Transcript
Introduction
"I reached the top of the arc and began to level off. I could have shaken hands with Lord Jesus. 80,000 feet. A nighttime sky with flickering stars at 10:00 in the morning. Up there, with only a wisp of an atmosphere. Steering an airplane was like driving on slick ice. I dropped my nose slightly to pick up more speed and watched the meter register Mach 2.2 than Mach 2.3. I was accelerating at 31 miles per hour per second, approaching 1,650 miles per hour, the fastest any pilot had yet flown and the fastest that any straight-winged airplane would ever fly.
My outside wing began to rise. I put in full aileron against it, but nothing happened. The thought smacked me. 'Too high, too fast, Yeager.' I might have added, 'Too late, Christ.' We began going haywire. The wing kept coming up, and I was powerless to keep from rolling over. And then we started going in four different directions at once, careening all over the sky, snapping and rolling and spinning in what pilots called going divergent on all three axes.
I called it hell. I was crashing around in that cockpit, slamming violently from side to side, front to back, battered to the point where I was too stunned to think. Terrifying. The thought flashed. I lost my tail. I've had it. G forces yanked me upwards with such force that my helmet cracked the canopy. Without my seat straps, I probably would have blasted right through the glass. My pressure suit suddenly inflated with a loud hiss. I was gasping, and my faceplate fogged, blinded, being pounded to death. I wondered where in the Sierra mountains I was about to drill a hole.
We were spinning down through the sky like a frisbee. Desperate to see, I groped to the right of the instrument panel trying to find the switch to turn up the heat in my faceplate. But then the ship snapped violently back on itself, slamming me against the control stick and somehow hooking my helmet onto it. As I struggled to get free, I had glimpses of light and dark, light and dark through the fog visor. Sun and ground, sun, ground, spinning down. I had less than a minute left.
Through some sixth sense, I remember that the stabilizer was set at leading edge full down, and I could find the switch in the dark. Still fogged over, I reached for it and retrimmed it. Still groping, I found the rheostat and the heat flicked on. My faceplate cleared, and I saw more than I wanted to. I was spinning into the Sierras. Without even thinking, I set the controls with the spin.
The ship flipped into a normal spin at 30,000 feet. I knew how to get out of that. I had spun every airplane imaginable, including the X-1. At 25,000 feet, I popped out of the spin. I radioed to Ridley. My voice was so breathless and desperate that I doubted he could understand me. 'Down to 25,000 feet. I don't know whether or not I can get back. I can't say much more. I've got to save myself.' I didn't know what was going on. I was so dazed and battered, I wondered if I could still fly. And I worried if the airplane could still carry me. I sobbed.
I barely remember the next moments, but then my head cleared, and I was at 5,000 feet, lining up with the lakebed. I was gliding in from the other side of the Mojave, doing 270 miles per hour, and I started to believe I was going to make it. The lakebed filled my windshield, and I put her down a little hard, with a thump and a cloud of dust, but no landing in my life was as sweet as that one. The flight data would later reveal that I had spun down 51,000 feet in 51 seconds. I survived on sheer instinct and pure luck."
That is what it's like to almost die testing jets. And it comes from the book that I want to talk to you about today, which is Yeager: An Autobiography by General Chuck Yeager. So before I jump into the rest of the book, just a quick note on -- I want to talk to you real quick about Founders Postscript. I started a secondary podcast feed for all the books that I read that are not biographies as a way to incentivize people to sign up for annual plans. I got to make a change. I added so much complexity.