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60 years after sonic flight, Yeager is as feisty as ever

The Washington Post

Monday October 15, 2007

GRASS VALLEY, Calif. -- I am standing on the tarmac of a small airstrip in this Northern California town on a recent crisp morning, awaiting the arrival of Chuck Yeager.

"General?" I ask eagerly as the 84-year-old approaches me. "General Yeager?"

"G-- d--- it, quit being so shovy," he says, eyeing the microphone in my hand. "If you don't take that g-- d--- thing and quit sticking it in my face, I'm going to throw you off the field."

I smile inside. This is going to be an awesome day.

I am here to fly with Yeager, history's top test pilot -- the aviation legend who broke the sound barrier 60 years ago Sunday in a rocket plane that now hangs in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. As a newly minted pilot (I got my license in April), I can't believe my luck. This is like a Little Leaguer getting to hit batting practice with Hank Aaron or a novice cellist playing a duet with Yo-Yo Ma.

All because of a throwaway line in an interview about a month earlier.

"You still fly much?" I had asked.

"Two or three times a week," Yeager said.

"Can I go flying with you?"

He was silent for a moment. "If you pay for the gas."

I'm not sure he expected me to take him up on his offer -- to fly across the country and then drive three hours to this small airport nestled in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, near his home. A wad of gas money bulges in my pocket.

Even before our brusque face-to-face introduction, I had been anticipating a tough time with Yeager during our short hop in a single-engine plane. I had been warned that he has canceled interviews without much notice. He has a reputation for charging for autographs. One woman told me he made a young boy cry at an air show because he wouldn't sign a photograph. During our telephone interview about the death of another test pilot two months ago, I was surprised at his frank criticism of the departed. Didn't test pilots have rules against that?

Part of me wants Yeager to like me -- to tell war stories for hours, to include me in his small fraternity of worthy pilots. But when he threatens to toss me off the tarmac, I can't say I'm disappointed.

I'll be getting the full Yeager experience: the abrasive and crusty swashbuckling pilot with confidence boiling out of his ears.

My dad always had books stacked on his nightstand, and I would swipe one or two from time to time. At 12 or 13, I borrowed Yeager's autobiography. I also read Tom Wolfe's "The Right Stuff," in which Yeager figured prominently, and a few other books on astronauts. I have watched "The Right Stuff" movie at least a dozen times.

Yeager grew up in Hamlin, the son of a gas-field worker and a housewife. He didn't go to college, and spent his teenage years hustling pool.

He eventually became a fighter pilot. Shot up over Europe during a dogfight, he bailed out and evaded the Germans for several weeks with the help of the French Resistance. After a harrowing hike through the Pyrenees, he reached safety in Spain. Yeager could have returned home, but he chose to remain with his squadron. He shot down five German planes on one mission. (Two collided, bursting into flames, when Yeager bore down on them in his P-51 Mustang.)

After the war, he got into test flying. He felt insecure around the college-educated test pilots, so he routinely battled them in mock dogfights high above Wright Field in Ohio.

"I went through the entire stable of test pilots and waxed every fanny," he wrote in "Yeager."

In 1947, he was tapped to fly an experimental rocket plane, the Bell X-1. It was jettisoned from a bomber -- like ordnance. With hundreds of pounds of volatile fuel just feet from his back, Yeager would free-fall for a few seconds and then push a series of buttons that set off the plane's rocket engines, hurtling him through the sky.

At the time, scientists and aviators worried that the sound barrier -- 761 mph at sea level -- could not be broken and would crush a plane to pieces. A British pilot had died a year earlier making a similar attempt. In a flight test before he broke the barrier, Yeager had difficulty controlling the plane and even told a friend that he "thought we had had it."

On Oct. 14, 1947, with broken ribs from a horse-riding accident, Yeager climbed into the X-1 (nicknamed Glamorous Glennis, after his wife), was dropped like a bomb, pushed the buttons and busted through the barrier.

"We were flying supersonic! And it was as smooth as a baby's bottom," he wrote.

Since he retired in the 1970s, Yeager has kept busy doing some television commercials, tending his property, flying and hunting and fishing. He created a Web site about his life, http://www.chuckyeager.com, and also helps raise money for his General Chuck Yeager Foundation, which helps finance youth pilot programs and college scholarships. (He tells me that he asks people who want autographs to make a $25 donation to the foundation.)

Yeager is wearing blue jeans pulled up to his bellybutton, a green fleece pullover jacket and an Air Force baseball cap that hides his white hair. Sunglasses dangle on a strap around his neck. He is sipping coffee.

He has just finished a week of public appearances, speeches and a supersonic flight in an F-16. He seems a bit tired, and his current wife, Victoria, says he has been battling a cold.

We hop into the family SUV, whose license tags reads "BELL X-1A." (Yeager's Chevy pickup truck announces "BELL X-1"). Victoria, 49, sits next to Yeager. She calls him "General Yeager," not Chuck.

Glennis, his first wife, died in 1990. He married Victoria in 2003.

Yeager doesn't seem interested in small talk. We ride in silence to the hangar, where he heads directly to the bumble-bee-yellow Aviat Husky, a standard-issue single-engine plane.

The Husky belongs to a buddy. Yeager says he never wanted to own his own plane. "If you are willing to bleed," he explains, "Uncle Sam will give you all the airplanes you want."

I ask where we're heading. "Wherever the airplane takes us," he says.

I crawl awkwardly into the two-seater -- but not before bashing my head on the wing. Yeager slips into the cockpit like he's a 20-year-old fighter pilot and starts the engine. We taxi to the runway. The airplane is a tail-dragger -- it has two large front wheels and a small wheel near its fanny. Tail-draggers can be difficult to taxi because you can't see over the engine. Yeager has to reach up, grab two metal struts and heave himself out of his seat to see where we're going.

A few minutes later, we are in the air.

Yeager loves the Sierras. He points out the mountains, a dried-up river, the profusion of trees that cover the landscape. The sky is perfectly blue. The air is smooth, kind of like driving on a newly paved road.

"It sure is beautiful," he says.

We don't talk much during the hour-long flight. But I ask about flying, about how he managed to stay alive all these years.

He says he worked hard, learned as much about each plane as he could and was always thinking -- way ahead of his next maneuver.

I notice we are following Interstate 80. Yeager looks down and says that is where we would land if our engine croaks.

"We would try to pick our way between the cars," he says.

I have heard that advice before, but I am impressed that a guy who flew experimental planes through the upper reaches of the atmosphere continues to follow roads as a safety precaution. I ask if he has any tips for inexperienced aviators like myself, hoping for a gem I can take back to my pilot friends. ( "Well, you know, guys, Chuck Yeager told me . . . ")

"The only thing you need to know is that you can't do anything with an airplane that hasn't already been done," he replies. "That includes making a smoking hole" in the ground.

A few moments later, I am looking out the window at Lake Tahoe and snow-capped mountains. Yeager says he has spotted a forest fire on the horizon. I can't see it until I squint against the sun. The old pilot still has better than 20-20 vision.

Yeager loves to fly. He wrote in his autobiography that he doubted there were many other pilots "who loved to fly as much as I did. . . . My feet touched the ground just long enough to climb out of one airplane" and into another.

I wonder what it will mean for him to give it up, and that day is fast approaching. That is why I am so shocked when he says he "can walk away from airplanes tomorrow and never miss it."

I don't believe him. I wouldn't believe him even if I thought it was true.

"I'm not sure I believe you," I say over the intercom. "You are Chuck Yeager!"

He ignores me and keeps us zipping along.

As a pilot, I really want to take the controls, but I figure it won't happen. I don't ask. It just doesn't feel right.

We head back to Grass Valley, and Yeager executes a perfect approach and a near-flawless landing.

"If you can walk away from a landing, it's a good landing," he says. "If you use the airplane the next day, it's an outstanding landing."

I have so many questions, and I don't want to waste a second. So I start querying the general as we walk to a bench outside the airport's offices -- first about how he would grade the landing and then about what it meant to break the sound barrier.

"We walked away from it, didn't we?" Yeager responds.

About the sound barrier: "That is where you make a mistake. We didn't know we could do it, see. See, what you are looking for doesn't exist. You are looking for sensationalism."

We talk for an hour or so. Yeager gets more and more frustrated with my questions. I can't draw him out. He says he has no plans for the sound-barrier anniversary and will only cryptically talk about his World War II experiences.

"Ain't no German who can catch a West Virginian in the woods," he says.

I upset him when I say he was "kind of a flyboy."

"That word is a disgrace," he says. "No pilot ever used that term."

We are sitting just a few hundred yards from a massive monument to Yeager outside the airport's main gate. I ask him about glory, about his legacy, about why he took the X-1 flights when success and survival were uncertain.

"Listen, it was about duty," he says. "Your whole career is duty. If you are not in the military, you don't know what that word means."

I ask him if there was anything I should have asked him but didn't. It's a question I often toss out there. Sometimes, it opens up a new avenue of questioning. Yeager doesn't give me an ounce of charity.

"The thing is," he says, "when you ask the question, you don't listen to the answer. This is my own personal opinion. Because you jump into another question immediately after you ask that question without giving time to answer the question thoroughly. See?"

The interview really isn't going anywhere. He won't even say why he agreed to fly with me. We pack up our gear and head to lunch. After some eggs and burnt toast, Yeager seems more at ease.

"You are nicer than I expected," he says.

Before we part ways, I rush to my car and get my pilot's logbook. I want him to sign it. There is a major conflict brewing between my inner pilot and my inner reporter. As a reporter, I am a stickler for ethics. I won't even accept a cup of coffee. I am not supposed to get autographs from the people I cover. But one day, I want to prove to my 2-month-old son (who sleeps under an airplane mobile and on airplane-decorated sheets) that his daddy got to fly with the guy from "The Right Stuff."

I do some quick ethical math.

I figure that since I'm writing an essay, I will disclose in it that I got Yeager's autograph. Ethical problem solved! I hand him the logbook.

Yeager signs it.

Still, one unanswered question has been gnawing at me, and I voice it: "General, would you have let me fly if I had asked?"

"It's not my airplane," Yeager says.