Retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Charles “Chuck” Yeager has died. He was 97 and born in 1923, in Myra, West Virginia.
He was a World War II fighter pilot ace and quintessential test pilot who travelled firstly in a speed faster than the speed of sound.
He made that history on October 14 1947, during his nine-year assignment as the nations leading test pilot. Yeager, then a 24-year-old captain, pushed an orange, bullet-shaped Bell X-1 rocket plane past 660 mph (1,062 kph) to break the sound barrier, at the time a daunting aviation milestone.
Yeager, from a small town in the hills of West Virginia, flew for more than 60 years, including piloting an F-15 to near 1,000 mph (1,609 kph) at Edwards in October 2002 at age 79.
Sixty-five years later to the minute, on Oct. 14, 2012, Yeager commemorated the feat, flying in the back seat of an F-15 Eagle as it broke the sound barrier at more than 30,000 feet (9,144 meters) above California’s Mojave Desert.
President Harry S. Truman awarded him the Collier air trophy in December 1948 for his breaking the sound barrier. He also received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1985.
Yeager retired from the Air Force in 1975 and moved to a ranch in Cedar Ridge in Northern California where he continued working as a consultant to the Air Force and Northrop Corp.
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