Yeager: An Autobiography

OUTFLYING THE RUSSIANS

I'm standing on the wing of a Russian-built MiG 15, hanging over into the cockpit, wiring the explosive cartridges that will blow me out of the seat if something goes wrong. It's pouring rain, and I'm wearing only a flying suit. I'm drenched. Water pours down from my hair into my eyes, making it hard to fix the seat. I'm beat and grim, just flat-out pissed at how close I've come to busting my ass during the past few days. I'm flying the first MiG 15 we've been able to get our hands on, flying it every which way but loose in a tropical storm that's been sitting over this damn island for nearly a week-heavy wind and rain and low ceilings-flying on gauges with a strange metric system, in a strange airplane, flying it higher and faster than any Russian pilot had ever dared. Those bastards know better.

Flying the MiG is the most demanding situation I have ever faced. It's a quirky airplane that's killed a lot of its pilots. We learn as we fly, on a tight time frame, the old man pushing me right to the edge-a fraction further and he will probably lose me. And he knows it.

General Boyd has brought me and Tom Collins, another test pilot, out to the middle of the Pacific because a North Korean pilot named Kim Sok Ho defected in his MiG 15. He received a $100,000 reward for giving us our first opportunity to fly the MiG. We were told to run a complete flight test on it, as if it were a brand new airplane, plot its speed, power, climb rate, and range. The MiG 15 was in combat against our Sabres over Korea, and our intelligence estimates of the Russian fighter's capabilities were the basis for how we engaged them in dogfights. We would discover that our test data matched perfectly with Air Force estimates. A shaky truce was in effect in Korea, but our people thought it could bust any moment; there was a lot of interest in our test.

A white line is painted down the center of the instrument panel. Lieutenant Ho, who is here to brief us, explained that if the MiG gets into a spin we are to shove the control stick against that white line. If the airplane doesn't come out of the spin after three rotations-he put up three fingers to make sure we understood-then "you go," he said, flicking his hand like a guy ejecting. The MiG could not recover from a spin, and the Koreans probably lost more pilots spinning in than from American guns. So, spin testing is a big no-no. One thing I did try-I purposely stalled the sumbitch, just about a foot off the runway and with the gear down. There was no warning light, nothing. I just quit flying and whacked down on the deck.

The MiG is a pretty good fighting machine, but it lacks our sophisticated American technology. It has problems-oscillating, pitching up unexpectedly, fatal spins, no stall warning, lousy pressurization, and a particular warning from Lieutenant Ho not to turn on the emergency fuel pump. That could blow the rear off the airplane; the North Koreans lost four or five MiGs that way. Man, that thing is a flying booby trap, and nobody will be surprised if l get killed.

I'm nearly finished wiring the ejection seat when somebody taps me on the shoulder. I look up and see General Boyd. "Chuck," he says, "come down for a minute. There's somebody I want you to meet." I follow him down off the wing and run through the rain to a staff car and climb inside to meet a four-star general Jack Cannon, head of the Air Force in the Pacific. General Boyd introduces me.

"What in hell are you doing up there, Major?" he asks.

"Putting in the cartridges for my ejection seat."

"God almighty, don't you have people who can do that for you?

"General, the crew won't do the seat-wiring because they say they aren't 'pyrotechnics qualified.' Anyway, I know as much about it as they do, and it's my ass on the line. I'm not about to flub it."

General Cannon frowns. "We brought out all those high-priced technicians from Wright, and it's beyond me why the test pilot is out there in the pouring rain."

I tell him the truth. "Because I want to stay alive, General. "

When General Boyd was in a car, he drove it. When he was in an airplane, he flew it. One night, he drove Tom Collins and me off Kadena Air Base to go out to dinner. We sat in the back of the staff car, a major and a captain, while a two-star general drove us out the main gate. We had to stop at the guard's gate to turn in our trip ticket, and I never saw such a startled look on any human being as on the face of the air policeman. The poor guy had to ask a meanfaced two-star for his trip ticket. After we pulled away, the old man began chuckling. "He never saw a general playing chauffeur, did he?"

We flew back in a big four-engine C-124, which the old man piloted with me in the copilot's seat. We flew first to Japan, where the old man gave our evaluation of the MiG 15 at a meeting of wing commanders stationed in South Korea and Taiwan, then headed home to brief General LeMay at SAC headquarters. We sat together in that cockpit for seventeen hours, flying all night across the Pacific, talking mostly pilot's talk. He told me about the early days of his Air Corps career, when he was a flight instructor in 1930. One miserable rainy day, he took off in a DeHavilland DH-4 because he loved instrument flying, but he got lost in heavy clouds and ran out of fuel. He landed on a highway and flagged down a passing Good Gulf gasoline truck and had the driver fill 'er up. He took off, but as soon as the automobile gas got in his plane's carburetor, the engine cut out and he crashed into trees, wrecking the airplane, but leaving him unhurt to catch hell from his commanding officer.

On December 6, 1941, he was scheduled to ferry a B-17 bomber from California into Hickham Field Hawaii, which would have put him on the runway just as the Japanese launched their attack on Pearl Harbor. But the flight was delayed by bad weather for twenty-four hours, and he arrived at Hickham on December 8, with fires still burning. That was as close to combat as he got. He stayed in Hawaii in the service command. "That's my only real regret, Chuck," he said. "I would've loved to have been flying Mustangs with you in the war. I think I would've been a damned good fighter pilot, too." I told him, "General Boyd, as far as I'm concerned, being a fighter pilot is it. I'd have given my eyeteeth to dogfight again in Korea. That's what I was trained for and what I love best."

He asked me if running a fighter squadron was something I'd enjoy doing after my test flying days were over.

"General," I said, "my bags are packed."

"You're ready to move on to other things?"

"If it means getting a squadron, you bet."

"Well, Chuck," he said, "after all we've asked of you, I personally think you ought to get what you want."

General Boyd had a lot of clout, and I've got to believe he was a big reason why a colonel from the Pentagon called me a couple of weeks after I got back to Edwards and told me I could stay as long as I wanted to at a desk job, but I could no longer do research flying, or I could take over a tactical fighter squadron of Sabre jets in Germany. He was almost apologetic explaining that the Pentagon brass decided to get me out of research flying before the law of averages caught up with me. I just chuckled and told him, "Colonel, you've given me the easiest decision of my life." I never saw Glennis happier than when I told her we were going to Germany. We had been on the desert for seven years, and it was hard to believe that the miserable week on Okinawa was actually my swan song as a test pilot.