonic boom out of it. The first woman to go Mach 1. And then she set some low altitude records in the F-86, and she held the altitude, absolute speed record for anybody, men or women, in the F-86. Then she started flying T-38s as a test pilot for Northrop. Did a good job out there, 1.3 Mach number and long range. Then she got into the F-104. Lockheed hired her as a test pilot. She flew 104 out to 2.2 Mach number, 100-kilometer closed course, some 1,429 miles an hour. She did a very good job, and she was a pretty old gal at that time. And she's a tremendous airplane driver. She was just furthering women in aviation. And because of Jackie's efforts, we now have gal pilots in the Navy and the Air Force. We've even had a half a dozen or so go through the test pilot school at Edwards. They're very good.

See, the ability of a pilot ... Doesn't make any difference what the shape of their reproductive organ is, basically, it's experience. The more experience that a pilot has, the better they are. It doesn't make a hoot if they're a woman or a man. And that's the thing that came out of this so-called Apollo 13 flap at Jericho and the women pilot. When the space program started with the Mercury program, it was an unknown. So who do you select to put in that capsule? The most experienced test pilots that you have. Unfortunately, when the space program started, there were no women pilots with the research flying experience. So they weren't even considered. There were guys who had a lot of experience. They were the ones that were selected, and they did a good job. Had the gal pilots had experience in flight testing, they would've done just as good a job. But they didn't, and that was the reason they weren't selected. It wasn't anti-females or things like that. That's a facts of life in the hard world of research flying.

When we started the space school, Air Force had space programs, the manned orbital laboratory, the mobile program. We had the X-20 Dyna-Soar, which was the forerunner of the system for elements like the shuttle. We had astronauts selected. We were developing space weapon systems. And in 1966, we had trained roughly 34 guys who went through the school and the space course that were picked up by NASA and became astronauts in space and flew in the space program. Now in 1966, the decision was made by the administration, John Kennedy and then Johnson, that space would be for peaceful purposes. See, we were very much in a Cold War with the Soviet Union and they were developing space weapon systems. We thought, "Well, if we are naive enough not to develop space weapon systems, the Soviet Union wouldn't either." That's not the way the system worked. And so they canceled the Air Force out of space, canceled the X-20 program, the mobile program. And I left the school in 1966 and went to Vietnam.

And from then on, NASA was formed. It got into the space program and the Soviets moved right into the void. And that's unfortunate, but that's the way it happened. And they pretty well wiped the program out. And those guys that we had trained, of course NASA picked it up. And on the staff, I had Frank Borman, Tom Stafford, Jim McDivitt, Dick Truly, guys like that, and it was a very good program.

To get into the space program in 1959, you had to have a degree. Hell, I'm younger than John Glenn is or any of the original seven guys. I'm younger than they are, because I got started early. But the thing was when the space program started in '59, you had to have a degree. I only had a high school education. I never paid any attention to it.

You got to realize when I retired in 1974 or '75, the Air Force came to me and said, "Look, you've got a lot of experience in research flying. We'd like to sign you as a consultant test pilot for a dollar a year." I did, and I flew at Edwards on the average of a couple of weeks a month for the next 22 years. Now, I'd always promised myself... One of the stipulations that you got to pass physical, which I have no trouble doing. And I'd sort of promised myself, if you can still be flying on the 50th anniversary breaking Mach 1, I'd probably hang it up. And I did. I was flying in F-15 at Edwards, but I was flying F-15s, F-16s and other airplanes for a long time prior to that, October the 14th, 1997. But it just so happened they wanted to celebrate the 50th.

And if you go back, the US Air Force became a separate service September the 18th, 1947. That's a little more in a couple weeks before we broke Mach 1. That was a big feather in the Air Force's hat to exploit that, to doing something like that. Now on October the 14th was a Tuesday, and I flew an F-15E and made a sonic boom. I also flew it the following weekend on Saturday and Sunday when we had almost 800,000 people up there at Edwards. And when I landed after that last flight on Sunday, I walked away from it and I've never regretted it.

I had my fun and I still fly Mustangs, light stuff, but not military stuff. Because a lot of the work I did out there on laser-guided systems, solid terrain following and weapons management systems, standoff weapons systems you saw in Desert Storm and things like that. And I enjoyed it. It was interesting.

The Concorde, basically, you take all the money from those 100 people crowded in that little tube and it didn't even buy the fuel. There's a lot of government subsidization in that program. We could build an airplane today that would fly at Mach 5 and carry people, but who's going to pay for it? See, that's a big question. It's a very expensive deal to develop a supersonic transport. And people will not pay that, 10 times as much as it would enjoy sitting in a 747 enjoying life.

It's a very safe arena now because of computer enhancement and simulators. And they do a very good job. They're very well-trained, very smart. And the same way with the fighter pilots that we have both in the Navy and the Air Force, they do a very good job.

The only thing that I see, what has happened basically is the military pilots today, you can't expect them to go out and fly $125 million airplane like the F-22 and spend seven months out of each year away from home and pay them peanuts. So guys are getting out, going to work for airlines, make three times as much money, fly three weeks a month, stay home, enjoy life. Well, people are beginning to realize that duty isn't as paramount as it used to be in guys like myself who were raised during a more patriotic time. And basically, now Congress is beginning to realize, say, "God, costs us a few million dollars to train a pilot and the guy serves six years and gets out and goes work for the airline. Well, we got to make it attractive for him to make him stay in." And the only reason you're going to see... Flying even in the military is a job and you've got to support a family, a house, a car and things like that. And it's not like it used to be in World War II where a guy would go out and get killed for $200 a month.

Ken Harbaugh:

That was Brig. Gen. Chuck Yeager.

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Warriors In Their Own Words is a production of Evergreen Podcasts, in partnership with The Honor Project.

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