Obituary: Chuck Yeager

 Celebrated pilot Chuck Yeager, who broke the sound barrier among many achievements, died this evening at the age of 97.  

Snip from the Mail:

Yeager is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest fighter pilots to have ever lived. 

He rose to fame in the Second World War, becoming a fighter pilot and shooting down at least 11 enemy aircraft. In 1947 he became the first pilot confirmed to have broken the speed of sound, in level flight. He went on to become a test pilot, breaking numerous records for speed and altitude, and then fight in Vietnam. 

Yeager retired in 1975, but did not slow down. On the 65th anniversary of his breaking the speed of sound, he did it again - aged 89, as a passenger in an F-15.

New York Times:

Charles Elwood Yeager was born on Feb. 13, 1923, in Myra, W. Va., the second of five children of Albert Yeager and the former Susie Mae Sizemore. He grew up in nearby Hamlin, a town of 400, where his father drilled for natural gas in the coal fields. By the time he was 6, he was shooting squirrels and rabbits and skinning them for family dinners, reveling in a country boy’s life.

He enlisted in the Army Air Forces out of high school in September 1941, becoming an airplane mechanic. One day he took a ride with a maintenance officer flight-testing a plane he had serviced and promptly threw up over the back seat. But he joined a flight program for enlisted men in July 1942, figuring it would get him out of kitchen detail and guard duty. He received his pilot wings and appointment as a flight officer in March 1943 while at a base in Arizona, and was commissioned as a second lieutenant after arriving in England for training.

He possessed a natural coordination and aptitude for understanding an airplane’s mechanical system along with coolness under pressure. He enjoyed spins and dives and loved staging mock dogfights with his fellow trainees.

Lots more at the link.

As the World Turns.

Everything I learned about war I learned from my cats. (Joao Silva, NYT)

A snip:

But that lay ahead when I arrived at the Baghdad airport one recent summer day with the crate carrying the four cats. Getting them that far had been a saga, finding Iraqi health officials ready to issue and counterstamp fit-to-travel documents; negotiating the 12 hazardous miles to the airport through an obstacle course of checkpoints where soldiers and policemen have been trained to destroy on sight any “suspicious package”; and persuading wary airline personnel to clear the cat crate for loading.

The process took hours, and left me exhausted, sitting on the terminal’s marble floor beside the cats, as the time for boarding approached.

All about was hubbub, with hundreds of angry, fearful Iraqis struggling to secure their own passage out. The cats seemed terrified, so I fell once more into my anthropomorphic mode, offering them a quiet discourse on what lay ahead — the 3,000-mile air journey, detention in the quarantine center and, ultimately, liberation into a green and pleasant land where they would be full citizens, never again wanting for shelter, warmth and food.

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Speaking of cats, a tiger once believed to be extinct in the wild in China has been spotted.

I don't mean the tiger is spotted instead of striped, but that it has been seen for the first time in more than twenty years.
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Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier 60 years ago.
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Since NONE of the area surrounding Lake Tahoe, whether in the north or in the south, in the east or in the west, EVER should have been allowed to have been developed in the first place, it's no surprise that even the allegedly "blue-collar" South Lake Tahoe is being turned into Incline Village South.

Most of the homes in the south shore area are now vacation homes, according to an article sometime ago in the San Francisco Chronicle (about 60 percent).
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