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Chuck Yeager
First Man to Break the Sound Barrier
Chuck Yeager: The X-1, to me, was a sort of a "fly twice a week" airplane. It took two or three days to reduce the data from your flight. It was a complex airplane that gets serviced with liquid oxygen and alcohol and gaseous nitrogen. And in the meantime, I'm flying about 15 other airplanes every day, on different test programs, so it was a hard grind. The X-1 was a pleasure to fly, because you took the whole day to do it. That particular flight, I think was on a Tuesday. On the weekends, there at Muroc, as it was called then, we used to go out to Pancho Barnes's. She had a rodeo grounds, swimming pool, motel and a good restaurant. You'd go out there and unwind. And I took Glennis out there, I think, on a Saturday night. We loved to ride horses, so we went out after dinner and were riding horses and chasing each other. Coming back, somebody closed a gate, it was dark and I didn't see it, so my horse hit the fence and flipped me, and I broke a couple of ribs. And that was on a Saturday night. Sunday I moped around, and then Monday, I had to go into the base and I went to a local doctor there, and he said, "You've got two busted ribs. I'll tape you up." And it really didn't make that much difference in flying the airplane, because it's not strenuous other than handling it with your hands and feet on the rudder pedals and the control surfaces and the loading pressure domes and turning switches on, and things like that. So my only problem was, it was painful to get into the airplane, because you had to come down a ladder and go through a little hole on the right side. But then the hard part was closing the door once old Jack Ridley came down the ladder and held the door against the right side. You had a lever. It took both hands all you could do it. I couldn't handle it with my right side, so he made me about a ten-inch long broom stick that I could stick in the end of the door handle to give me that mechanical advantage. That's the way we solved the problem. So that really didn't make much difference.
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