Just taking official notice of the passing of the man who came to embody The Right Stuff.

Zitat

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Charles E. “Chuck” Yeager, a military test pilot who was the first person to fly faster than the speed of sound and live to tell about it, died Monday. He was 97.

His wife, Victoria, announced the death from Yeager’s official Twitter account.

For his prowess in flight, Yeager became one of the great American folk heroes of the 1940s and 1950s. A self-described West Virginia hillbilly with a high school education, he said he came “from so far up the holler, they had to pipe daylight to me.” He became one of the greatest aviators of his generation, combining abundant confidence with an innate understanding of engineering mechanics — what an airplane could do under any form of stress.

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He retired as an Air Force brigadier general in 1975, although, in an honorary gesture, he was promoted to the rank of major general in 2005. In 1985, President Ronald Reagan awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award.

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RIP, General Yeager.