Chuck Yeager, a United States Air Force officer and test pilot became the first person to break the sound barrier on October 14, 1947, while flying an experimental Bell Aircraft X-1 over California’s Mojave Desert. The military kept Yeager’s achievement classified until June 1948, but once it was confirmed, the pilot turned into a subject of public interest.
Born Charles Elwood Yeager in Myra, West Virginia, Yeager joined the Army Air Forces immediately after graduating high school. He earned a reputation as an accomplished fighter ace during World War II and survived a harrowing escape from German-occupied France to Spain in 1944. By the late 1940s, Yeager was a respected test pilot in the newly created United States Air Force. He was known for his deft mechanical control of aircraft under highly stressful circumstances and for his stoic attitude toward his dangerous work, a perspective captured in his musing to Time magazine in 1949, “I’ll be back all right. In one piece, or a whole lot of pieces.”
In addition to breaking the sound barrier for the first time, Yeager set several other speed and altitude records over the course of his long and distinguished flying career. He retired from the Air Force in 1975 as a highly decorated brigadier general and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1985. Photographer Bob Seidemann, known for his portrait series of leaders in aviation, took this image of Yeager standing in front of an F-15E military plane at Edwards Airforce Base in 1990.
© Bob Seidemann
