“There was a demon that lived in the air.”

General Chuck Yaeger, the ultimate test pilot, possessor of the right stuff, defeated that demon – and lived another 73 years to hear his story told again and again.

You all know he was the first man to break the sound barrier. What I didn’t know until I read this obit is that the flyboy extraordinaire flew 361 different kinds of aircraft in the course of his career.

4 thoughts on ““There was a demon that lived in the air.”

  1. 361? Poor guy. Only 126 more and he’d have caught up to Captain Eric Brown of the Fleet Air Arm. Well, I’m sure he did his best.

    And to be serious, he did the break the sound barrier, which put him on the frontier of aviation technology.

  2. “There was a demon that lived in the air. They said whoever challenged him WOULD DIE! So they built a small plane, called the X-1, to break the sound barrier. And men came to the high desert of California to ride it. They were called test pilots. And no one knew their names.”

    Opening narration to the movie, “The Right Stuff”.

    I may be off by a few words…that was all from memory.

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