Yeager: An Autobiography

FOURTH POWERED FLIGHT DECEMBER 12, 1953

I was up and out before dawn to get in a couple of hours of duck hunting before going to work. I drove out in the Model A to the base Rod and Gun club. The sun was just peeking over the far mountains when I reached the blind. There were three or four guys already in there. By eight, I was over at the base firehouse having a sweet roll and a cup of coffee with the firemen. The fire chief was an old hunting buddy and kept my brace ot ducks in his refrigerator. By eight-thirty I was dressing for work in front of my locker in the operations building. My pressure suit needed minor repairs, which gave me time to clean my shotgun. Several of us kept our guns in our lockers, because being so damned busy, we took to hunting during a few spare hours here and there. A few days earlier, I was landing on the lakebed and spotted a gaggle of Canadian geese just sitting out there. A few of us drove out in a convertible, coming in on them in narrowing circles, so that by the time they spooked and took wing we were right under them. Man, the sky rained honkers.

By nine-fifteen, I was up front in the B-50 mother ship as she rumbled down the runway. It was a cold crisp morning, perfect weather for speed flying. I felt real good. Ridley was flying low chase this day, keeping a sharp eye on my exhaust when I fired up. Maj. Kit Murray was high chase, going up to about 40,000 feet ahead, to give me an aiming point. Both those guys would take off in their Sabres in about twenty minutes, as we approached altitude in the mother ship. We planned the drop for 30,000 feet.

At 13,000 feet, I headed for the bomb bay of the B-50, where the X-1A was nestled directly below metal scaffolding. I stepped down into the open cockpit strapped myself into the seat, and hooked my suit into the pressurization kit and the oxygen system. I gave a thumbs-up sign, and the crew lowered the heavy domed canopy over my head and sealed the bolts. For the next ten minutes, I checked out all my systems and started my prime to get all the gaseous oxygen out of my fuel line. It worked perfectly. Meanwhile, Jack Russell was supervising the disconnect of the liquid oxygen hose. He'd plug the fuel tank only when we reached altitude; otherwise, the pressure would build so quickly that the tank might explode. At 30,000 feet, Jack sealed the tank; a few moments later the big bomber lowered its nose and began a shallow dive to achieve 240 knots, my drop speed.

…four, three, two, one.

That familiar cracking sound as the shackles released the X-1A. I was lifted out of my seat by the sudden drop. Much faster than the X-1, because we're much heavier. We're right on the money-240 knots, nose-up angle. I reached for the ignition switches and lit three engines simultaneously. The impact knocked me back. They popped on clean and we whistled upstairs. With a domed canopy I clearly saw what Skip Ziegler wished he hadn't seen shock waves rippling like spider webs across the surface of my wings. Streaking up at .8 Mach to 40,000 feet, I fired the last chamber and was rewarded with that familiar kick in the butt. At .95 Mach we began bumping like a light airplane flying in turbulence; the buffeting meant I was about to cross threshold from subsonic to supersonic. We were flying the perfect flight.

Except for the blinding sun. It was bursting straight into my face. I could barely see my gauges, and when I took a quick look at my wing, I saw I was climbing too steeply because the sun glaring off my helmet visor made it impossible to see my flight attitude indicator. Instead of a forty-five-degree climbing angle, I was going up at fifty-five degrees. By the time I leveled off, I'd be a lot higher than the planned 70,000-foot ceiling on this flight. I lowered my nose going through 60,000 at 1.1 Mach, and by the time I reached the top of the arc and began to level off, I could've shaken hands with Lord Jesus. Eighty thousand feet. A nighttime sky with flickering stars at ten in the morning. Up there, with only a wisp of an atmosphere, steering an airplane was like driving on slick ice.

My Mach meter could register up to Mach 3. Nearing engine flameout, I hit Mr. Crossfield's mark of Mach 2. I dropped my nose slightly to pick up more speed and watched the meter register 2.2 and then, 2.3. I was accelerating at 31 mph per second, approaching 1,650 mph, the fastest any pilot had vet flown, and the fastest that any straight-winged airplane would ever fly. In my headset I heard Ridley ask Kit Murray whether he yet had me in sight. Kit said, "No-too small."

The Mach meter showed 2.4 when the nose began to yaw left. I fed in right rudder, but it had no effect. My outside wing began to rise. I put in full aileron against it, but nothing happened. The thought smacked me: Too high, too fast, Yeager. I might have added, too late. Christ, we began going haywire. The wing kept coming up and I was powerless to keep from rolling over. And then we started going in four different directions at once, careening all over the sky, snapping and rolling and spinning, in what pilots call going divergent on all three axes. I called it hell.

I was crashing around in that cockpit, slamming violently from side to side, front to back, battered to the point where I was too stunned to think. Terrifying.

The thought flashed: I lost my tail. I've had it. G forces yanked me upwards with such force that my helmet cracked the canopy. Without my seat straps, I probably would've been blasted right through the glass. My pressure suit suddenly inflated with a loud hiss. I was gasping and my face plate fogged. Blinded, being pounded to death, I wondered where in the Sierras I was about to drill a hole.

We were spinning down through the sky like a frisbee. Desperate to see, I groped to the right of the instrument panel trying to find the rheostat switch to turn up the heat in my face plate. But then the ship snapped violently back on itself, slamming me against the control stick and somehow hooking my helmet onto it. As I struggled to get free I had glimpses of light and dark, light and dark, through the fogged visor. Sun, ground, sun, ground. Spinning down. I had less than a minute left.

Through some sixth sense, I remembered that the stabilizer was set at "leading edge full down," and I could find that switch in the dark. Still fogged over, I reached for it and retrimmed it. Still groping, I found the rheostat and the heat flicked on. My face plate cleared and I saw more than I wanted to. I was spinning into the Sierras. Without even thinking, I set the controls with the spin. The ship flipped into a normal spin at 30,000 feet. I knew how to get out of that! I had spun every airplane imaginable, including the X-1. At 25,000 feet, I popped out of the spin. I radioed to Ridley. My voice was so breathless and desperate that I doubted he could understand me. "Down to 25,000 feet over the Tahachapis. I don't know whether or not I can get back."

Jack replied, "That's twenty-five, Chuck?"

"I can't say much more. I gotta save myself."

I heard a voice from the control van say, "I don't know what's going on, but he's down from altitude." God, I didn't know what was going on, either. I was so dazed and battered, I wondered if I could still fly. And I worried if the airplane could still carry me.

"I don't know if I've torn up this thing or not, but Christ…" Ridley couldn't understand, and when I repeated it, I sobbed.

I barely remember the next moments. But then my head cleared and I was at 5,000 feet, lining up with the lakebed. I was gliding in from the other side of the Mojave, doing 270 mph, and I started to believe I was going to make it. I got on the horn with Ridley. "I think I can get back to the base okay Jack. Boy, I'm not gonna do that again. Those [Bell] guys were so right [warning against going faster than 2.3 Mach]. You won't have to run a structural demonstration on this damned thing. If I hadda [ejection] seat you wouldn't still see me sitting in here."

The lakebed filled my windshield, and I put her down a little hard, with a thump and a cloud of dust, but no landing in my life was as sweet as that one. The flight data would later reveal that I had spun down fifty-one thousand feet in fifty-one seconds. I survived on sheer instinct and pure luck.

I took off for Washington around midnight on December 16 in a P-80 Shooting Star and flew all night, landing at Andrews Air Force Base around dawn. The press was waiting. Somehow the word about my new speed record had leaked, even though the secrecy lid was on. The Secretary of the Air Force was going to announce it at the Pentagon later that morning, but the press crawled all over me wanting all the details. The headlines were out. The reporters wanted to know what it was like traveling at two and a half times the speed of sound. I told them I'd let them know after I did it.

After the announcement, the Bell p.r. types grabbed me and sped me all over town for various interviews. They set me up on The Camel Caravan and half a dozen other television shows going balls-out to milk it dry. The NACA bunch just couldn't believe it. Operation NACA Weep really kicked their fannies. The television people were pulling out their hair, scheduled to go on the air the following day with several big and expensive salutes to Crossfield as the fastest man alive. The Air Force brass just purred like a cat being rubbed.

On the way back to Andrews to fly home, one of the Bell executives in the car handed me a big box. "Chuck," he said, "we know it would be illegal to give you a gift of gratitude, but there's nothing in the regulations that prevents us from giving a gift to your wife." Inside the box was a beautiful Persian lamb jacket. "Mr. Bell wants Glennis to have this." I took the fur out of the box and rolled it up. Before taking off in the Shooting Star, I hid it in the nose, a helluva place to hide an expensive fur jacket, but it traveled fine despite high altitude temperatures of minus sixty. Glennis was really pleased. That jacket was a thing of beauty in black and gray and she wore it for many, many years. I had finally got her a fur coat, but I nearly killed myself doing it.

After that ride in the X-1A, the Air Force decided not to try any further speed runs with it, but instead concentrate on high-altitude testing. I never again flew in it, but Ridley, Murray, and half a dozen other pilots did; Murray got it up to 90,400 feet. My speed record stood for nearly three years until Bell's X-2 began its flights at Edwards and cracked Mach 3. By then I was out of the test business.

Even before that wild ride in the X-1A, I had been thinking about doing other things in the Air Force. I wanted to get back into a fighter squadron, enjoy flying only one kind of airplane again, and experience the closeness of squadron life, so different from the dog-eat-dog rivalries in flight testing. I asked Ridley if he could calculate on his slide rule how many more flights it would take before the law of averages made it impossible for me to survive. Jack pretended to figure it out on a pad, then began to laugh. "According to my figures," he said, "Major Charles E. Yeager died three years ago."

To continue to live, a veteran test pilot needs both skill and luck. My skills were fine, but after the X-1A I had scraped to the bottom of the sack labeled luck. It really was only a matter of time before I bought it; I knew it and so did a lot of other people, including a couple of congressmen from back home, who began to pressure the Pentagon to get me away from Edwards before I got killed. It took a while for the pressure to build to the point where action was taken; the word didn't filter down to me for nearly another year. By then I was spending one of the nastiest weeks of my life out in the Pacific, secretly testing a captured Russian MiG under conditions that made me relive the terror of the X-1A for five long days.