Welcome to the American Story. Stories about what it is that makes America beautiful.

Heartbreaking, funny, inspiring, and endlessly interesting.

This is Chris Flannery with the Clermont Institute.

I call this one the right stuff.

America lost a hero a short time back.

Chuck Yeager passed away in Los Angeles at the Admiral Age of 97 on December 7, 2020.

Charles Elwood Yeager 7th, 2020.

Charles Elwood Yeager was born in West Virginia in

1923, was shooting and skinning squirrels and rabbits for family

dinners by the time he was six, enlisted in the Army Air Forces right

out of high school, and was flying P51 Mustang fighters in the European theater in World War II

by the time he was 20.

He was shot down once over France, carried a severely wounded flyer over the snow-capped

Pyrenees to neutral Spain, then returned to his base in England and back to the fight.

He became an ace, shooting down 13 German planes, five in a single day. In a long and full career, Yeager later commanded a fighter

wing and flew 127 missions during the Vietnam War. He retired as a highly decorated Brigadier General

in 1975 and 10 years later received the Presidential Medal of Freedom the

nation's highest civilian award from President Ronald Reagan.

But what made Chuck Yeager famous was something he did between wars as a test pilot.

On October 14, 1947, flying at 43,000 feet over the Mojave Desert in a rocket-powered

Bell X1 research aircraft, he became the first human being to fly faster than the speed of sound.

No one knew until then, whether a plane breaking the sound barrier, about 760 miles an hour, would be torn apart

...