Historic Airplanes

How Many Aircraft did Chuck Yeager Fly?

December 14, 2020 by Scott Spangler

Living with an editor’s mindset is no easy thing, especially when faced with inconsistent “facts” in stories presented by different sources on a common topic. In this case it was the death of Chuck Yeager. Publicity throughout his life has made much of his signature aviation accomplishments, guiding the X-1 through the sonic barrier, surviving a high-altitude misadventure in the NF-104 Starfighter, but postings on his passing could not agree on how many different types of aircraft he flew or how many flight hours he’d logged.

This i-Quest started with the New York Times, the obituary gold standard. “Chuck Yeager, Test Pilot Who Broke the Sound Barrier, is Dead at 97” said “He flew more than 150 military aircraft, logging more than 10,000 hours in the air.” Like any curious aviation editor, I wanted to know what aircraft were on that list, beyond the ones I already knew about, the P-39, P-51, X-1, and F-104. Google offered me “About 3,474,000 results (0.75 seconds),” and that’s when the trouble began.

ChuckYeager.org parrots the Times’ obit word for word (including Richard Goldenstein’s byline), but the website does not provide a list of those “more than 150 military aircraft.” Scrolling through the site’s timeline of Yeager’s life, from his birth in 1923 to 1997, revealed some of them.

Stationed at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio, after the war, he flew the P-80 Shooting Star and P-84 Thunderjet. “He also evaluated the German and Japanese fighter aircraft brought back to the United States after the war.” I remember reading an article by Grumman test pilot Corwin “Corky” Meyer, who also flew these aircraft at Wright Field, and how the FW-190 influenced the F8F Bearcat.

Yeager commanded a number of squadrons during his career, but aside from the F-100 Super Saber, it didn’t’ identify what aircraft they flew. The timeline concludes with “AND BEYOND,” saying, “General Yeager has flown 201 types of military aircraft, and has more than 14,000 flying hours, with more than 13,000 of these in fighter aircraft.”

Several days after he died, Popular Mechanics published “The Eight Planes That Tell the Story of Chuck Yeager’s Career.” Among them is the Messerschmitt Me-262 jet. Yeager didn’t fly it, but he did shoot one down as it was on approach to landing with his P-51. During Vietnam, he commanded five different units that flew the F-100, F-102 Delta Dagger, and the F-4 Phantom, but the Martin B-57 Canberra was his predominant mount, and he logged 414 missions in it. At the end of this section of the article, PM says, “Yeager flew his final active-duty Air Force flight in 1975, by that time accumulating 10,131.6 flight hours in 361 different types of airplanes.”

The WarZone on The Drive told a similar story, “Chuck Yeager’s Amazing Life Told Through the Airplanes He Flew.” Like the Popular Mechanics article, it listed the Beech (18) AT-11 Kansan, which Yeager maintained after he enlisted in the Army. That he flew it seems to be an assumption. “It was onboard an AT-11 that Yeager got his first taste of flying and the airsickness he experienced sitting alongside the pilot made him, briefly, have second thoughts about a future career in the air.”

The story added the BT-13 and AT-6, which makes logical sense, as they were the basic and advanced training aircraft of the day. During a tour at Edwards Air Force Base during the Korean era, he went to Kadena Air Force Base in Okinawa to fly a MiG-15 donated to the American cause by a North Korean defector. Command of an F-86 Sabre squadron followed.

Back in the world of flight test, the WarZone story revealed that Yeager was the first Air Force pilot to fly the NASA M2-F1 Flying Bathtub in 1963. He wanted to see if the wooden wingless lifting body would be a suitable trainer for the Aerospace Research Pilots School, aka the Air Force Test Pilot School. This raised my editorial hackles because the article didn’t answer the question it posed; did the school use the engineless bathtub as a lifting body trainer?

This article touched on the Northrop F-20 Tigershark that Yeager helped market to the world, and the F-15 he crewed for a celebrity flight celebrating the 50th anniversary of his sound-breaking flight in the X-1.

Searching the online National Museum of the USAF revealed nothing more than a long list of artifacts in its collection, from photos, to the flight suit he wore on his historic X-1 flight, to that MiG-15 he flew in Okinawa.

I saved Wikipedia for last, sure that some dedicated aviation history geek would have researched and listed all of the aircraft Yeager flew during his career. But there was no joy. While the entry highlighted those already known, this is all it said, “Throughout his life, he flew more than 360 different types of aircraft.” There wasn’t any attribution for this, not even a footnote. Bummer. Living with an editor’s mindset is no easy thing. — Scott Spangler, Editor

Why is World War I Little Appreciated?

October 7, 2019 by Scott Spangler

To the aviation minded, interest in World War I stops at the aerodrome because that’s where aeronautics’ voice changed as its technology matured. But interest in the conflict in which it fought—the War to End All Wars—never captured the interest of most Americans, whose attention and adulation focused on the Great War’s offspring, World War II. A visit to The National World War I Museum and Memorial in Kansas City was an eye-opener that posed the headline’s question and others that wonder why?

If someone asked me to name all of the World War I memorials I knew of, it would be the Liberty Memorial and the mass-produced Spirit of the American Doughboy statue in Lord’s Park in Elgin, Illinois, not far from my boyhood home. I learned about the Liberty Memorial when I moved to Kansas City in 1989, but I never visited because the two halls that flanked the memorial tower were rarely open, and the whole thing closed in 1994.

It wasn’t until I visited it earlier this year that I learned that two weeks after the war ended on 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, the civic leaders discussed the need for a lasting memorial to the men and women who served and died in the war. The city raised $2.5 million in 10 days in 1919. More than 100,000 people, including the five main allied commanders, attended the site dedication in 1921.

After three years of construction, President Calvin Coolidge delivered the dedication speech to a crowd of more than 150,000. On Veteran’s Day 1961, former presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower delivered rededication addresses to a crown of 60,000. The citizens voted to restore the memorial and expand the museum in 1998. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in October 2006. On the 2014 centennial of the war’s commencement, Congress finally recognized the Liberty Memorial as the national World War I memorial, renaming it.

America’s lack of appreciation for World War I is probably rooted in its short tenure of combat. The war started in 1914 but America didn’t get involved until April 1917, when unrestricted submarine warfare and the publication of Zimmerman’s telegram to Mexico promising the return of Texas and other states if it would attack America on behalf of the Axis.

Another factor is the scope of America’s participation. Slightly more than 4.7 million men and women served in the armed forces during the war. Of the force, only 2.8 million served overseas; 53,402 of them were killed in action. More than 63,000 died from diseases, mostly in the influenza pandemic, which claimed 50 million people worldwide, 675,000 of them in the United States. Unlike World War II, in which more than 16 million Americans (11 percent of the US population) served during the four-year conflict, during World War I more families were affected by the flu than the war.

Related to the number of affected families is generational depreciation, where interest wanes with the arrival of every new generation—unless the surviving hardware and history satisfies a niche curiosity. Aviation leads this list. And World War II is first on it because of its expansive generational proximity and because its hardware is still airborne. In the Great War, America didn’t really have substantial aerial forces let alone combat aircraft. Those that served fly fixed from museum ceilings. And the same is true for most aircraft that served the conflicts that followed World War II.

A lack of appreciation for the sacrifices of those who served in World War I is superseded only by the universal disregard for the socioeconomic and geopolitical causes of it and the resulting consequences that plague the world today. Another way to view all military memorials is, perhaps, as monuments to human hubris and disability to learn from the past. — Scott Spangler, Editor

Historic Airplanes: A Reliquary for the Spirit and Soul of Their Crews

November 23, 2015 by Scott Spangler

The men who united as a crew in the vertical war over Europe after Pearl Harbor have all since surrendered, as we all must one day, to time. Its last living member, radio operator Robert Hanson, passed into history in 2005 at age 85. But their spirits and souls live on in the reliquary that fused their individual personalities into historic airplanes like the Memphis Belle.

Standing before its wingless fuselage in the crowded restoration hangar of the National Museum of the United States Air Force, under its iconic nose art I see the crew of the Memphis Belle, men just past 20, bundled up in sheepskin and thick coveralls. They are, from left, Harold Loch, Cecil Scott, Robert Hanson, James Verinis, Robert Morgan, Charles Leighton, John Quinlan, Casmer Nastal, Vincent Evans, and Clarence Winchell.

Portrayed in an eponymous motion picture, Hollywood history has confused the significance of what these men achieved in the Memphis Belle. It was not the historic airplane before me that successfully flew 25 missions, it was the team that gave it life. Consistent through all the history of the era I’ve read, including The Man Who Flew the Memphis Belle, written by Robert Morgan and Ron Powers in 2001, daylight bombing early in the war endured an 80-percent casualty rate.