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CalliArcale
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On February 13, 1923, Brigadier General Charles E Yeager (better known as "Chuck") was born. This makes him 83 today, so say a happy birthday for him. <img src="/images/icons/wink.gif" /> Yeager was born in Myra, West Virginia and enlisted in the Army Air Corps in 1941. He began pilot training the following year. He was deployed to the European theater in World War II, flying a P-51 starting in November of 1943. He scored two kills (an ME-109 and an HE-111K) before being shot down over occupied France. The Maquis (French resistence) helped him escape to Spain, from whence he travelled to Gibralter and eventually got back to England in 1944. He flew 56 more missions and shot down eleven more German aircraft. He also developed a startling reputation for his vision: Yeager was able to see approaching German aircraft up to five minutes before other pilots could see them. I have no idea if his vision is still this acute today, but in his heyday he was one of those rare people capable of seeing a crescent Venus with the naked eye. After the war was over, he became a flight instructor and then became a test pilot. It was through this experience that he came to be selected for the Bell X-1 program. On October 14, 1947, he flew the X-1 and fired its rocket engine. The aircraft was carried slung under the belly of a bomber and Yeager had the strenuous and hair-raising job of squirming from the bomber to the X-1 in flight and at altitude! He obviously made the transfer all right, because he then became the first human being to break the sound barrier. He later made the first piloted ground takeoff of a rocketplane, and also became the first human to break Mach 2.5. In the 50s, he returned to active military service, commanding several squadrons. In 1962, he became commandant of the Aerospace Research Pilot School, which trained all astronauts at the time. He continued to fly experimental and research aircraft, nearly getting killed in 1963 when he lost control <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p> </p><p><font color="#666699"><em>"People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly . . . timey wimey . . . stuff."</em> -- The Tenth Doctor, "Blink"</font></p> </div>