Chuck Yeager has reached out and touched the face of God.
He was 97.
He was the first man to break the sound barrier, an ace pilot and a lifelong flier.
[…]He totaled 12.5 aerial victories and shot down 13 German planes on 64 missions during World War II, “including five Me109s on 12 October and four FW 190s on 27 November,” his website added.
After World War II, he became a test pilot beginning at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.
Yeager retired from the Air Force in 1975 and moved to a ranch in Cedar Ridge in Northern California where he continued working as a consultant to the Air Force and Northrop Corp. He flew for more than 60 years, including piloting an F-15 to near 1,000 mph at Edwards Air Force Base in October 2002 at the age of 79.
The legendary pilot and retired brigadier general became the first man to fly faster than the speed of sound on Oct. 14, 1947.
The giants are passing on, and the frontiers are growing ever smaller. We are lesser sons of greater sires.
Riders of Skaith 
I was so saddened by this news; Yeager was one of those larger-than-life characters, absolutely worthy of the term ‘legendary’. Of course I never met him, but like I was when Neil Armstrong and Carl Sagan and Arthur C Clarke passed, I remain absolutely stricken by news of his passing. The world is a much lesser, more mundane place without these people. I consider myself blessed to have lived at the same time as these people were alive, somewhere in the wide world. So many have gone now: Frazetta, Buscema, Horner, Hitchcock, Kubrick, Goldsmith… the list goes ever on.
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I agree…although it’s best never to *meet* your heroes, we still need to have them around to look up to. And there don’t seem to be any fit replacements around these days…
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