Yeager: An Autobiography

WHAT GOES UP MUST COME DOWN

A fighter pilot doesn't care where in the world he is stationed as long as the flying is good. Outside of actual combat, which is the ultimate flying experience, most of us old-timers stayed in the military because we loved to fly fast airplanes and the Air Force owned them. Once my test piloting was over, it was the luck of timing that made being a squadron commander as interesting as test piloting. In Germany, we had flown with nuclear weapons and learned how to deliver them. Back on the Mojave at George Air Force Base, my new squadron was the first in the Tactical Air Command to be armed with air-to-air Sidewinder missiles. In the early 1950s I had helped test the airplanes that created the modern air force; in the late 1950s, I was in on the ground floor of the operational deployment of these new airplanes and their sophisticated weapons systems that would receive their first combat testing a decade later in Vietnam.

My squadron at George was made up of supersonic F-100 Super Sabres, whose powerful engines gulped tremendous amounts of fuel, but which could be flown nonstop anywhere in the world, refueling from airborne tankers. Between learning to dogfight with missiles and traveling five thousand miles nonstop on training exercises, all of us felt we were flying right into the future. Air warfare would never be the same.

George was only fifty miles from Edwards. Glennis wasn't too thrilled living again in a sandbox, but like most Air Force wives, she was more interested in the quality of the local schools, and whether the base had a well-stocked commissary and a decent hospital. Her equivalent of having a good airplane to fly was decent on-base housing; on that score, the Air Force was still in the damned dark ages, so she dipped into our savings and made a downpayment on a three-bedroom place in Victorville, a couple of miles from the base. Our street had shade trees and was only a block or two from the local school. There was still sand in our coffee mugs after a hard night's blow on the desert, but at least the family was comfortable. I had warned her, "Hoe, we better settle in fast because I have a feeling I'm gonna be off and running. "

When I reported in at George, April 1957, long-range deployments were a new art. Only the year before, as leader of our wing gunnery team in Germany, I had flown the ocean in an F-86 Sabre that had no airborne refueling capability. We flew back to the States to compete in the finals in Nevada by hopscotching across Europe to land and refuel until we reached Scotland. There, extra wing tanks were added, and we raced our fuel gauges across the Atlantic, hoping to reach Greenland before our tanks went dry. Then we hopscotched across North America to Nevada, an exhausting two-and-a-half-day trip.

Airborne refueling was developed for the big SAC bombers, and I had helped train their first tanker boom operators years before. But until a fighter could hitch onto a filling station in the sky, crossing the Atlantic in a single-engine airplane was as awesome as when Charles Lindbergh first did it, thirty years before. The ability to refuel without landing was as revolutionary to military aviation as the invention of the jet. In World War II, it had taken a full six months to transport and establish an operational fighter squadron in England. Now, we could fly anywhere and set up for combat in a matter of days.

My outfit was the first daylight air defense squadron of 100s in the Tactical Air Command, so they were an elite group, like being handed a Rolls-Royce. They were the best bunch I ever flew with, and my two years with them was the most fun I had as a squadron commander. TAC gave us the first Sidewinders, eager to discover how quickly their best pilots could become proficient learning to fire weapons that cost fifteen thousand bucks each. At those prices we didn't waste many practice shots. Firing those Sidewinders really impressed us about how well we would need to fly to survive future combat. All we had to do was wax a tail, turn on the system and get a rattling tone in our headsets, which meant that the heat sensors were locked on the hot-air exhaust of another jet, turn on our gunsight radar that locked us on target, then fire and watch that missile streak right up the tail of a drone, blasting it to pieces. Until evasion tactics could be developed, the price of getting your fanny waxed in future combat would be a high-explosive missile rammed up your behind.

But before that could happen some sumbitch would have to stick on your tail long enough to close in and get a lock on your exhaust. Dogfighting with missiles would really be survival of the fittest, but the new technologies were already weeding out weak sisters. For example, any fighter pilot who couldn't hack formation flying was in a tough spot hitching up to a refueling tanker high above the ocean. If he couldn't maneuver himself-into position to fill his fuel tank, he was going to swim. Good pilots learned to master these new challenges; the others got out. It really was a black-and-white situation. The good ones had few problems adapting to the changes.

Until my squadron deployed to Spain in 1958, the Tactical Air Command had never enjoyed a perfect deployment and were beginning to wonder whether fighter aircraft were capable of extended range flying without suffering numerous aborts. We made it to Spain and back with all our airplanes. The next year we flew to Japan, then later, deployed from the States back to Spain and on to Italy. And we maintained a perfect deployment record, unique in TAC. I felt almost as good about that as breaking the sound barrier because a transoceanic deployment was how the TAC brass rated a squadron s leadership and ability. A lousy bunch lost half their airplanes to aborts en route.

Commanding an elite group eager to bust their tails to please me was a wonderful position to be in. We practiced airborne refueling under every kind of weather condition until we could do it practically in our sleep, and it was a pleasure watching a squadron of really proficient fighter pilots flying crisp and precise. In-flight refueling was actually used in the 1920s when an airplane named Question Mark set an endurance record by flying back and forth between Los Angeles and San Diego for 150 hours, being refueled in the air by pumping fuel through a hose from an airplane flying overhead. Our technique wasn't too different. It was called "probe and drogue." The four engine tanker, holding about thirty thousand gallons of fuel, ran out a long hose with a funnel attached at the end. Our airplanes had probe outlets on the side and we positioned ourselves to push in the funnel against the probe. The tankers could refuel three fighters at a time from drogues dangling from each wing and its tail. For an experienced formation flier it was not difficult, although bad-weather refueling could get rough. Even then, it was a matter of squadron pride to do things right.

So when the order came to deploy to Spain, I told them, "We're gonna do this the TAC way-we get where we're going, every damned one of us." I didn't get any arguments. There wasn't a pilot there who didn't know he'd make it wherever he was sent even to hell and back. Transoceanic flying didn't intimidate that bunch. They knew their airplane and its systems and could cope with any problem. If a good pilot knew what he was doing, flying to Spain was no more difficult than flying to Indianapolis. Maintenance was the heart of a squadron, and our crews had everything they needed to keep our airplanes in top shape. I just told the crew chiefs, "You guys are in charge. When you tell a pilot that his airplane is ready, that's all he needs to know. So, you'd better make damned sure you know what you're talking about."

I never applied pressure to keep all of our airplanes in the air; if two or three were being serviced, we just lived with an inconvenience, rather than risking our lives with aircraft slapdashed onto the flight line. I wouldn't allow an officer-pilot to countermand a crew-chief sergeant's decision about grounding an unsafe airplane. A pilot faced with not flying wasn't always the best judge about the risks he was willing to take to get his wheels off the ground. And it paid off. My pilots flew confident, knowing that their equipment was safe.

Other squadrons suffered aborts because pilots got uptight once land was left behind, becoming supercautious if anything went wrong. Fighter pilots had much less experience flying over oceans than bomber pilots, who had been doing it in their big birds since the war. There were some damned good reasons to turn back from a mission, including a fuel leak, but to be able to make a sound judgment about whether to stay or abort meant knowing what was a manageable problem. There were dozens of ways to circumvent malfunctions, but the guys knew that I wouldn't risk their lives to avoid an abort. Squadron commanders who lacked experience and were unsure about their airplane's systems often agreed to aborts simply to play it safe over water. But the best way to fly safe was to know what in hell you were doing.

To get to Spain, we had to rendezvous successfully with two sets of tankers en route. Navigating to the rendezvous points was my job as flight leader. The longest leg of the trip was six hours to the Azores where we would land, refuel, then fly to Spain on our extra 275-gallon wing tanks. On the first leg eighteen Super Sabres in our squadron left California and flew to Langley Field in Virginia, where we refueled and took off for the Azores in flights of six.

Ocean weather was changeable, and we encountered strong head winds at 35,000 feet, that slowed us and increased fuel consumption, so we climbed a couple of thousand feet at a time, until the winds decreased at about 40,000. At the two-hour mark we made our first tanker rendezvous, and the refill operation was perfect. But two hours later, the weather turned murky and it became damned near impossible to visually sight those big birds. We only carried gunsight radar, which is why we were limited to day flying. No radio contact either. Nuthin. I began to sweat it. As far as I could figure we were right on time and on the mark, and those tankers were probably in our vicinity; but that wasn't good enough with fuel gauges edging toward empty. I was practically straining the eyeballs out of my head, until by sheer luck I came in right on the tail of a big lumbering shadow in the middle of a dark cloud. Those guys had been calling us on the wrong channel frequency. The last of our airplanes to refuel had about two minutes of fuel remaining.

Other than that one moment, the flight was a piece of cake. Not one problem. We landed at the Azores, refueled, and headed for Spain, twelve hundred miles away. All eighteen landed safely a couple of hours later at the big SAC base at Moron, near the southern coast, the first perfect deployment of a TAC fighter squadron. It was a long day of flying, but we weren't too tired to keep from having a helluva party that night. The TAC command center in Washington tried to phone congratulations, but the SAC switchboard in Spain couldn't find us.

We stayed in Spain four months providing air defense for the SAC B-47 bombers that had also deployed from their base in Arkansas. Mixing my guys with those SAC pilots was fun to watch. My pilots were ten feet tall after that deployment, and they were aggressive jocks. We all wore our red scarves and took real pride in our squadron. The SAC crews came limping into Spain looking as if they had crawled all the way. I hadn't seen such low morale this side of a prison camp. We offered to give them rides in our fighters to perk them up, but they got sick riding in back. The "Colonel Bogey" song was on the jukebox at the officers' club, and we sang our own words: "SAC, it makes the grass grow green." The base commander was a SAC bird colonel who didn't know what in hell to do with us. I was in charge of my squadron and took my orders from TAC. I got away with murder.

Gibraltar, Tangier, Seville, and Malaga were easy half-hour flights on weekends. My guys loved life and never got homesick. We had our Sidewinder missiles with us over there, and I worked out a deal with the gunnery range commander in Tripoli, where they were firing Matador ground-to-ground missiles that sometimes got away from them. We flew down and chased out-of-control missiles, hammering them with our Sidewinders-really good practice.

TAC was delighted with our performance and perfect deployments. We were singled out as a show squadron, and other TAC commanders visited us at George to be briefed on our deployment procedures, especially in the maintenance section. I felt damned good and never would have imagined that my days as a TAC squadron commander were numbered, or that I was about to get clobbered and barely escape court-martial.

In the winter of 1959, we were ordered to deploy to Aviano, Italy. We flew from California to England Air Force Base, Louisiana, refueled, and took off again at two in the morning. We hit our first set of tankers off the North Carolina coast, then two more sets before arriving back at Moron, in Spain, around five in the afternoon-an eleven-hour flight. All eighteen Super Sabres deployed perfectly. We spent the night at Moron, a Saturday night, and were scheduled to fly into Italy the next morning. Having spent four months at Moron the year before, my guys knew where to go to unwind. When I drove back on the base at seven the next morning, I found TAC Maj. Gen. Karl Truesdell waiting to see me. He had flown all night from Texas to personally congratulate us on another perfect deployment, but stood around in the cold dawn talking to himself because all of my pilots were in town. An hour before the briefing for our flight to Aviano, they all showed up in their flying suits. The general couldn't believe they could live that way, but that's how it was.

We took off on time for Aviano. The weather turned bad over France and Germany and got worse as we started our approach into Aviano in six hundred feet of overcast and heavy rain. It wasn't a good situation; the Super Sabre is a tough airplane to land under perfect conditions, but the weather was miserable all over Italy and Europe. It was Sunday morning, and the only base radar operators on duty were Italian air force guys who could barely speak English. Either their radar wasn't working or they didn't know how to operate it properly, so we let down using a low-frequency radio beacon. Christ, it got hairy. I came in under the clouds only to look a cliff in the eye, and turned just in time. The guys were following me down, locked in tight, and I was sure I was going to lose some people.

I had never been to Aviano, didn't know the terrain, but we finally found the field by the grace of God, and I landed furious at the controllers' poor performance. If it hadn't been for experienced night leaders in each of our three elements, we would probably have killed some pilots. I found the base commander, a bird colonel, and really lit into him for having those Italian operators in the tower. His excuse was he thought we had our own cockpit weather radar, as did the last squadron of F-l00s to deploy to Aviano, and could make our own let-down. So we got off on the wrong foot. The next day he came down to the flight line and asked if he could fly with the squadron. I was still steaming. I said, "You aren't going to fly with my squadron because that's the way it is. He turned purple and stomped off.

Our first weekend in Aviano, Col. Pete Everest flew up from North Africa, where he was in charge of the gunnery range. I hadn't seen Pete since Edwards so we had a squadron party in his honor. We started at the club on base at five in the afternoon, and by eight we were feeling no pain. Pete and I and a few others drove in a staff car to a restaurant in Pordenone. We had trouble finding the place, the streets were narrow and winding, and we busted a headlight and dented the fender. When we got back to the club around eleven, the party was still in full swing. The guys who were still standing were outnumbered by the guys who weren't. The jukebox was turned over and some wine bottles were broken. I took the club manager aside and paid for the damage. I figured one of my mechanics could do some body work on the staff car, and I would pay for a new headlight and that would be the end of it. Man, was I wrong.

By the time I woke up the next morning, I had more to worry about than a hangover. The base commander had laid for me and had me nailed. He had called his superior, the commanding general of the Seventeenth Air Force, in Germany, to complain that we had wrecked his club, and he wanted me out of there. I went to see him. "Colonel," I said, "we paid for all the damage." He said, "I don't care. You're getting out of here." I had been nasty to him, and he was paying me back in spades by ruining my career. I just looked that guy in the eye, thinking, "You rotten, petty son of a bitch." I was mad at myself too. I should've known to watch my ass around a guy like that. He had me dead to rights, and I felt sick.

I tried calling the commanding general of the Seventeenth, hoping to tell my side of the story. I had reason to hope he would want to help me out because he was Russ Spicer, my old wing commander in the Second World War, who was shot down the same day I was, when he came down too low to light his pipe. But General Spicer refused to take my call. Instead, I received a terse wire from TAC headquarters back in the States. It was signed by Gen. Frank F. Everest, no relation to Pete, unfortunately. It said: "Assign command of your squadron to your deputy and report to me immediately." I had heard that General Everest was a terror, and I was really scared. I told Pete Everest, "Jesus, my career is wiped out." He felt terrible, but tried to put the best light on things when he saw how upset I was. I was being relieved of command and ordered home. Pete said, "Well, hell, it was only a fighter pilots' party. General Everest knows all about them. He'll probably just chew your ass and send you back here." I said to Pete, "If they only wanted to chew me out ol' Russ Spicer could have done that." The guys in the squadron were in a state of shock so was I. All of them thought I'd come back, but the base commander set them straight. He told them, "Yeager is through."

That flight across the Atlantic took forever. I sat hunched in my seat too miserable to eat, sleep, or even think clearly. One minute I thought there was no way the Air Force would let me go down the tubes, and the next, I was sweating all the enemies I had made by being famous, who would love to lynch me. The Air Force was the only job I ever had, and the possibility of being forced out in disgrace was almost more than I could handle.

I had never met General Everest, but I sat in his outer office sweating bullets. His secretary, a Women's Air Force lieutenant colonel, finally came out and asked, "Are you Colonel Yeager?" The way she looked at me, I figured I had had it. I said, "Yes, Ma'am." She took me in to see the general.

I saluted as smartly as I knew how, and he invited me to sit down next to him on a leather couch. Then he asked, "What in hell were you doing in Aviano?" I said, "General, we were just having a fighter pilots' party." I told him about damaging the staff car, overturning the jukebox, and breaking some bottles of wine. "We paid for everything. The guys were just happy. We have a good outfit." He asked if Pete Everest had been involved. I said, "Yes, sir, he came up from Wheelus."

Finally he smiled. "Sounds like you two had a pretty good time. Well, Chuck, you've done a helluva good job with that squadron, but I pulled you out of there to save your career. They were getting ready to court-martial you. You did damage government property, and they had a strong case to convict. Having that on your record would be the end of it for you. Now, I want you to go back to George and cool your heels for the next couple of months. We're going to send you to the Air War College. There's no way to send you back to Aviano, so we have to give your squadron to someone else. But go on home and try to forget about what happened. It won't be held against you in any way."

TAC bailed me out but I had almost augered in. I couldn't believe how close I had come to a court-martial that would have shot me down once and for all. A conviction would have meant the end of promotions and any future command. But General Everest was true to his word. I was assigned to the next class at the War College in Montgomery, Alabama, and while I was there, the promotion list was published of those who had made full colonel. My name was on it. I was still in good standing, although my promotion meant that my squadron commander days were finished. Bird colonels command entire wings, which is a lot more authority and responsibility and a lot less fun. But I sure as hell wasn't complaining.