Yeager: An Autobiography

RESCUE MISSION

One day when I was going out to fly the XF-92, Pete Everest stopped me on the flight line. "Where are you off to?" he asked. "To fly the XF-92," I said. "No, you're not-I am." Pete was a major, in charge of the military test pilots at Muroc and a fellow West Virginian. I was five-ten and he was a couple of inches shorter than that, but ruggedly built and extremely strong. In a bar brawl, you could get him down on the third swing of a sledgehammer. Pete was a damned good pilot, probably my closest rival in sheer ability among the fighter test pilots. The old man picked Pete to do high-altitude test work on the X-1 after my Mach I flight, and I flew chase for him on the day when his canopy suddenly burst and his pressure suit saved his life; he managed to get back and land safely under great difficulty.

We had fun together raising hell hither and yon, but he was intensely competitive and not someone who willingly took second place to anybody. On the job, I had to watch my step with him. So, I told him, "Well, screw it. You outrank me, and if you want to fly that thing, be my guest." I turned around and walked back to operations, leaving Pete looking a little shocked. He didn't expect me to surrender so fast, and that airplane was a tricky bastard to fly cold. If he dinged it, the old man would have him for supper. I don't know what he did because I took off my parachute and went home early.

Everest was piqued because he didn't get the X–I supersonic flights or the XF-92, either. Those assignments came to me directly from the old man. And in late 1949, when Colonel Boyd was promoted to general and moved himself and the entire flight test division out to Muroc, that kind of petty horseshit on the flight line came to a crashing halt. Man, all of us shaped up fast. After being on our own for more than two years, we cringed knowing that the sternest disciplinarian in the entire Air Force was on his way. Fun and games were definitely over. Ridley called me at home the night before the general arrived, kind of stuttering in that high nasal voice: "Chuck, goddamn, I can't find my Air Force tie. It must've burnt with our house. You got an extra?" That damned fire had happened two years earlier.

Hell, we wore any damned thing we wanted, which wasn't very much in summer, with temperatures stuck above one hundred. We nearly forgot how to salute, and sometimes we'd joke and wonder what it was like being in the real Air Force. Well, the old man showed us in a hurry. He came roaring in from Wright Field, ordering Saturday morning inspections, lining up all of us under the baking sun. We had spent hours scraping off two years of corrosion from our belt buckles, polishing those brass buggers until they gleamed. Our shoes were spit-polished, our uniforms so starched and pressed that bread could be sliced on the creases. We had fresh haircuts and close shaves. Christ, we had never looked any better, but the old man put half of us on report. He went up and down the line, scowling, eyeing us from peaked hat to polished toe. A few of the guys began wobbling under the sun and keeled over. The general stepped right over them. He knew damned well what had been going on at Muroc and he just lowered the boom.

Within a year or two, none of us would have recognized the place. We were renamed Edwards Air Force Base in honor of Capt. Glenn Edwards, who was killed testing the Flying Wing, which looked like a boomerang. (Russ Schleeh took over the program; he was taxiing for takeoff when the nose wheel began to shimmy violently. The airplane nosed over, fell apart, and burst into flames. Russ broke his back, but managed to pull his copilot out. He was so damned disgusted with the Flying Wing that he tried to stop the firemen from putting out the flames.) With the change of name, sleepy old Muroc ceased to exist. Edwards became the Free World's center for advanced aviation research that would take us to the edge of space. By the time I left in 1954, there were ten thousand people working at Edwards. So, Muroc was an old-timer's memory, along with unpolished shoes and belt buckles.

General Boyd arrived just as I was finishing my test work on the XF-92. In fact, I checked him out in that airplane. He crawled in the cockpit and said "Now, Chuck, what do I have to do?" I said, "Well I'll tell you, sir, you just go rolling down the runway, and when that airspeed indicator hits 180, you just blow a little on that stick." He laughed, but he later said I was so right, that he never worked any controls so sensitive in his life. "How in hell did you land that thing at 67 mph?" he wanted to know. Obviously he meant that question as a compliment and was very pleased with my test performance, so the last thing that either of us expected was that he would be forced to sign orders sending me back to test pilot's school. But that is exactly what happened, the result of jealousy against me.

I had no shortage of enemies in flight test, and one of them (I never learned who) discovered that I had never completed the stability and control course at test pilot school. That is, the school was in two parts. I finished the first part, then went on to fly the X-1, skipping the second part, stability and control school, a six-month course. Without a diploma from stability and control school I could not be certified to do flight testing. Well, it was ridiculous. I had more stability and control experience than any of my would-be instructors. Performance tested how high and fast an airplane could fly; stability and control tested all of its handling characteristics by performing spins, stalls, high angles of attack. A fighter was a moving gun platform, and to be accurate in firing its weapons, it had to be a stable platform. I had literally hundreds of hours of stability and control work behind me when I was forced back to school. General Boyd's hands were tied; regulations were regulations. I was sabotaged, but it was ironic having the Air Force's big test pilot hero back in test pilot school, hitting the books.

The school was on base. The instructors made damned sure it wouldn't be easy for me. Their attitude was right out in the open: they would love to flunk me. The word got back to me that they had actually laughed at the possibility, wondering what the Air Force brass would do about it when they denied me a diploma. In class, the instructors smirked every time they called on me, as if to say, "Okay, hot shot, let's see how you handle this one." They just dumped on me. The word was out that I could be tripped up academically, so they loaded me down with extra assignments, and if I didn't complete every last equation or problem, I staved after class until I did. If I were a minute late to class, they put me on report. I knew they wanted me to explode, so they could really nail me and maybe ruin my career. So, I did what I was told and counted to three or four hundred. But I always remembered those nasty sons of bitches. If they were harassing me because of a cocky attitude or because I wasn't doing my work, I would respect that. But this was spite. I put a little red flag next to the name of each one of those guys, and I nailed them the first chance I got. That's exactly what I did, and ruthlessly, too.

I was scared they were going to flunk me no matter how hard I worked. Ridley tried to help bY tutoring me; I remember sitting up half the night, night after night, struggling through complicated problems. I felt trapped, and I could smell disaster at the end of the line. No diploma for this jock. But then an amazing thing happened. General Boyd grabbed me out of school and took me with him to France. Wham team. One day I was in class, the next I was on his wing in a fighter crossing the Atlantic. The school's commandant was a bird colonel. He raised hell, saying I couldn't miss three weeks of school and expect to graduate. General Boyd's authority extended over the school, and he told me to pack my bags. The French government invited him over to evaluate their first generation of jet fighters and bombers, because we had much more experience in high-speed aircraft. The old man chose me to go with him. He said, "I know how disappointed you'll be leaving school to go fly, but I thought I'd take you, anyway."

God, it was wonderful, although we worked our butts off. We went first to French Air Force headquarters in Paris to get briefed, then flew down to Marseilles to their flight test center. Although he was a general officer, he always flipped a coin with me to see who got to fly first. And if he won, you could bet your tail he would put that airplane right on the end of the runway, landing as pretty as any pilot could ever do. He was so expert at evaluating airplanes that he could fly once and write up a complete flight test report. The general wanted to go to work very early when the air was smooth, but the French engineers drifted in around nine in the morning, broke out the wine and cheese. The old man wiped that out fast. I flew the Mystere up to Paris and made the first sonic boom over that city in a steep dive. We had a lot of problems, but we worked well together. The old man was like me: stick him in an airplane and his day was made.

On the way back from France we stopped off in Madrid. At dinner, I said, "General Boyd-" but he interrupted. "Chuck, we're after-hours now. Call me 'Al.'" I said, "General Boyd, the two of us can be stuck together on a desert island for the next ten years, but you'll still be 'General Boyd.' " I could no more call my own dad "Hal" than call General Boyd by his first name. I think if I had ever tried to call him Al, my mouth would not have known how to get it out.

When we returned to Edwards, the old man marched on the test pilot school. The commandant told him, "General, there's no way we can pass Yeager. He's missed too much work." The old man handed him the stability and control reports I had prepared on the XF-92 and the French jets. "Study that," he said, "you might learn something. Yeager knows more about stability and control than you can teach him." The commandant said that might be, but rules were rules, and I couldn't get a certification diploma without completing my course work. And without the certificate, my test pilot days were over. General Boyd turned red, then purple. He slammed his fists down on the table and his voice shook that room. "Goddamn it, I'm in charge of this school. You will pass".

And that's how I got my diploma.