Anniversary of supersonic flight: The Chuck Yeager and Wright-Patt connection was always strong

When legendary pilot Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in October 1947 45,000 feet above the Mojave Desert, it was brainpower at what became Wright-Patterson Air Force Base that helped make it possible.

There was always a connection between Yeager and Wright-Patterson, the birthplace of much of the technology that made Yeager’s record-breaking deeds possible.

Yeager died Monday. He was 97.

Yeager, of course, was the first pilot in history confirmed to have exceeded the speed of sound in level flight. When his bullet-shaped Bell X-1 broke the sound barrier 45,000 feet above the Southern California desert, much of that technological power was tied to what was then Wright Field here outside Dayton.

The rocket-powered, soon-to-be supersonic plane was nicknamed “Glamorous Glennis” after Yeager’s wife.

Kevin Rusnak, an historian for the Air Force Research Laboratory, based at Wright-Patterson, said the supersonic X-1 was the brainchild of the then-Wright Field Aircraft Laboratory’s Ezra Kotcher, who “conceived of an airplane designed and built from scratch solely for experimental research, in this case high-speed, rocket-powered flight past the speed of sound.”

“When the head of Wright Field’s Flight Test Division, an organization connected to the modern Air Force Research Laboratory and Air Force Life Cycle Management Center, surveyed his 125 pilots to find one best-suited to flying the experimental, and highly dangerous, Bell X-1 airplane, he chose Chuck Yeager,” Rusnak said in an email Tuesday. “The young lieutenant was known for his precision flying and natural feel for an airplane — the quintessential ‘stick-and-rudder man’ —and his record as an ace in World War II attested to his coolness under fire.”

“Gen. Yeager was a hero and a legend,” Gen. Arnold W. Bunch, Jr., commander of Air Force Materiel Command, said Tuesday. “I had the good fortune of multiple interactions with Brig. Gen. Yeager and he always inspired our test pilots and test teams to push through barriers. May he rest in peace, our thoughts and prayers are with his family as they go through this trying time.”

“Gen. Chuck Yeager truly embodied the innovative spirit of the Wright Brothers and literally broke through barriers. He leaves behind an incredible legacy and will continue to be an inspiration to America’s pilots,” U.S. Rep. Mike Turner, R-Dayton, said.

“It proved that the so-called sound barrier was no barrier whatsoever,” Bob van der Linden, curator of special purpose aircraft at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., told the Dayton Daily News in 2017, then the 70th anniversary of Yeager’s historic flight.

The X-1 program was managed at Wright Field and both Yeager and his backup pilot, future air show legend Robert A. “Bob” Hoover, were Wright Field test pilots on “temporary” duty at Muroc, now Edwards Air Force Base, noted Timothy Gaffney, a former Dayton Daily News military affairs and aviation writer.

“The X-1 program is a good example of how (Wright-Patterson’s) work often goes unrecognized: the development and management are done here, but the dramatic flights over the desert get all the attention,” Gaffney said. “Just like Dayton and Kitty Hawk.”

Yeager is also a National Aviation Hall of Fame enshrinee and one of four X-1 rocket planes is in the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force, he added.

Then as now, Wright-Patterson is the beating heart of Air Force research and development, and in the 1940s, work there helped pave the way for supersonic flight. Yeager flew military planes here before moving to California, said Doug Lantry, historian at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force.

After World War II, Yeager’s career as a test pilot was launched at what became Wright-Patterson.

Yeager had completed the school for test pilots recently established at Wright Field and was already flying airplanes with experimental new technologies developed there by the Air Force laboratories, the AFRL’s Rusnak said.

“In January 1947, he had his turn on the Wright Field Aero Medical Laboratory’s (now part of AFRL’s 711th Human Performance Wing) centrifuge, hitting 3.8 Gs (or nearly 4 times the force of gravity),” he said. “His qualifications and experience made him ideally suited to flying through the largely unknown and unpredictable transonic speeds and faster than sound.”

Jeff Duford, a curator at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force, said Yeager’s connections to the base are historic and deep.

“He actually flew in the skies right above our museum, right above Wright-Patterson,” Duford said.

Yeager actually flew in several aircraft currently on display at the Air Force Museum, including the X-3, the X-4, the Convair XF-92 and a MiG-15. The latter plane was flown from North Korea to South Korea by a defector before being flown in a transport to Okinawa, Japan, where Yeager and another American test pilot flew it.

The museum has an X-1 like the one Yeager flew, but not one that he did in fact pilot, a museum spokesman said.

The flight suit Yeager actually wore during the record-breaking flight surpassing the sound barrier is not displayed, but the museum has that suit in its possession, a spokesman said.

In July 1945, Yeager became a maintenance officer at Wright Field, a job that entailed flight-testing the field’s variety of planes, according to Yeager’s web site earlier this year.

Yeager went on to break other speed and altitude records and to serve as a consulting civilian test pilot.

Yeager formally retired from the Air Force in March 1975 as a brigadier general. In the 1980s, Yeager worked with General Motors, publicizing AC Delco, the company’s automotive parts division, which had its own Dayton connections.

In 1986, he drove the pace car for the Indianapolis 500 and has been in high demand for public appearances over the years.

“Yeager passing away is the end of an era with a group of pilots who made enormous leaps in human understanding,” Duford said. “He’s a legend, really,”