Whatever I did I determined to do the best I could at it.
Catalog
Chuck Yeager
Charles Elwood "Chuck" Yeager (/ˈjeɪɡər/; born February 13, 1923) is a former United States Air Force general officer and record-setting test pilot. In 1947, he became the first pilot confirmed to have exceeded the speed of sound in level flight. Yeager's career began in World War II as a private in the United States Army Air Forces. After serving as an aircraft mechanic, in September 1942 he entered enlisted pilot training and upon graduation was promoted to the rank of flight officer (the World War II USAAF equivalent to warrant officer) and became a P-51 fighter pilot. After the war, Yeager became a test pilot of many types of aircraft, including experimental rocket-powered aircraft. As the first human to officially break the sound barrier, on October 14, 1947, he flew the experimental Bell X-1 at Mach 1 at an altitude of 45,000 ft (13,700 m). Although Scott Crossfield was the first to fly faster than Mach 2 in 1953, Yeager shortly thereafter set a new record of Mach 2.44. Yeager later commanded fighter squadrons and wings in Germany, and in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, and in recognition of the outstanding performance ratings of those units he was promoted to brigadier general. Yeager's flying career spans more than 60 years and has taken him to every corner of the globe, including the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War. 2Early life and education Yeager was born February 13, 1923, to farming parents Susie Mae and Albert Hal Yeager in Myra, West Virginia, and graduated from high school in Hamlin, West Virginia, in June 194
What good does it do to be afraid? It doesn't help anything. You better try and figure out what's happening and correct it.
The secret of my success is that I always managed to live to fly another day.
I ran the astronaut school for six years, and I was the commandant and when I finished in '65, 26 of my guys went into space as NASA astronauts that I trained.
He was in very bad weather and his airplane broke up.
I have flown in just about everything, with all kinds of pilots in all parts of the world - British, French, Pakistani, Iranian, Japanese, Chinese - and there wasn't a dime's worth of difference between any of them except for one unchanging, certain fact the best, most skillful pilot has the most…
He had a program called Free Spirit, ... He split 1 million four ways between people who didn't conform to the normal. I did a couple of slow rolls with the X-1 (the plane in which he broke the sound barrier), and I guess he thought that qualified.
Unfortunately, many people do not consider fun an important item on their daily agenda. For me, that was always high priority in whatever I was doing.
When it started, I had about 20,000 pilots donate their aircraft and fuel so we could fly 1 million kids by Dec. 17, 2003 (the 100th anniversary of the Wright Brothers first flight), ... I flew the millionth one at the Nevada County Airport.
You don’t concentrate on risks. You concentrate on results. No risk is too great to prevent the necessary job from getting done.
There’s no such thing as a natural-born pilot.
You do what you can for as long as you can, and when you finally can’t, you do the next best thing. You back up but you don’t give up.
Rules are made for people who aren’t willing to make up their own.
The first time I ever saw a jet, I shot it down.
Most pilots learn, when they pin on their wings and go out and get in a fighter, especially, that one thing you don’t do, you don’t believe anything anybody tells you about an airplane.
Later, I realized that the mission had to end in a let-down because the real barrier wasn’t in the sky but in our knowledge and experience of supersonic flight.
I was always afraid of dying. Always. It was my fear that made me learn everything I could about my airplane and my emergency equipment, and kept me flying respectful of my machine and always alert in the cockpit.
If you want to grow old as a pilot, you’ve got to know when to push it, and when to back off.
Everybody that I’ve ever seen that enjoyed their job was very good at it.