1975-2020: Living it Up!
By Air Force Flight Test Center History Office, Dr. James Young, Chief Historian
Retirement from active duty means anything but retirement from active life. While he has long been an Air Force icon, the 1979 publication of Tom Wolfe’s best-seller, The Right Stuff, vaulted Yeager into international celebrity . . . and the 1983 motion picture based on the book further solidified his hold on the public imagination. There are endless demands for public appearances, lectures and interviews. More important, for the past quarter century, his advice has been much sought after by both the government and the aerospace industry on a wide variety of issues ranging from the development of new state-of-the-art aircraft systems to the safety of spaceflight operations.
Yeager climbing into the cockpit of an F-4C prior to his final active duty flight at Edwards AFB on 25 February 1975.
After retirement, General Yeager was awarded a peacetime Congressional Medal of Honor by the Congress of the United States (presented by President Gerald Ford in 1976), and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Ronald Reagan in May 1985.
Perhaps, most remarkable of all, for more than two decades, he has retained the stamina, skill and mental acuity to fly and evaluate the most modern high-performance aircraft. He did much of his flying at Edwards where he remains an active consulting test pilot, serving—in the words of one AFFTC commander—as a “wise, accurate and keenly observant advisor” to the Air Force Flight Test Center.
On 14 October 1982, Yeager celebrated the 35th anniversary of his first supersonic flight by flying the single-place Northrop F-20 out to Mach 1.45.
Chuck Yeager and Sam Shepard next to the X-1 during the filming of “The Right Stuff.”