On This Day in History: October 14

Chuck Yeager breaks the sound barrier

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Chuck Yeager had the right stuff, except not according to NASA. One of the greatest pilots to ever live, Yeager lacked a university degree, and so was passed over for the astronaut program. This despite being the first human to travel faster than the speed of sound.

--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: October 14, 1947--

Yeager entered World War II as a private, working on airplanes as a mechanic before entering pilot training. During the war he flew a P-51 Mustang and shot down a dozen German planes, getting five in a single mission to earn the status of “ace in a day.” He was shot down once over France, but the Resistance helped him escape back to England where he climbed back into the cockpit to shoot down more Luftwaffe.

He finished the war with the rank of captain, eventually retiring as a brigadier general, but what got him into the history books was breaking a speed record many believed unbreakable. For years pilots imagined that attempts to surpass the sound barrier would result in “transonic drag” that would rip the aircraft apart. Test pilot Yeager was chosen to fly the Bell XS-1 after Bell’s own test pilot demanded the equivalent of almost $2 million to break the sound barrier, because it was so fucking dangerous he said motherfuckers pay me.

Yeager demanded no such payment. But two days before the attempt Chuck fell from his horse and broke two ribs, and got a civilian doctor to tape them, not telling his superiors. He was in immense pain when he made the attempt. On October 14, 1947, a B-29 bomber carried his experimental XS-1 to an elevation of 25,000 feet then released the test plane via the bomb bay. Yeager took the aircraft, which he named Glamorous Glennis after his wife, to 45,000 feet and hit the gas, achieving Mach 1.05 over the Mojave Desert. The mission was kept secret for almost a year.

Yeager broke many additional speed and altitude records and trained several astronauts, including taking a flight with Neil Armstrong, the first person to walk on the moon. And while we can praise Yeager’s heroic actions in the war, and as a test pilot and astronaut trainer, we can’t ignore that he was a racist piece of shit.

Chuck was livid that USAF Captain Ed Dwight, the first Black trainee, was chosen for the Air Force training program that NASA selected their astronauts from, and Yeager did everything he could to ensure Dwight never became an astronaut. Yeager reportedly said, “Washington is trying to cram the [n-word] down our throats.” He instructed everyone in the training program not to speak or socialize with Dwight at all. Dwight later blamed Yeager’s leadership for creating a hostile environment, blaming his lack of selection as an astronaut because “racial politics had forced him out of NASA.”

On the 65th anniversary of breaking the sound barrier, Yeager did it again as a co-pilot in an F-15 Eagle, at the age of 89. He died in 2020 at the age of 97.

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