Chuck Yeager
Pilot — born 1923
Chuck Yeager is a retired brigadier general who became the first pilot to officially break the sound barrier.
Chuck Yeager was an American Hall of Fame former U.S. Air Force flying ace and test pilot whose October 14, 1947 first faster-than-sound powered flight produced one of the foundational documents of mid-20th-century American aviation history — making him the first pilot ever confirmed to fly faster than the speed of sound (Mach 1) in level flight. He was born Charles Elwood Yeager on February 13, 1923, in Myra, Lincoln County, West Virginia, into an American working-class family. His father Albert Hal Yeager was a West Virginia natural-gas-business worker, and his mother Susie May Sizemore was a homemaker.
His U.S. Army Air Forces enlistment in 1941 (at age 18) and his subsequent 1942 enrollment in the U.S. Army Air Forces flying-sergeant flight-school program at the Luke Field, Arizona Army Air Forces base — which produced his March 1943 commissioning as a U.S. Army Air Forces flight officer — launched his World War II American military-pilot career.
His World War II military-flying service across 1944–1945 — across the 357th Fighter Group of the U.S. Eighth Air Force in the European Theater of Operations — produced his World War II American flying-ace public profile (across which he shot down 12.5 German aircraft, including five aircraft on a single October 12, 1944 mission, making him a flying "ace in a day"). His March 5, 1944 shoot-down by German anti-aircraft artillery over France (across which he was evaded by the French Resistance and crossed the Pyrenees mountains into Spain on foot) shaped his later biographical narrative.
His post-WWII assignment to the U.S. Army Air Forces flight-test division at the Wright-Patterson Field, Ohio (1945–1946), and his subsequent 1947 transfer to the Muroc Army Air Field (now Edwards Air Force Base) in California's Mojave Desert, launched his late-1940s American test-pilot public profile. His October 14, 1947 first faster-than-sound powered flight — at the Muroc Army Air Field, California, in the Bell X-1 experimental rocket-powered research aircraft (which Yeager named after his wife Glennis) — produced his 20th-century American aviation public profile.
His subsequent ongoing 1947–1975 American test-pilot career produced multiple American supersonic-and-experimental aircraft test-flights. He retired from the U.S. Air Force on March 1, 1975, at the rank of brigadier general. He died on December 7, 2020, at age 97, in Los Angeles, California.
His name Chuck is the English diminutive of Charles (from the Old Germanic karl meaning "free man"). Chuck has been a popular American boys' name across the mid-20th century.
About the name Chuck
Gender: Male · Origin: English
A Man: Variant Of Carl.