Centennial of a Giant

Brigadier General Charles Elwood (Chuck) Yeager was a United States Air Force officer, a lordly aviator, and a test pilot blessed with a peculiar amalgam of dazzling aeronautical genius and regimented mania that, in 1947, saw him become the first pilot in history to exceed the speed of sound (Mach 1.0) in level flight.

Among the most highly skilled and eminently respected airmen of all time, Yeager piloted over 360 different aircraft over his seventy-year flying career—to include superb machines the likes of Bell’s eccentric P-39 Aircobra and ferocious X-1, in which he broke the sound barrier; Mikoyan-Gurevich’s infamous MiG-15; North American’s fabled P-51 Mustang, in which he earned fighter ace status and shot down numerous Axis aircraft, including a Messerschmitt Me-262; Lockheed’s Art Deco P-80A Shooting Star; North American’s elegant F-86H Sabre and Century Series founding F-100 Super Sabre; Lockheed’s superlative NF-104A Starfighter; NASA’s bizarre M2-F1 lifting-body; Martin’s long-lived B-57 Canberra: McDonnell Douglas’s fearsome F-4 Phantom II, and patently invincible F-15D Eagle.

Yeager’s accomplishments were acknowledged with highest accolades bestowed by the U.S. military and the world’s preeminent aeronautical associations: the Bronze Star, the Distinguished Service Medal, the Collier, Mackay, and Harmon International trophies, and induction into the National Aviation Hall of Fame—to name a few.

In remembrance of his many contributions to the broadening of mankind’s aerospace horizon, the FAA’s FAASTeam invites pilots, aircraft owners and operators, and all those moved by the profound and powerful enterprise of flight to celebrate General Yeager's one-hundredth birthday on 13 February 2023 by engaging in an aviation oriented activity such as finally getting that biennial flight review, attending an aviation museum, dining at an airport cafe, visiting a community airport, or just looking upwards toward the heavens and reflecting on the determination, applied intellect, indefatigable heart, and steely nerves by which General Yeager and the esteemed aviators gone now from this world urged their machines and the whole of humankind resolutely and ever forward.

FMI: www.faa.gov