Yeager: An Autobiography

THE RIGHT PLACE

I got to Wright Field on a fluke. Because Glennis was pregnant and sick, I figured we needed to be close to West Virginia, where Mom could give us a hand. As a former evadee, I could be stationed at the air base of my choice. I knew I'd be gone a lot-that's the pilot's life-and we both agreed that being near Hamlin was a smart move with a baby on the way. To have Glennis move in with my folks was not our idea of married life. Right from the start, we were a typical military couple: we never could find housing or enjoy any real family stability. Whenever Glennis needed me over the years, I was usually off in the wild blue yonder. Yet, she never griped, not even when we lived out on a dry lakebed in the Mojave, drawing our water from a damned windmill pump, and the nearest store or doctor was forty miles away.

If another air base had been closer to Hamlin than Wright Field I would not have been at the right place at the right time. I had no idea that I had stumbled into the most exciting place on earth for a fighter pilot. Not only were Wright's huge hangars crammed with airplanes begging to be flown, but it would soon be the center of the greatest adventure in aviation since the Wright brothers-the conversion from propeller airplanes to supersonic jets and rocket-propelled aircraft.

I reported into Wright in July 1945, a few weeks before the atomic bomb ended the war. I had eleven hundred hours of flying time and a background in maintenance. I was a perfect candidate for what they needed: a fighter pilot to run functional test flights on all the airplanes after engine overhauls and other repairs. I was assigned as an assistant maintenance officer to the fighter test section of the flight test division, the hub, over the next decade, for the testing of a radically new generation of powerful airplanes that would take us to the edge of space and change aviation forever. These tremendous changes occurred in the age of the slide rule, before computers were born or advanced wind tunnels existed. We would discover by dangerous trial and error what worked and what didn't. That cost lives, but for the pilots who survived, it was the most thrilling time imaginable. I was in on the beginning of a Golden Age. Two weeks after arriving at Wright, I was flying the first operational American jet fighter.

I had no idea of what the future might hold when I reported in. All I knew was that Wright Field was a fun place to be, loaded with every airplane in the inventory, and there was plenty of gasoline. It was like Aladdin's lamp with unlimited rubs. I could fly as much as I wanted, building flying experience on dozens of different kinds of fighters. The first chance I got I flew to Hamlin and buzzed Glennis. I called her that night and said, "I miss you, hon, but I'm in hog heaven."

I wasn't an ambitious kid, but I was competitive. I had a small office between Hangars Seven and Eight, where all the fighters were kept, and got to know some of the test pilots. It never occurred to me that I could be one of them; I lacked the education. All of them were college grads, mostly with engineering degrees. There were about twenty-five fighter test pilots, and they weren't exactly shy about their status. They were the stars of the show. I thought, well, fair enough. If they're fighter test pilots, they must be hotter than a whore's pillow. It would be interesting to see how well I could do against the best fighter jocks in the Air Corps.

So, every time I took off in a P-5 1 on a test hop, I climbed to 15,000 feet and circled over Wright, waiting for one of those guys to take off. They were all fair game for a dogfight, and I lived and breathed dogfights. That was a way of life ever since my squadron training days. As soon as a test pilot climbed to altitude, I dove at him. I went through the entire stable of test pilots and waxed every fanny. A few of them fought back half-heartedly, but none of them had any combat experience, and when they saw I was merciless, they just quit. The test pilots couldn't fly an airplane close to the ragged edge where you've got to keep it if you really want to make that machine talk. And they weren't amused by being shown up by an assistant maintenance officer.

One of them told me, "We weren't trained to do acrobatics. We're precision fliers. If I handed you a test card and told you to go test an airplane, you couldn't do it. You'd bust your ass." That was probably true, but I kept after some of the sore losers, waxing their tails every chance I got.

I flew six to eight hours a day; I flew everything they had, including most of the captured German and Japanese fighter planes. (The Focke-Wulf 190 was the only one in the same league with the Mustang.) I checked out in twenty-five different airplanes. I never did understand how a pilot could walk by a parked airplane and not want to crawl in the cockpit and fly off. I could not honestly claim to be the best pilot, because as good as you think you are, there is always somebody who is probably better. But I doubt whether there were many who loved to fly as much as I did. Nobody logged more flying time. My feet touched ground just long enough to climb out of one airplane and service check another. I even flew the first prototype jet fighter, the Bell P-59, which had been secretly tested out on the California desert in 1942. Its crude engines were vastly underpowered, so there wasn't an exhilarating sense of speed, but I marveled at how smooth and quiet it was compared to prop airplanes, and I flew that first jet right down the main street of Hamlin.

If you wanted to fly in those days, you had only to ask a crew chief to check you out in an unfamiliar cockpit, brief you on the systems and characteristics and then fire the engine. Everything about airplanes interested me: how they flew, why they flew, what each could or couldn't do and why. As much as I flew, I was always learning something new, whether it was a switch on the instrument panel I hadn't noticed, or handling characteristics of the aircraft in weather conditions I hadn't experienced. Unlike many pilots, I really learned the various systems of aircraft. A typical motorist is content to drive without knowing a spark plug from a crankshaft; a typical pilot is much the same. The gauges in the cockpit tell him as much as he wants to know about his machine. You've got to love engines and valves and all those mechanical gadgets that make most people yawn to have an eager curiosity about an airplane's systems. But it was a terrific advantage for me when something went wrong at 20,000 feet. Knowing machinery like I did, and having a knowledgeable feel for it, I knew how to cope with practically any problem. I knew what was serious or manageable. All pilots take chances from time to time, but knowing- not guessing-about what you can risk is often the critical difference between getting away with it or drilling a fifty-foot hole in mother earth.

And it also set me on a path that would change my life.

It was my feel for equipment that first brought me to the attention of Col. Albert G. Boyd, head of the flight test division.

The Jet Age arrived for me the day when I was seated in the cockpit of the Lockheed P-80 Shooting Star, the first operational American jet fighter. What a breathtaking ride-like being a pebble fired from a slingshot. Cruising straight and level, I flew at 550 mph, faster than I had in a full-throttle power dive in my Mustang. I felt like I was flying for the first time. I greased that thing in on landing, happy as a squirrel hunter who had bagged a mountain lion. The life of an engine in those early jets was practically nothing; after only three or four hours an engine would burn out, and we had so many fire-warning lights in the cockpit that I finally unscrewed the bulb. But since the Shooting Star was always being repaired, I logged more jet time than anyone else: the airplane couldn't go back into service until the maintenance officer checked it out in the sky. So, right from the start, I was probably the most experienced jet pilot in the Air Corps.

Flying those primitive jets was tricky. You had to be cautious opening the throttle because the engine temperature would climb enormously. So, you'd ease up on the throttle slowly, making sure you didn't go over the red line on the temperature gauge. The landings were even trickier. Flying faster than ever before, you had to line up your approach faster and more accurately than with props. The Shooting Star didn't decelerate very quickly, and its rate of acceleration was even worse, so if you came in too slow, you couldn't get your power back for nearly twenty seconds, and by then you might be heading into the ground. We lost several jets and pilots that way. Like somebody said, it was like trying to learn how to ride a race horse after riding only on elephants.

But I adjusted quickly, and in August 1945, I accompanied Colonel Boyd and a detachment of fighter test pilots out to Muroc Air Base in the Mojave Desert to conduct service tests on the Shooting Star. I was the detachment's maintenance officer. Muroc, about seventy miles from Los Angeles, was the site of ancient lakebeds that were six miles wide and eight miles long, perfect landing fields in the middle of nothing but scrub and Joshua trees. During the war it was used for practice bombing and secret test work. The place looked like the ass-end of the moon, and little did I know at the time that I would spend sixteen years of my life there.

We flew off the north end of the lakebed. There were six pilots and six or seven jets, working in temperatures way over 100 degrees. And we worked our fannies off. Especially the ground crews. The jets were constantly breaking down which meant that the maintenance officer was logging more flying time than anyone else in test hops. Colonel Boyd watched me fly, and he also saw that I was on top of the maintenance and the mechanics. At the end of a week of testing, he ordered one Shooting Star flown back to Wright, while the others were returned to the factory. He chose me to fly it back, which really frosted the major in charge of the fighter test section. "Colonel," he said, "I think a test pilot should fly it back." Boyd said no. "Yeager is a maintenance officer who knows the airplane and understands the system, and he'll get it back there." And I did.

If you love the hell out of what you're doing, you're usually pretty good at it, and you wind up making your own breaks. Other than being forced by circumstances to live apart from Glennis, I was as happy as I ever was. If I could fly and hunt and fish, I had nine-tenths of it all. Rank didn't mean a whole helluva lot, except that I needed more money. If they had decided to make me a general, my first question would've been: Do generals get to fly? I wasn't a deep, sophisticated person, but I lived by a basic principle: I did only what I enjoyed. I wouldn't let anyone derail me by promises of power or money into doing things that weren't interesting to me. That kept me real and honest. Job titles didn't mean diddly. Assistant Maintenance Officer might not be a title that would really impress Aunt Maude, but if it meant that I could fly more than anyone else, I'd stick with it for as long as I could. I loved being in the Air Corps because I was a trained combat pilot, and that's where all the airplanes were. But I wasn't thrilled by all the regulations, orders, and chains of command; and over the years, I bent most of their rules into pretzels if they ever got in the way of what I wanted, especially when it came to flying off somewhere to hunt or fish. In the end, though, I figure they got more out of me than I got out of them.

I wasn't a saint, for sure. I could raise hell with the best in the bunch. But pride was a big part of me, and I never tried to be who I wasn't. I thought I was as good as the rest of them. And when it came to flying, I was better.

I was self-conscious about my lack of education, especially in comparison to the test pilots. With jets coming into the picture, flying would get more complex and technical, and I worried about keeping up without an engineering background. I wasn't particularly impressed with the skills of the fighter test pilots, and after the service tests at Muroc, they felt even worse about me. That the old man had chosen me to fly back the P-80 really stuck in a few craws. When I detected that kind of petty jealousy, I couldn't resist rubbing their noses in it, so I became ruthless in my dogfight tactics against the test pilots, waxing them so often they had to sit on pillows.

One day I took off in the Bell jet, the P-59. It was only my second flight in it, and I really didn't know the systems. Suddenly, a P-38 prop fighter dove in on me. I couldn't believe it! None of the test pilots had ever started a dogfight, but this guy seemed determined to bounce me. I whipped that jet around and pulled up in a vertical climb-not really understanding what in hell I was doing-and I stalled going straight up. I was spinning down and that damned P-38 was spinning up, both airplanes out of control and when we went by each other, not ten feet apart my eves were like saucers and so were the other pilot's. We both fell out of the sky, regained control down on the deck, engines smoking and wide open. Finally he said, "Hey, man, we'd better knock it off before we bust our asses." I didn't know who he was. We landed, and I went over to meet this tall, lanky first lieutenant. His name was Bob Hoover. I told him, "You're really hot in that airplane." He said "You are, too. I didn't know a P-59 could swap ends like that." I told him the truth: "I didn't either, till I tried it."

Bob was a combat pilot, had been shot down and spent time in one of the worst German stalags. He was assigned to the fighter test section, and from then on, we would dogfight every chance we got, in any airplane we happened to be flying, and neither of us ever won. As soon as our wings would pass we'd go right into a vertical climb, spin down, and break off so low to the ground, that it was either give up or crash. A stand-off every time. Bob became a legend: he had about twenty major accidents, all equipment failure, and once made it back into Wright on a dead engine by bouncing his wheels off a passing truck to give himself altitude over a chain link fence.

He loved practical jokes. He went over to a little airport in Dayton and signed up for flying lessons. He took the course taught by a really sharp-looking blonde, and when the time came for him to solo, a bunch of us went out to watch. He took off, climbed above the field, then dove straight down, did a roll and barely missed the hangars, looped and spinned, and turned everything loose. His instructor hid her face in her hands and almost passed out, but when she saw us standing in our uniforms and laughing like hell, she knew she'd been had.

Bob and I became pals and called each other "pard." One Friday, I said to him, "Hey, pard, how about dropping me off down at Hamlin? We have an airplane that needs some service testing and there's a little strip up there on the side of a hill." The truth i is, I had got other pilots to fly down there, but when they saw the small strip that stopped just short of a steep cliff, they chickened out of landing. But Bob was game, and made it in with a couple of yards to spare. I got out and he took off wide open and dropped! right off the edge of that damned cliff, engine racing. Down he went into the valley, roaring around down there to build up speed. It was a ten-minute walk to my front porch in Hamlin, and when I climbed those steps, I could still hear ol' Bob grinding away in there.

In the fall of 1945, Hoover and I began putting on air shows together. Air shows were very popular around the country after the war, and tens of thousands of people would show up at a local airport to watch military airplane demonstrations. At Wright, we had the only jet fighters flying, the P-80 Shooting Star, and when the requests began to pour in from local groups, some of the senior test pilots felt they couldn't be bothered, but Bob and I would fly anywhere, anytime, because we loved it. So, off we went- Michigan; Wisconsin, Alabama, New York. We were the stars of the show; the public hadn't seen a jet airplane, and there were no restrictions about what we could do: we could fly as fast or as low as we wanted, buzz Main Street, anything, nobody cared. It was great fun, and, man, you'd come in and break real crisp and grease it in, then taxi to a ramp in front of all those people, and think, well, I might not be the world's greatest, but maybe the second greatest.

People would come up and stare at your airplane and wonder how it could fly with no propeller. I'd get a volunteer to stand behind the tail pipe and light a newspaper. Then I turned on the igniter and whoosh, the engine fired up. The crowd really thought that guy had lit the engine. One day at a show in Philadelphia, I noticed two gals staring at my jet. "You gals ever seen a jet before?" I asked. They said no. I helped them up on the wing, and one of them told me she was flying air shows too. She pointed nearby and said, "That's my P-39.' I hadn't seen one since my early days of squadron training at Tonopah. I told her I had five hundred hours in the ThirtyNine and thought it was the best airplane I ever flew. She asked me if I wanted to fly it. "Yeah, man," I replied, "I'd give my right arm." So we concocted a little deal.

She was scheduled to fly the show the next morning. She was an ex-WASP, and the P.A. announcer told the crowd all about her just before take-off. We parked her Thirty-Nine away from the crowd. She had outfitted me in a woman's wig, a white jump suit, and a blue cap, and off I went. I put on a helluva acrobatic show, doing Immelmanns and Cuban eights, thrilled to be back in a Thirty-Nine again. I landed and parked far from the crowd, where she replaced me in the cockpit and then taxied up to the main ramp to receive the cheers

Those air shows were wonderful fun and good flying, as long as you kept your nose clean and didn't have any accidents. That's all that mattered. Those Shooting Stars were tricky; Hoover had a bad accident flying into Boston for a show; his engine exploded at 40,000 feet and he somehow dead-sticked in the fog. The test pilots would fly the Shooting Star to an air show and after the first day they would fly back on a commercial airliner, leaving behind a malfunctioning P-80. We would send a crew out to fix it, and then I would go get it and bring it back. But I knew the P-80 systems cold; if anything went wrong, I could usually fix it myself. I had a crew chief along to service the airplane and help. The point was, that of all the guys who flew in air shows, I was one of the very few who always came whistling back in without any problems.

I know that impressed Colonel Boyd because he ordered me to stage an air show with a Shooting Star for the open-house at Wright Field in early November 1945. Twenty-five fighter test pilots prayed that I'd bust my ass. Here I was, a damned maintenance officer, being the star attraction at an air show at their own base. And I wasn't even a test pilot. But anyone who knew my combat background understood that doing acrobatics was my piece of cake. For the Wright Field show, I took off with jet assists on each wing and water injection into the engine for additional power boost, and that P-80 shot straight up in the sky. Then I dove low over the crowd, did a few slow rolls, shot back up, then down again to do acrobatics. It really was an impressive show, and I flew real crisp that day. The test pilots looked grim after that.

A few days later, the old man sent for me and asked me if I wanted to be a test pilot. I told Colonel Boyd that I was interested, but that I wasn't very well educated. "You shouldn't have any problem," he said. "If you do, there are a lot of test pilots around here who would be glad to tutor you." Nothing got by Colonel Boyd. He knew damned well that Hoover and I were beating the asses off his test pilots in dogfights every day, and it amused the hell out of him.

Boyd's office was on the second floor of the headquarters building, his windows facing the flight line. He was six feet, two inches, lanky and balding, with thick dark eyebrows, and a thick hard jaw. Think of the toughest person you've ever known, then multiply by ten, and you're close to the kind of guy that the old man was. His bark was never worse than his bite: he'd tear your ass off if you screwed up. Everyone respected him, but was scared to death of him. He looked mean, and he was. He might have the most responsible job in military aviation, heading flight tests of all new airplanes, and you might be his star test pilot, but Lord help you if you stood in front of his desk with an unpolished belt buckle. That's the way he was. There were some tough characters among the pilots at Wright, but when the old man sent for any of us, we stood at attention with sweaty palms and knocking knees.

And he was one helluva pilot. He flew practically everything that was being tested at Wright, all the bombers, cargo planes, and fighters. If a test pilot had a problem, you could bet Colonel Boyd would get in that cockpit and see for himself what was wrong. He held the three-kilometer, low-altitude world speed record of 624 mph, in a specially built Shooting Star. So, he knew all about piloting, and all about us, and if we got out of line, you had the feeling that the old man would be more than happy to take you behind a hangar and straighten you out. In later years, he and I would fly together a lot doing test work, and we developed a warm relationship. But one thing had nothing to do with another: whenever I got out of line, he swatted me down. I've got the scars to show for it. Outside of Glennis, he became the most important person I've known. He completely changed my life in ways I never could imagine.

In January 1946, the skies over Wright Field were finally quiet. That's because Bob Hoover and I were sitting in class at the test pilot school on base, taking a six-month course. By far the smartest guy in our class was a skinny little bomber pilot from Oklahoma named Jack Ridley. He had studied at Caltech, and was about ten steps ahead of the others, and a lot more than that ahead of me. The course was a bitch, and it took me a while to get with it because I lacked the academic background. We were taught to reduce data, plot graphs and charts using calculus and algebraic formulas. When I didn't understand something, I'd go to Ridley for help, and he always explained a problem in ways that made it clear for me. As it turned out, Jack would do that time and again in the years ahead, saving my life many times.

The point was to teach you to fly in extremely precise ways, then prepare technical reports reducing the data of your flight into charts and graphs. As test pilots we would be investigating extremely specific performance characteristics of a particular airplane to determine whether or not it met its military specifications. Half a day of classroom work and half a day of flying. The flying part was for me a breeze. We'd crawl into a prop trainer with a test card to record our measurements. The assignment might be to find out the best climbing speed of the airplane. You'd start at 90 mph, hold it exactly, and record the rate of climb-about nine hundred feet a minute at a certain altitude. Then you'd increase to 100 mph and record that rate of climb. Then 110 mph…. Back on the ground, you'd record these three points and calculate a curve that showed the best airspeed-110 mph in that particular airplane. On board your aircraft was a barograph, a smoked drum rotating with two needles showing time and altitude. The barograph paper revealed how accurately you flew. If you performed a perfect rate of climb and descent, the graph looked like the teeth in a saw, and it was called a saw-tooth climb. It meant perfect precision flying. The instructor showed my graph to the class and said, "This saw-tooth climb belongs in a textbook." Because of my flying ability, they took mercy on my academics.

But I came within an inch of being bounced out of test pilot school and out of the service. I took off with my instructor one day in a two-seat T-6 prop trainer to run a power-speed test at 5,000 feet. Suddenly, the master rod blew apart in the engine, and the ship began to vibrate as if it would fall apart. I cut back on the power and began looking down to see where I could make an emergency landing. We were over Ohio farmland with plenty of plowed fields. I didn't want to bail out unless it was absolutely necessary. My instructor, a lieutenant named Hatfield, hadn't done much flying, and I looked back at him in the mirror and saw that his teeth were sticking to his lips. I said, "No sweat. Lock your shoulder harness and make sure your belt is tight because I'm gonna try and make it into one of these fields."

There were two fields on either side, and I started to set myself up on one of them. But I was sinking too fast coming in on a dead stick to make one field, and was really too high to use all of the other field so we came in between the two, directly in the path of a farmhouse, a chicken house, a smokehouse, and a well. Wheels up, we hit the ground, slithering along and went through the chicken house in a clatter of boards and a cloud of feathers. As the airplane skidded to a stop, the right wing hit the smokehouse, turning us sideways, and the tail hit the front end of the farmhouse porch, flipping us around. We came to rest right alongside the farmwife's kitchen window. She was at the sink, looking out, and I was looking her right in the eye through a swirl of dust and feathers. I opened the canopy and managed a small smile. "Morning, Ma'am," I said. "Can I use your telephone? "

Because there was a loss of civilian property, a board of inquiry was held. One of the witnesses was a councilman in a nearby village who claimed that before I crash-landed, I had buzzed down Main Street. Lieutenant Hatfield, who was my passenger, supported my denial, but those four majors on the board seemed hostile in their questioning, and I was scared to death. I could easily have been court-martialed. But the barograph aboard my airplane was my best defense. It clearly showed my altitude at the time of the engine problem, and what we were doing before I hit. Without that thing aboard, I'd probably be back in Hamlin digging turnips.

I was stuck at this damned hearing when my son, Donald, was born and because of it I couldn't get home for a couple of weeks. Andy was also gone when little Jim was born a few weeks earlier. He was off recruiting somewhere while Wily had the baby back in California. The military was the pits for things like that, but there was nothing you could do about it except get out. It was exciting, though, being a father, even if the news came long distance; I told Glennis on the phone that if I were flying at this moment, I'd do three slow rolls down on the deck. When I finally did get back and held Don in my arms, it was one of the big moments of my life. I figured that our lives would settle down as soon as I got test pilot school behind me. Little did I know.

A few months after I graduated from school, Colonel Boyd selected me to be the principal pilot to fly the X-1 and try to break the sound barrier.