Sixty-five years later to the minute, on Oct. It was a matter of keeping them from falling apart,” Yeager said. ![]() “It wasn’t a matter of not having airplanes that would fly at speeds like this. Yeager’s feat was kept top secret for about a year when the world thought the British had broken the sound barrier first. Yeager nicknamed the rocket plane, and all his other aircraft, “Glamorous Glennis” for his wife, who died in 1990. He said the ride “was nice, just like riding fast in a car.” The modest Yeager said in 1947 he could have gone even faster had the plane carried more fuel. “When you’re fooling around with something you don’t know much about, there has to be apprehension. “Sure, I was apprehensive,” he said in 1968. 14, 1947, Yeager, then a 24-year-old captain, pushed an orange, bullet-shaped Bell X-1 rocket plane past 660 mph to break the sound barrier, at the time a daunting aviation milestone. “If I auger in (crash) tomorrow, it won’t be with a frown on my face. “I haven’t yet done everything, but by the time I’m finished, I won’t have missed much,” he wrote. The trick is to enjoy the years remaining,” he said in “Yeager: An Autobiography.” “Living to a ripe old age is not an end in itself. Yeager, from a small town in the hills of West Virginia, flew for more than 60 years, including piloting an X-15 to near 1,000 mph at Edwards in October 2002 at age 79. ![]() Curtis Bedke, commander of the Air Force Flight Test Center at Edwards. He was “the most righteous of all those with the right stuff,” said Maj. “In an age of media-made heroes, he is the real deal,” Edwards Air Force Base historian Jim Young said in August 2006 at the unveiling of a bronze statue of Yeager.
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