Another of my boyhood heroes has left us at 97. He had the Right Stuff.
Chuck Yeager RIP
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Musings on the byways of popular culture
Musings on the byways of popular culture
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Another of my boyhood heroes has left us at 97. He had the Right Stuff.
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“The first time I ever saw a jet, I shot it down.”
😂😂😂
Thunderbirds are go!
That was awesome! I have to admit though to not knowing who Chuck Yeager is though I have heard his name. Obviously greatly respected by all the crew around him. Wonderful to see that when there’s such a lack of it in our everyday lives.
Kick the tyres and light the fires. Way to go, Chuck.
Even by WV standards he came from nowhere.
If you ever get to DC, go to the Air and Space museum in town – they have Glamorous Glennis there. You’ll be amazed that was the first plane to go supersonic
I recommend his autobiography heartily..
Go to about 22 mins into this and hear about the first attempt to run at Mach 2. This man had balls the size of Mars.
A last link to a very different era.
The X-series planes that Yeager flew were fearsome machines. He and his fellow test pilots were right on the edge of disaster the whole time. If they didn’t blow up before being launched they were incredibly unstable and one mistake could lead to an uncontrollable spin.
As Tom Wolfe describes in The Right Stuff – the official term was ‘inertia coupling’ but this was actually a polite description of their plane losing all stability around all axes of movement and tumbling out of the sky. On one test flight Yeager was thrown so hard around the cockpit while in a spin that his head cracked the canopy. It was only pure luck that he regained consciousness in time to get the plane back under control before it crashed.
You`ve said it for me Clem. For once the word `Legend` isn`t over-used with regard to Chuck Yeager.
I must have seen `The Right Stuff` dozens of times, I reckon the Bluray is gonna be spinning later on.
And by under control, we mean putting it into a normal spin, because those were dead easy to get out of (I paraphrase his version)