Chuck Yeager, aviation legend who had what it takes

Chuck Yeager leaning on the X-1 with which he broke the sound barrier in 1947.

Chuck Yeager has broken through the last barrier.

We have to imagine that he has done it the same way he did everything: without thinking twice and with a lot of courage.

With Charles Elwood

Yeager (Myra, Virginia, USA, 1923), who died on Tuesday at the age of 97, according to his wife since 2003, Victoria Scott D'Angelo, an aviation legend disappears, the best born pilot, a character of the height (and worth the expression) of the greatest of the air, who definitely flies to sit next to the Wright brothers, Lindbergh, Mermoz, Amelia Earhart, the Red Baron or James Jabara.

To embody it in the cinema, in

, you had to put Sam Shepard.

Tom Wolfe the author of the book that gave rise to the film (

that Anagrama published as

), wrote about him what today sounds like an extraordinary epitaph: "The most honorable of all the possessors of what you have to have."

He was without a doubt the best pilot alive and his death leaves us down here with shorter wings.

Although he was much, much more, he is remembered above all for being credited as the first human to break the sound barrier, on October 14, 1947, flying his famous Bell X-1

at 13,700 meters above the Mojave at speed Mach 1 (1,225 kilometers per hour).

The aircraft, an orange fat swallow powered by a rocket engine on display today at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington with the

, had been launched from the belly of a B-29 bomber.

Two days earlier, Yeager had broken two ribs while riding a horse: he did not tell anyone and a temporary cure was made with a vet.

Six years later, Yeager reached a new record, twice the speed of sound.

It would be impossible to imagine a more impressive air life: Yeager, an air force officer, test pilot in all types of airplanes down to the most improbable and dangerous prototypes - throughout his life he flew in 360 different types of airplanes -, it was so hunting in World War II.

He made it to the category in a single day in which he shot down a whopping five German aircraft: two Me-109 fighters crashed on collision while fleeing from him.

During the contest, which ended with 13 victories, he even loaded, at the controls of his Mustang P-51 propeller fighter (his favorite aircraft of all time), one of the first jets in history, a Messerschmitt Me-262 , a true angel of death capable of flying at 900 kilometers per hour, 200 more than Yeager's apparatus.

In an interview with the person signing these lines in October 2010, the aviator recalled that action with his characteristic direct language: “I shot him down while landing, because in the air it was frustrating, you couldn't catch them, they also tried to avoid

and they went for the bombers.

I went behind him and shot him;

crashed in a cloud of dust and smoke.

I would have preferred to shoot down the son of a bitch in aerial combat, but it wasn't easy, with all the antiaircraft artillery at his base shooting at me. "

Years later it has been said that precisely a Me-262 would have broken the sound barrier before him, in 1945.

That sure made him doubly glad he knocked one down.

He said that killing other airmen was nothing personal and in fact after the war he was friends with aces from the other side like Galland and Steinhof.

The interview with this newspaper took place during a tribute to the pilot in Sort (Lleida), where Yeager returned 66 years after his first visit in 1944, when the French resistance passed him to Spain after having parachuted from his plane.

He had been shot down by a Focke Wulf 190 (which he considered the best German fighter of the war: he shot down 4).

Evacuated to Great Britain - later he would return to Spain with the Super Sabers in Morón, Torrejón and Zaragoza and hunt partridges with Franco, although he always considered himself outside of politics - Yeager returned to the front to continue fighting.

Talking to Chuck Yeager was like being before a force of nature.

He embodied like no one else the archetype of the military pilot (his surname, English version of the German Jäger, hunter, seemed premonitory): brave, without fissures, aware of his capabilities and achievements until he seemed arrogant, elemental in his way of not giving it too many laps to things, straight,

.

The only problem with Yeager, his superiors said, was containing him.

The simplicity of his way of seeing life was specified in precepts like those he inherited from his father: "Don't bet money, and never buy a truck that isn't General Motors."

That conservative mentality of deep and rural America (he was from a peasant family) did not condition his opinion about female aviators, whom he considered equals and whom he even admired (he was close friends with Jackie Cochran, the first to fly faster than Sound).

He named his planes

after his first wife Glennis Faye Dickhouse (who died in 1990), with whom he had four children.

Later, a widower, he married Victoria, 36 years younger and also a pilot.

The fear was unknown to him.

He said he had never felt it.

And look, he once lost control of his X-1A and fell 16,000 meters in 51 seconds before regaining control.

"Heaven is not a good place to be afraid, there is no time for such things."

Being fearless and his privileged, predatory eye (he had extraordinary eyesight, he was capable, he said, of hitting a deer at half a kilometer), he considered these to be two of his best virtues as a pilot.

He compared being a test pilot to being "a matador", a bullfighter and said that in the trade the main mission was to survive.

Aerial literature was completely alien to him;

When I asked him about a classic aviation title, he could only quote me his autobiography,

(which was a

).

Nor was he able to articulate the romanticism of flight.

"The emotion of flight? Look son, we did it, we flew, it was duty.

Duty is everything. "

Impossible to imagine him writing

and let's not say

Little Prince

.

Even his great moment of the first supersonic day explained it with a certain aroma of anti-climax: “I did not notice anything special, the needle of the machometer jumped out of scale;

before there was a wobble, a tremor and then a smooth flow ”.

You have to read Wolfe,

, to understand what that was: “He was the master of heaven.

His solitude was the solitude of a king, unique and inviolable, on the dome of the world ”.

That is the man who has died.

An aviation enthusiast who discovered like many other pilots of his generation in air shows, he started as an airplane mechanic and enlisting in the army (at the age of 21) opened the sky (he certainly would not have used that metaphor), by allowing him enter in 1942 in the pilot training program.

During the Cold War, he was one of the first US pilots to test a Soviet Mig-15.

He then flew combat missions in Vietnam and was an adviser to the Pakistani air force.

Highly decorated (Silver Medal, Purple Heart, DFC ..., although not, despite the fact that there was a campaign for it, the Congressional Medal of Honor), he ended up as a general in the US Air Force.

His great frustration, although he talked about it in his own way, was not being an astronaut, something that he attributed to his lack of studies.

The fact is that the recognized best pilot of his generation had to give way to others chosen for glory.

He remembered it sportily: “They gave me the opportunity to drive the X-1 and X-1A, and that's more than a man can ask for in this field.

They gave this new opportunity to new people, and that's what they had to do ”.

But he added singly that being an astronaut was "cleaning monkey shit," referring to the fact that the first to go into space were macaques.

In

(1983) he made a cameo as the owner of the pilots' bar.

The movie seemed too long.

That afternoon in Sort, I gave him as a gift a small model of a P-51 Mustang.

He put it in his pocket very naturally and in the same way he dedicated his photo to me next to the X-1.

"Hell, I believed in what I was doing," he wrote in his biography;

“I'm not denying that it was damn good, and if there's something like the best, I'm one of the few who can compete for the title.

But what I really think when I look back is: wow, with everything that could have happened to me, how lucky I was ”.

That's how he was.

Good flight, Chuck Yeager.