HEROES OF…TRANSPORT
Chuck Yeager
The man who made history by breaking the sound barrier
Yeager named many of his aircraft after his wife Glennis, including the one that broke the speed of sound
© Getty
Yeager (left) next to Major Gus Lundquist, Captain James Fitzgerald, and ‘Glamorous Glennis’
© Getty
The rocket engine-powered Bell X-1 became the first aircraft to achieve supersonic flight
Source: NASA
A life’s work
The journey to becoming the ‘Fastest Man Alive’
DID YOU KNOW? Yeager was promoted to the rank of Captain by the end of World War II
Charles “Chuck” Yeager was born in Myra, West Virginia, in 1923 – the second of five children of Albert Hal and Susie Mae Yeager. The family moved to the small town of Hamlin when Yeager was five, which at the time had only around 600 residents. Yeager’s father owned a natural gas-drilling business, which meant Yeager learned all about the mechanics of generators, pumps and regulators at a young age, which transferred into his aptitude for mathematics. Yeager ended his formal education after high school and joined the Army Air Corps in 1941, only months before the attack on Pearl Harbor. He had originally joined to work on the engines of planes, but by the following year he had been selected to join the flight training program. Yeager’s start in the skies wasn’t smooth; some reports say he wasn’t keen on leaving the ground as his first flights made him queasy. But that must have been short-lived, as by 1943 he had been awarded his pilot’s wings.