Chuck Yeager — arguably the most famous test pilot in United States history — passed away this week at age 97.
On Oct. 14, 1947 at age 24 Yeager made history as he pushed the limits by piloting the bullet-shaped Bell X-1 rocket to a then daunting speed of 660 mph to become the first man to break the sound barrier.
Yeager edged out another test pilot for the privilege of being the first to break the sound barrier. The other man was Glen Edwards.
Yeager broke the sound barrier on Oct. 14, 1947 flying the Bell X-1 out of the Muroc Dry Lake bed in Southern California’s Mojave Desert that is now known as Edwards Air Force Base.
Edwards was considered a superb pilot, engineer, and officer. He had cut his teeth in World War II flying more than 50 combat missions in North Africa including 11 missions in a single day when the Germans broke through Kasserine Pass. They repeatedly attacked advancing German armored columns to successfully blunt their thrust. On one of those missions Edwards and his crew set a record for completing a combat mission. It took just 19 minutes from takeoff to landing.
After the war he was assigned to the test pilot program at Muroc Army Air Field. He tested numerous experimental bombers. Edwards along with Henry Warden set a new transcontinental speed record in December of 1945 when they flew the pusher-prop light bomber dubbed the XB-42 Mixmaster from Long Beach to Washington, D.C., in five hours and 17 minutes.
Edwards was part of a team of pilots and engineers at Muroc in May of 1948 putting the Northrop YB-49 through its paces. The experimental aircraft was an all-jet version of the flying wing, arguably the most exotic-looking bomber of all time.
On a test flight on June 5, 1948 the plane broke apart in midflight killing Edwards at the age of 32 and the rest of the five crew members.
The decision to rename Muroc in late 1949 in honor of someone that had given their life to experimental flight led to it becoming Edwards Air Force Base. Naming it after Edwards fell into the tradition at the time of naming Air Force bases after the native sons of states where bases were located.
Edwards was born in Medicine Hat in the Canadian province of Alberta. When he was 13, his family moved to Lincoln in Placer County northeast of Sacramento. The dashing Edwards, as newspapers referred to him during his heyday as a test pilot, graduated from Lincoln High in 1936. From there he went to Placer Junior College in Auburn then on to the University of California at Berkeley.
There is an elementary school named for Edwards in Lincoln that is across the street from his final resting place, the Lincoln Cemetery.
And while the paths of Edwards and Yeager crossed in the late 1940s in Southern California, they ended up sharing a Northern California bond of sorts.
When Yeager retired from the Air Force in 1975 he moved to Grass Valley where his wife was born. Grass Valley and Lincoln are 26 miles apart as the crow flies.
The rural areas surrounding the two communities are on opposite sides of Beale Air Force Base. The base, originally founded in 1942 as Camp Beale for use for training armored and infantry platoons as well as to house German prisoners of war was recommissioned as a base for the fledging Air Force.
Beale today is the only base where the high-flying U-2 spy planes are stationed. Among its various units and missions is the 10-story radar structure known as Phased Array Warning System the can detect sea-launched missiles and track satellites.
Over the years Beale has supported a number of high profile missions including a B-52 bomber wing as well as overseeing three nearby Titan missile bases near Chico, the Sutter Buttes, and just a half mile on the outskirts of Lincoln at the base of the Sierra foothills.
It’s most famous mission without argument was serving as the home base for the SR-71 Blackbird reconnaissance plane from 1966 from 1990.
The SR-71 is the aggregated result of various technology tested by men like Edwards and Yeager. It set a world speed record in 1975 for the fastest air-breathing manned aircraft that still stands at today at 2,913.2 miles per hour.
Much of its capabilities are still classified.
It could reach speeds in excess of Mach 3. The 32 SR-71 planes that were manufactured were capable of taking reconnaissance footage of 100,000 square miles in an hour at attitudes in excess of 80,000 feet. The fuselage would reach temperatures in excess of 500 degrees and would elongate 6 inches at top speed.
It was so fast that it was fired upon more than 1,000 times and never hit. Whenever a launch was detected, the protocol was to simply accelerate and outrun the missile.
During a presentation at the Lincoln Rotary in 1975, the base commander dodged specific questions about the top speed of the porous titanium aircraft that couldn’t be fueled until just before takeoff or else it would start leaking like a sieve.
He did share that under restricted operating speed that the SR-71 could take off from Beale AFB and be over Idaho in 15 minutes. An inkling of its surveillance tech was a series of photographs he shared of a license plate lying flat on a dock in Miami. The first looked like a patchwork of the earth like you’d see from flying high over the earth in a jet on a clear day. The last photo you could make out the numbers and letters in the license plate.
This was 45 years ago. One can only imagine how far the technology has evolved since then.
As a second grader at Glen Edwards School we’d occasionally hear a sonic boom from the early days of the SR-71 operations at Beale. The sonic booms quickly came to an end within days of the deployment of the SR-71 to Beale due to civilian complaints. It led to their restricted operation protocols for takeoffs that also took the Blackbird to the northeast.
You can get a fairly close up look of the SR-71 as one — minus the classified guts — was presented for display at the Atwater Air Museum just north of Merced off of Highway 99.
As an aside, Beale AFB was named after Edward Fitzgerald Beale. He served in the US Navy before becoming a brigadier general in the California Militia. Among his claims to fame besides escorting the first shipment of gold from the California mines to the East Coast was being in charge of the experimental Army camel corps in 1858 to 1859 that helped survey and build a wagon trail that today is part of Route 66.
Beale also at one point in 1845 was assigned as acting master and private secretary to Captain Robert F. Stockton for whom the City of Stockton is named.
Everything we have today is the direct or indirect result of others whether it is our freedom, supersonic flight, or the founding of the communities where we live.
Call it fate, if you like, but we are all tied together and arguably have a better life because of men like Yeager, Edwards, and countless others that have pushed the envelope over the centuries whether it is in medicine, agriculture, flight, or an endless list of other disciplines.
The opinions are of Editor Dennis Wyatt and not necessarily the Bulletin or 209 Multimedia.
