Aloft With Chuck Yeager, Testy Pilot

"I'm not sure I believe you," I say over the intercom. "You are Chuck Yeager!"

He ignores me and keeps us zipping along.

As a pilot, I really want to take the controls, but I figure it won't happen. I don't ask. It just doesn't feel right.

We head back to Grass Valley, and Yeager executes a perfect approach and a near-flawless landing.

"If you can walk away from a landing, it's a good landing," he says. "If you use the airplane the next day, it's an outstanding landing."

I have so many questions, and I don't want to waste a second. So I start querying the general as we walk to a bench outside the airport's offices -- first about how he would grade the landing and then about what it meant to break the sound barrier.

"We walked away from it, didn't we?" Yeager responds.

About the sound barrier: "That is where you make a mistake. We didn't know we could do it, see. See, what you are looking for doesn't exist. You are looking for sensationalism."

We talk for an hour or so. Yeager gets more and more frustrated with my questions. I can't draw him out. He says he has no plans for the sound-barrier anniversary and will only cryptically talk about his World War II experiences.

"Ain't no German who can catch a West Virginian in the woods," he says.

I upset him when I say he was "kind of a flyboy."

"That word is a disgrace," he says. "No pilot ever used that term."

We are sitting just a few hundred yards from a massive monument to Yeager outside the airport's main gate. I ask him about glory, about his legacy, about why he took the X-1 flights when success and survival were uncertain.

"Listen, it was about duty," he says. "Your whole career is duty. If you are not in the military, you don't know what that word means."

I ask him if there was anything I should have asked him but didn't. It's a question I often toss out there. Sometimes, it opens up a new avenue of questioning. Yeager doesn't give me an ounce of charity.

"The thing is," he says, "when you ask the question, you don't listen to the answer. This is my own personal opinion. Because you jump into another question immediately after you ask that question without giving time to answer the question thoroughly. See?"

The interview really isn't going anywhere. He won't even say why he agreed to fly with me. We pack up our gear and head to lunch. After some eggs and burnt toast, Yeager seems more at ease.

"You are nicer than I expected," he says.

Before we part ways, I rush to my car and get my pilot's logbook. I want him to sign it. There is a major conflict brewing between my inner pilot and my inner reporter. As a reporter, I am a stickler for ethics. I won't even accept a cup of coffee. I am not supposed to get autographs from the people I cover. But one day, I want to prove to my 2-month-old son (who sleeps under an airplane mobile and on airplane-decorated sheets) that his daddy got to fly with the guy from "The Right Stuff."

I do some quick ethical math.

I figure that since I'm writing an essay, I will disclose in it that I got Yeager's autograph. Ethical problem solved! I hand him the logbook.

Yeager signs it.

Still, one unanswered question has been gnawing at me, and I voice it: "General, would you have let me fly if I had asked?"

"It's not my airplane," Yeager says.

In Yeager-speak, that means no.