Brigadier General Charles Elwood Yeager died yesterday at age 97.
Yeager entered the United States Army Air Force in 1941 as a private. He was an aircraft mechanic at first but volunteered for flight training and was promoted to Flight Officer, a rank more or less equivalent to warrant officer. He flew P51s during World War Two and was stationed in the ETO. He became a test pilot following World War Two and famously broke the sound barrier in that role flying the X1 "Glamourous Glennis", which was named after his wife.
Yeager had a long Air Force career which was likely somewhat arrested, as famous as he was, by the fact that he was not a college graduate, having entered the Air Force at a time in which it was still possible to become a pilot without a college degree. The movie The Right Stuff, in which Yeager was played by Sam Shepard (and in which Yeager had a cameo role as a bar tender), based on the book by Tom Wolfe, asserted that he was ineligible to become an astronaut for that reason. Whether or not that is true, he certainly was a justifiably famous character and in some ways his passing on December 7 was oddly symbolic.
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