Taking Bearings

December 8, 2020

Pensacola FL– Bravo zulu maximus for Chuck Yeager on his service, a life fully and well lived, and for his “no bridge too low” approach to all of it.

Today is a day for solitary reflection on life, and also probably a good bit of bourbon. A legendary icon and true American hero has passed. General Chuck Yeager, always a man among men–and for a time, THE man among men–died last night at age 97.

What the force is to the Jedi, Yeagerisms are to pilots. It is a force that binds us and training must be undertaken to properly use it. Yeager’s way was THE way.

Yeager was a WWII hero who once shot down five enemy aircraft in a single day, and a legendary test pilot. As Yeager would dismissively say, he was the first pilot “confirmed to exceed the speed of sound and live to talk about it,” but he was also the originator of Yeagerisms, and it was this quality and force of character that Tom Wolfe so aptly later captured and immortalized in The Right Stuff.

Every pilot who has ever kicked a rudder to line up at the top of a loop, landed a crippled plane, ejected from a flaming hunk of falling metal, or walked away from a crash understands Yeagerisms. No matter their personal titer of the right stuff, no matter their accent, they will invariably drawl out the tale in a way that shows they believe doing your duty or your job is the most important thing, but also that coolness while doing it is THE thing.

Most people lead timid lives full of fear and regrets, but not Yeager.

To lead the fullest life, however, one must adopt the Yeager creed, for which much more than a quiet disdain of danger or death is prerequisite. In whatever station of life or venue you find yourself, you must actively seek out the edge of such peril, put yourself over that edge a bit, and then pull it back. You must laugh in the face of adversity, not with arrogant bravado but rather as an intrinsic and reflexive dismissal of the very notion that whatever or whoever it is that you are up against can possibly pose a challenge that you can’t surmount or be the cause of your demise.

A disdain for death does not mean having no fear of death. As Yeager said, “I was always afraid of dying. Always. It was my fear that made me learn everything I could about my airplane and my emergency equipment, and kept me flying respectful of my machine and always alert in the cockpit.” What Yeager professed was that through training, you could take fear of death, combine it with a sense of duty, and turn death into something unworthy of your consideration.

Yeager sayings and stories abound, from being shot down over France only to escape, return to combat, and become an ace with 12 kills to flying under a bridge near his hometown in West Virginia in 1948 in a P80 Shooting Star. From exceeding the speed of sound in an X-1 named Glamorous Glennis (after his beloved first wife and mother of his four children, who passed away in 1990) to pushing the speed record out to two and a half times faster, again in an Bell X-1A.

Glamorous Glennis went to the Smithsonian, but Yeager lived on, and his legend grew. At age 89, during a celebration of his initial record setting flight, Yeager again broke the sound barrier in an F15.

Those deeds and tales merely scratch the surface of a colorful and full life. All in all, not a bad run for a guy with only silver wings.

As I age, I try not to fear the long night, and am comforted that Yeager has broken that barrier, too. While the final grounding is inevitable for all of us, Yeager seemed to defy the gravity of mortality.

As long as Yeager was out there, still flying into his 90s, still hunting, fishing, downing bourbon, commanding a thousand dollars an autograph, vexing his adult children by marrying a woman half his age, and–with a wink to the knowing–playing the part for the unwashed, there was a comforting beacon in the night.