Remembering General Chuck Yeager

[drseti]

I am saddened to learn of the death yesterday of aviation icon Chuck Yeager. At 97, his was a long life well lived.

At the end of January 1968, Yeager and his squadron deployed to Osan AFB Korea, where I was stationed. This was a decade before Tom Wolfe made his name a household word, but everyone in the Air Force knew who he was, and what he had accomplished. I can't say that I knew him (he certainly didn't know me), but I saw him swagger around base, brash, crude, and irreverent.

Despite his ego and attitude, his men loved him. He was a true leader, who commanded from in front, not behind. He would never send anyone on a mission he wouldn't fly himself. He was not much taller than I, but towered over me, larger than life.

A dozen years later, I ran into him at the Watsonville Fly-In. I was flying my beloved Beechcraft, and he an ultralight. When questioned about it, he said it was the only plane of his that he ever actually owned.

He was once the airshow announcer when Bob Hoover performed his famous energy management routine in the Shrike Commander. As usual Hoover, with both engines caged and both props feathered, glided into a low pass, a go-around, a touchdown on first one main, then the other, a proper landing, rolled to a stop in front of the reviewing stand, got out, and waved his straw hat to the crowd. Cocky as ever, Yeager said over the loudspeaker "ladies and gentlemen, let's hear it for the world's second greatest pilot!"

[3Dreaming]

He was no doubt a great pilot, a legend in aviation. But it is the story of the kid who waited for hours behind the Theater in the Woods at Oshkosh waiting to get an autograph is the one that sticks in my mind the most. He walked out. The kid said General Yeager can I have your autograph? He said get out of my way kid I don't have time.

[drseti]

How sad.

Dick Rutan is just the opposite - he goes out of his way to encourage and inspire the next generation. Pardon the thread drift, but I've got to give him as a counter-example.

In the Eighties, I used to take my pre-teen son Andrew to the Watsonville Fly-In every year. Dick would fly in every year in his blue Long EZ, set up a table by the plane, and sell memorabilia to raise money for his upcoming Voyager round-the-world flight. Andrew and I bought posters, t-shirts, coffee cups, and anything else we could do to support the mission. Thus, we got an invitation to fly down to Edwards and watch the landing (which we did).

Following the flight, I hosted an FAA Wings seminar in San Jose, and Dick was the featured speaker. So I got to be Dick's gofer and assistant. Afterward, as we were carting his AV equipment back to the car, he asked me "what was the name of that son of yours?"

I told him, and he took a color picture postcard of the Voyager aircraft out of one pocked, and a Sharpie out of the other. He signed the card "To my friend Andrew -- keep flying, and stay safe," and autographed it.

Andrew is now in his mid-forties, and lives in Berlin. He no longer flies, but still has that postcard on the wall of his flat.

Now, that's how to encourage kids! Sorry to hear that Yeager wasn't of the same mind.

[JimParker256]

I posted in another forum about meeting Chuck Yeager, Bob Hoover, and Paul Poberezny on the same day at OSH many years back... Yeager was a bit full of himself, but if you can walk the walk, I guess you're entitled to talk the talk. I listened to him sharing a funny story about his younger days, and then asked him to sign the copy of his book I'd just purchased to replace the one that got lost during a military move. He was gracious enough to sign it, and it's on my bookshelf to this day.

I met Hoover and Poberezny when I was slogging from the current ultralight area to the warbirds area in 95º heat to meet my buddy for lunch. Paul was driving his "stretch limo convertible beetle" with Bob Hoover, and passed me going the opposite direction. He stopped, backed up, and asked where I was headed, then offered me a ride. I declined initially, because they were headed the other way, and I knew how busy Paul was during the fly-in... Plus, I was more than a little bit awed to meet two of my childhood heroes! But Paul insisted, and when Bob agreed, I gratefully jumped in.

They drove me to the warbirds area, chatting about airplanes the whole way. When we got there, we talked for another 10-15 minutes, with Hoover asking me all kinds of questions about flying the OH-58 scout helicopters that I flew in the Army. He wanted to know if the controls were hydraulic (no, but there was hydraulic damping), how well it autorotated (very), whether I'd done full-touchdown autos (literally thousands – I was an instructor and we did one or more on almost every training flight), had I flown helicopters with Night Vision Goggles (yep - I trained and qualified probably half the Guard and Reserve instructor pilots on the West Coast while I was stationed at Ft Ord, CA, since I was designated as a "Standardization Instructor Pilot" for NVGs), and a bunch of other topics. When Paul found out I was working on my Commercial rating, he wanted to know how I liked flying the Grumman Tiger (lots) versus the Piper Arrow I had to use for the "complex" stuff (not nearly as much). It was just three guys talking about airplanes, though I could hardly get either one of them to talk about what they did or had flown... They just wanted to hear about my experience. I was having such a good time with my new "best friends" that it never even occurred to me to have them sign my program... Doesn't matter. The mental picture is clear as a bell to this day!