Aloft With Chuck Yeager, Testy Pilot

"We were flying supersonic! And it was as smooth as a baby's bottom," he wrote.

Since he retired in the 1970s, Yeager has kept busy doing some television commercials, tending his property, flying and hunting and fishing. He created a Web site about his life, http://www.chuckyeager.com, and also helps raise money for his General Chuck Yeager Foundation, which helps finance youth pilot programs and college scholarships. (He tells me that he asks people who want autographs to make a $25 donation to the foundation.)

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Yeager is wearing bluejeans pulled up to his bellybutton, a green fleece pullover jacket and an Air Force baseball cap that hides his white hair. Sunglasses dangle on a strap around his neck. He is sipping coffee.

He has just finished a week of public appearances, speeches and a supersonic flight in an F-16. He seems a bit tired, and his current wife, Victoria, says he has been battling a cold.

We hop into the family SUV, whose license tags reads "BELL X-1A." (Yeager's Chevy pickup truck announces "BELL X-1"). Victoria, 49, sits next to Yeager. She calls him "General Yeager," not Chuck.

Glennis, his first wife, died in 1990. He married Victoria in 2003.

Yeager doesn't seem interested in small talk. We ride in silence to the hangar, where he heads directly to the bumble-bee-yellow Aviat Husky, a standard-issue single-engine plane.

The Husky belongs to a buddy. Yeager says he never wanted to own his own plane. "If you are willing to bleed," he explains, "Uncle Sam will give you all the airplanes you want."

I ask where we're heading. "Wherever the airplane takes us," he says.

I crawl awkwardly into the two-seater -- but not before bashing my head on the wing. Yeager slips into the cockpit like he's a 20-year-old fighter pilot and starts the engine. We taxi to the runway. The airplane is a tail-dragger -- it has two large front wheels and a small wheel near its fanny. Tail-draggers can be difficult to taxi because you can't see over the engine. Yeager has to reach up, grab two metal struts and heave himself out of his seat to see where we're going.

A few minutes later, we are in the air.