General Chuck Yeager – In Memorium

General Chuck Yeager passed away late Monday night. Ironically, I heard the news while on the phone with an instructor from Checkride Prep, chatting about my CAP cadets who are in their program. She was moderating an evening class, and someone put the news in chat.

I don’t know that there’s much I can add to the various tributes and eulogies being written about the man. The Drive, has a particularly excellent one chronicling General Yeager’s life through the wide variety of aircraft that he flew. Several of them had information I didn’t know before, such as that AFTER being a test pilot, General Yeager went to Vietnam in the ‘60s and while commanding the 405^th Fighter Wing, flew a number of combat missions in the B-57.

I suppose there is one small thing I haven’t seen anywhere else – Chuck Yeager helped teach me (and thousands of other computer savvy aviation nerds in the ‘80s and early ‘90s) to fly. Back before Electronic Arts was the Evil Empire, they actually published some pretty good flight simulators. Starting in 1987 with Chuck Yeager’s Advanced Flight Trainer, followed by Chuck Yeager’s Advanced Flight Trainer 2.0 in 1989, and culminating with Chuck Yeager’s Air Combat in 1991, a generation of virtual pilots got told “You really screwed the pooch on that one.” By The Man himself when we crashed and burned.

Although the graphics are incredibly rough by today’s standards, Chuck Yeager’s Advanced Flight Trainer is playable in a web browser via the Internet Archive. With a little bit of digging, Chuck Yeager’s Air Combat can be found for download on the same site.

Unlike a lot of other folks of his generation, General Yeager was also remarkably active on Twitter. Read through a chunk of his tweets sometime – he spent a lot of time answering questions, talking about his history, and showing absolutely zero tolerance for stupidity.

Rest in peace, General Yeager. Teach the angels to fly faster.