Chuck Yeager

Today Charles Elwood "Chuck" Yeager turns 90. Yeager is best known for being the first person to travel faster than Mach 1, the speed of sound in air, but had a long and distinguished career in the US Air Force. You can read about that and his other exploits here:
Chuck Yeager

Mr. Yeager nearly got himself killed several times, first during his service in Europe during World War II, then flying high-performance experimental aircraft over the desert of southern California. It's truly remarkable that he's lived his current age given the risk inherent in his line of work. His colleague Scott Crossfield, for example, died 7 years ago after flying a Cessna into a convective shear front after a long career of riding rocketplanes. He did several remarkably stupid things during his flying days that aren't all discussed in Tom Wolfe's hagiography The Right Stuff, and managed to live to tell his own, invariably self-serving, version of the tale every time.

One of the biggest mistakes Philip Kaufman made in adapting The Right Stuff was truncating the end of the story. The movie closes with great fanfare amid Gordon Cooper's successful Mercury flight. The book moves past this, to the days when the rocketplanes of Edwards were phased out and NASA's human spaceflight program moved briskly ahead. In the book's final scene (some version of which happened in real life), Yeager and an up-and-coming ex-Navy test pilot named Neil Armstrong set out after a monsoon thunderstorm to inspect a backup lakebed runway for usability. Their airplane became stuck in the mud after landing, and Armstrong and Yeager had to wait for a transport aircraft equipped with mud tires to fetch them. Alone in the desert, Yeager vented his rage at Armstrong, while Armstrong simply sat dispassionately and waited for help to arrive. Yeager must have felt at the top of his game at that moment, chewing out the newbie he was stranded with, but Armstrong's game wouldn't peak for another decade. I can't think of a better way to end the story Wolfe set out to tell.