Yeager << YAY guhr >> , Chuck (1923-2020), was the first person to fly an aircraft faster than the speed of sound. He achieved this on Oct. 14, 1947, in a Bell X-1 rocket airplane. He set another record on Dec. 12, 1953, by flying 21/2 times the speed of sound in a Bell X-1A. For those achievements, he became known as “the fastest man alive.”
Charles Elwood Yeager was born on Feb. 13, 1923, in Myra, West Virginia. He joined the United States Army Air Corps (now called the U.S. Air Force ) in 1941. During World War II (1939-1945), Yeager served as a fighter pilot. After the war, he became a flight instructor and a test pilot. He later held various positions of command in the Air Force. Yeager retired from the military in 1975 with the rank of brigadier general. In 1986, he was named to the presidential commission investigating the accidental destruction of the space shuttle Challenger .
Yeager’s achievements were included in the American journalist Tom Wolfe’s account of the early years of America’s space program, The Right Stuff (1979). The book was made into a motion picture, also called The Right Stuff, released in 1983. Yeager died on Dec. 7, 2020.
