Chuck Yeager

U.S. Air Force pilot. Born Charles ("Chuck") E. Yeager, on February 13, 1923, in Myra, West Virginia. Yeager was the first person to fly a plane faster than the speed of sound. His father was a driller for natural gas in the West Virginia coal fields. As the United States began mobilizing for World War II, Yeager enlisted in the Army Air Force in 1941 at the age of 18. In 1943 he became a flight officer, a non-commissioned …

…had found that the Germans had not only developed the world's first jet fighter but also a rocket plane that had tested at speeds as fast as 596 miles an hour. Just after the war, a British jet, the Gloster Meteor, had raised the official world speed record to 606 miles per hour. The next record to be broken was to attain the speed of sound, Mach 1, which was what the XS-1 project was designed to do.