Chuck Yeager
Charles E. Yeager was born on February 13, 1923 in Myra, West Virginia and raised the nearby village of Hamlin for the first eighteen years of his life. His father drilled natural gas, and his mother was a housewife. At an early age, Chuck helped his father drill, and learned mechanics from his father. Chuck was always fixing the car engines or the drill engine if it broke. In high school Chuck played basketball and baseball, although he never really excelled in either. He also was not that smart in school. He said the only thing that he was good at was typing and math, everything else, he got a D in. After high school, Chuck, being poorly educated and destitute decided to join the U.S. Army Air Corps. The funny thing about that is that Chuck never even saw an airplane on the ground until he was 16 years old, when it had an emergency and landed in a cornfield, and Chuck was not even impressed with it. He said the reason that he joined the Air Corps is because the recruiter made the Air Corps sound more interesting that the Navy recruiter. Anyway, Chuck joined the Air Corps as a mechanic. After a year of being a mechanic, the Untied States was short pilots, so they put up a notice to see if
anyone wanted to become a pilot. Chuck signed the form; however, it took another year for them to pick him. It was always hard for Chuck to fit in among the other pilots and mechanics. Because he was from West Virginia, he had a strong accent, and a poor education, so he was never given a chance at first. Then, when he first went in a plane, he almost quit the pilot school because there was turbulence and he was bumping all over the place. On the other hand, once he flew a plane by himself he was hooked. He excelled in pilot school because he had excellent vision, 20/10, and learned how to dogfight, that is getting in position to shoot down another plane and avoiding getting shot down yourself. I believe the book portrayed an accurate description of Chuck Yeager because I researched him on the Internet before I read the book and found most of the facts to be unbiased even though Chuck co-wrote the book. It also had other people commenting on the situations on hand. After that, he tested more planes, like a captured Russian plane, and the X-1A which from 2.5 Mach. With the X-1A he almost "bought the farm"(and expression used instead of crashing). At 80,000 feet and going 1650 mph, the X-1A took a nosedive, in a downward spiral. Chuck was thrown all over the place; his head even cracking the canopy. However, by some miracle, he took started to take control of the plane at 25,000 feet. He dropped 51,000 feet in 51 seconds! Also another scare, while he was flying and experimental plane at Mach 2 was that he had to jump out of a plane wearing a compression suit. The suit caught on fire and tangled in his parachute. He survived the fall bad needed skin grafts for his burns. After the war, he started working at a test pilot base in California. After a while Major Boyd asked if he wanted to become a test pilot being that he was such a good combat pilot. He skipped right over the pilot school and got handed the greatest project one could ask for. He got picked to fly the jet propelled X-1 to break the sound barrier. After 3 months it was done, and Chu
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Approximate Word count = 1407
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)
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