THE ACE

Charles Elwood “Chuck” Yeager didn’t make the record books as the highest-scoring fighter ace in American aviation history, nor was he the only hotshot test pilot to have flown the rocket-powered Bell XS-1. Yet he’s widely considered to be the greatest military pilot of all time, or at least the best known. Yeager’s signal achievement—becoming, in 1947, the first person to fly faster than the speed of sound—often overshadows his achievements as a World War II ace. Enlisting in the U.S. Army Air Corps in September 1941, the 18-year-old West Virginian started out as an aircraft mechanic but quickly rose through the ranks to become a flight officer. Within two years Yeager was flying the skies of Western Europe in Glamorous Glen, a P-51 Mustang he’d named after his fiancée, Glennis Faye Dickhouse. On March 5, 1944, Yeager was shot down over France on his eighth combat mission, and his subsequent escape into Spain and then his campaign to immediately rejoin the fight have become the stuff of legend. “It wasn’t in the Aviation History