Aloft With Chuck Yeager, Testy Pilot

Even before our brusque face-to-face introduction, I had been anticipating a tough time with Yeager during our short hop in a single-engine plane. I had been warned that he has canceled interviews without much notice. He has a reputation for charging for autographs. One woman told me he made a young boy cry at an air show because he wouldn't sign a photograph. During our telephone interview about the death of another test pilot two months ago, I was surprised at his frank criticism of the departed. Didn't test pilots have rules against that?

Part of me wants Yeager to like me -- to tell war stories for hours, to include me in his small fraternity of worthy pilots. But when he threatens to toss me off the tarmac, I can't say I'm disappointed.

I'll be getting the full Yeager experience: the abrasive and crusty swashbuckling pilot with confidence boiling out of his ears.

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My dad always had books stacked on his nightstand, and I would swipe one or two from time to time. At 12 or 13, I borrowed Yeager's autobiography. I also read Tom Wolfe's "The Right Stuff," in which Yeager figured prominently, and a few other books on astronauts. I have watched "The Right Stuff" movie at least a dozen times.

Yeager grew up in Hamlin, W.Va., the son of a gas-field worker and a housewife. He didn't go to college, and spent his teenage years hustling pool.

He eventually became a fighter pilot. Shot up over Europe during a dogfight, he bailed out and evaded the Germans for several weeks with the help of the French Resistance. After a harrowing hike through the Pyrenees, he reached safety in Spain. Yeager could have returned home, but he chose to remain with his squadron. He shot down five German planes on one mission. (Two collided, bursting into flames, when Yeager bore down on them in his P-51 Mustang.)

After the war, he got into test flying. He felt insecure around the college-educated test pilots, so he routinely battled them in mock dogfights high above Wright Field in Ohio.

"I went through the entire stable of test pilots and waxed every fanny," he wrote in "Yeager."

In 1947, he was tapped to fly an experimental rocket plane, the Bell X-1. It was jettisoned from a bomber -- like ordnance. With hundreds of pounds of volatile fuel just feet from his back, Yeager would free-fall for a few seconds and then push a series of buttons that set off the plane's rocket engines, hurtling him through the sky.

At the time, scientists and aviators worried that the sound barrier -- 761 mph at sea level -- could not be broken and would crush a plane to pieces. A British pilot had died a year earlier making a similar attempt. In a flight test before he broke the barrier, Yeager had difficulty controlling the plane and even told a friend that he "thought we had had it."

On Oct. 14, 1947, with broken ribs from a horse-riding accident, Yeager climbed into the X-1 (nicknamed Glamorous Glennis, after his wife), was dropped like a bomb, pushed the buttons and busted through the barrier.