Oct. 25—A display of artifacts, mementos and photographs chronicling Gen. Charles E. "Chuck" Yeager's historic supersonic flight and his years as a test pilot opened Monday at the Charleston airport named in his honor.
The West Virginia-born aviator's sound barrier-breaking flight in the experimental Bell X-1 rocket plane took place 75 years ago this month over Rogers Dry Lake, in California's Mojave Desert.
After being carried to an altitude of 25,000 feet by a B-29 Superfortress bomber, Yeager and the X-1 were released into the morning sky, where Yeager engaged the aircraft's rocket propulsion system, climbed to 43,000 feet and flew faster than the speed of sound for 18 seconds. He reached a top speed of Mach 1.06, or 669.4 miles per hour.
"He radioed his flight engineer, Jack Ridley, and told him, 'This Machmeter is all screwy,' which was a code for telling Jack he had broken the sound barrier, since the project was top secret at the time," his wife, Victoria, said during a ceremony preceding the exhibit's opening.
Yeager's logbook for the series of flights he made in the X-1, their pages all stamped "Top Secret," are among things included in the exhibit, assembled from items Yeager donated to Marshall University in 1986 when its Yeager Scholars program got underway.
Victoria Yeager praised her late husband and his first wife, Glennis, who died in 1990, for gathering together the items featured in the exhibit and donating them to Marshall. "They might have gone lost forever, otherwise," she said.
Dr. David Pittenger, of Marshall's flight school program, said new items will be periodically rotated into the exhibit. "This display is the first of many to come," he said.
Among other items now on exhibit at West Virginia International Yeager Airport include Yeager's certificate of membership in the Mach 3 club, for piloting an SR-71 Blackbird at more than three times the speed of sound in 1983.
Also on display is the pitot static tube, used to measure impact pressure and calculate airspeed, that was attached to the nose of the X-1 in which Yeager made his historic Mach 1 flight, and a December 1947 Aviation Week cover story that first broke the news that the sound barrier had been broken in an aircraft piloted by Yeager.
Airport Director Dominique Ranieri observed that, in addition to being the month in which Yeager broke the sound barrier, October 1947 also was the month when the first commercial flight took place at newly built Kanawha Airport, as the Charleston airport was initially named.
"Breaking Barriers" will be the theme of CRW's 75th anniversary, Ranieri said.
" General Yeager's influence on our airport, and on the aviation community at large, is undeniable," she said.
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