Chuck Yeager

“It was so smooth that Grandma would be sitting up there sipping lemonade". He was fearless in the face of death, bailing out many times. He was an ace pilot, doing the impossible. Chuck Yeager was a test pilot for the U.S. Air Force, was the first person to go faster than the speed of sound, and has trained the next generation of pilots. He was the first person to break the sound barrier, and was an ace during World War Two. When Chuck Yeager joined the Air Force, he was just a mechanic. He later became a pilot and shot down 23 and 1/2 planes. On one of his missions, he was shot down by Anti-Aircraft guns. He was rescued by French Resistance fighters that helped him escape to Spain. While in Spain, he was captured and imprisoned. “He escaped by cutting the bars of his cell with a small saw he had …show more content…
One of the planes he shot down was the Nazi jet, the first of its kind. “After the war, Yeager became an Air Force flight instructor and then an experimental test pilot, flying high-speed rocket planes'' (“Chuck Yeager”, 1998). This is how he came to break the sound barrier. Yeager once said, “Anyone with brain cells would have to wonder what in hell he was doing in such a situation—strapped inside a live bomb that was about to be dropped out of a bomb bay” (“Chuck Yeager” 1998). Nevertheless, Yeager made the flight and broke the sound barrier. No one had ever broken the sound barrier and survived, and Yeager did it with two broken ribs. Earlier, the people attempting to break the sound barrier died when their planes fell apart. “Airplane pilots who approached the speed of sound in dives reported that their controls froze and the structure of the plane shook uncontrollably. A British test plane disintegrated as it approached the speed of sound” (“Chuck Yeager”, 2011). Two days before Chuck Yeager's flight, he fell off a horse and broke two ribs. He went to a civilian doctor to keep it secret from the military, and then flew the mission with