In fact, I was responsible for Chuck's last airplane ride on active duty. He was running out of time, and so was I. He had thirty-four years in and I had thirty. Five years was the limit he could serve as a brigadier general, although if he got a second star, he could serve seven more years because he wasn't commissioned until 1944, and the law allowed him to serve thirty-five years of commissioned time. He was really of two minds about it. He was only fifty-two, very young to retire, especially as a general officer. It was one of those deals where he would've liked to be asked to become a major general, for the honor of it. He and Pete Everest had always been rivals: both from West Virginia; both great test pilots, and both one-star generals. I'm sure he would've enjoyed edging Pete out, but he knew damned well a second star would mean serving at the Pentagon. Chuck just rolled his eyes about that. He said, "Shit, there won't even be any flying to speak of." When the time came, he was ready to hang it up.
So 1975 was it for him. And a few weeks before he was scheduled to retire, he came to Edwards to hold a safety inspection, and the officers involved came to me for advice about the best way "to please General Yeager." I laughed. I told them, "Get him an airplane to fly and stick a pilot in the back seat, and you won't hear any complaints out of him." And that's what they did. But before he took off, he called me at my office and said, "Listen, I'm too damned old to bail out. I don't want you within a hundred yards of that flight line. Hell, I don't want you to even look out your goddamn window."
I wasn't in the sky with him that day, so he didn't have to bail out of that F-4 Phantom. But before he landed, he came down right over the deck at 500 knots and did a couple of beautiful slow rolls. I know because I peeked.
In the end he logged ten thousand hours flying in 180 different military aircraft, including foreign or experimental rocket aircraft. And to another pilot, that was the most enviable thing about Yeager s career; no matter what he was doing, he never stopped flying. Being Chuck, he made damned sure that retirement wouldn't keep him from continuing to fly military airplanes. Dave Scott, who was a student at his space school and took over NASA's high-speed flight research center at Edwards, called him and said, "Chuck, how would you like to be a NASA consultant for no pay? All you have to do is fly 104s when you want to." Chuck said, "Hell, yes." The Air Force also made him an unpaid consultant at Edwards for the same reason.
Before he retired, he was enshrined in the Aviation Hall of Fame in Dayton, the youngest member ever to be inducted. Jackie enshrined him in the ceremonies down there, and then Edwards honored him by unveiling a huge oil painting of him and the X-1 in the lobby of the base officers' club, directly opposite the front door. Hell, parking spot one was reserved there for him; the second spot was for the base commander.
But the retirement ceremonies were at Norton, where he was headquartered. General Boyd, who was long retired, flew all the way from Florida in his own Bonanza, and said, "Chuck, there are damned few people in the world that I would do this for." He conducted the retirement ceremonies on the stage. General Doolittle and his wife Jo were there, and Jackie and Floyd Odlum. Most of the guys he had flown with in flight test were there, as well as guys he commanded in his squadrons, and a bunch of us from World War II, including Obie O'Brien, Don Bochkay and Chuck McKee. It was a typical Yeager crowd: fighter pilots, test pilots, a few generals, and a couple of millionaires, sheepherders, and drunks. General Boyd read the special orders retiring Chuck and then there was a pass-in-review parade in his honor.
After the ceremonies, he came up to me with tears in his eyes. He said, "Jesus, not one damn piece of equipment in the sky." Bob Hoover was going to fly by in a P-51 Mustang to honor Chuck, but he got socked in in fog back in L.A. Chuck was really upset. He said, "I spent my life flying and there wasn't even a pigeon in the air when I said good-by."
A SUMMING UP
The person I am is the sum-total of the life I've lived. So, I have very deep emotions about the blue Air Force uniform that I wore most of my adult life. The Air Force molded and trained me, and who I am and whatever I've accomplished, I owe to them. They taught me everything I needed to know to do my job. There is no such thing as a natural-born pilot. Whatever my aptitudes or talents, becoming a proficient pilot was hard work, really a lifetime's learning experience. For the best pilots, flying is an obsession, the one thing in life they must do continually. The best pilots fly more than the others; that's why they're the best. Experience is everything. The eagerness to learn how and why every piece of equipment works is everything. And luck is everything, too.
Many pilots are killed because they get into situations where it is impossible to survive, while others, because of luck or knowing everything about their emergency gear, slip between the raindrops. I made my share of critical mistakes that nearly cost me my life. I climbed too steeply in the X-1A and paid for it by being bashed around the cockpit and scared out of my senses knowing I was aguring in. To survive took everything I knew and had ever experienced in a cockpit, so that maybe one hour less flying time could have been the difference between drilling a hole or landing safely. I saved myself by sheer instinct, but a knowledgeable instinct based on hundreds of previous spin-tests. Experienced at spinning down to earth, I was less disoriented than others who had done it many fewer times, and was more likely to make the right moves to save myself.
And luck. The most precious commodity a pilot carries. How can I explain surviving the million to one odds against me when my ejection seat tangled in my parachute shroud lines and set them smoldering, to the point where after I landed I pulled those burnt lines apart with a slight tug? I can't explain it. Nor can I explain surviving intact after getting clobbered by the rocket-end of that chair and having my face set on fire. To survive, fly again, and have no facial scars? Luck, pure and simple.
Ever since Tom Wolfe's book was published, the question I'm asked most often and which always annoys me is whether I think I've got "the right stuff." I know that golden trout have the right stuff, and I've seen a few gals here and there that I'd bet had it in spades, but those words seem meaningless when used to describe a pilot's attributes. The question annoys me because it implies that a guy who has "the right stuff" was born that way. I was born with unusually good eyes and coordination. I was mechanically oriented, understood machines easily. My nature was to stay cool in tight spots. Is that "the right stuff"? All I know is I worked my tail off to learn how to fly, and worked hard at it all the way. And in the end, the one big reason why I was better than average as a pilot was because I flew more than anybody else. If there is such a thing as "the right stuff" in piloting, then it is experience.
The secret to my success was that somehow I always managed to live to fly another day. To be remembered for accomplishing significant things, a test pilot has to survive. Hell, I could've busted my ass a dozen times over and nobody would have heard of me. I would have been Yeager Boulevard carrying military housewives to the commissary at Edwards. Popson Drive is a nearby street from the flight test center, but who remembers poor Ray Popson, a fine pilot and a wonderful guy, who ran out of luck? Who remembers my old friend Joe Wolfe? How many know or care that Edwards is named for Glenn Edwards? And what did Glenn Edwards do for a living? These young guys augered in before they could make their mark. Some of them might have been better pilots than I, but I made it into a rocking chair and managed to accumulate a lifetime of work and luck to be at the right place at the right time.