Chuck Yeager addresses a crowd at the EAA AirVenture
July 29, 2011, 12:58 pm
The Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA) AirVenture annually draws hundreds of thousands of aviators from around the nation, including a number of famed pilots. Chuck Yeager is perhaps the most famous attendee of the 2011 AirVenture in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.
Yeager is a former Brigadier General of the U.S. Air Force (USAF) and served in World War II and Vietnam. His biggest claim to fame is being the first pilot ever to break the sound barrier, accomplishing the feat on October 14, 1947.
Despite being 88 years old, the former combat and test pilot remains active in flying, hunting and fishing. Yeager spoke to a large audience filling a hanger at the AirVenture, giving accounts of his extended career in aviation.
"I tell it the way I remember it - that's not necessarily the way it happened," Yeager said. "The one word you use in military flying is duty. It's your duty. You have no control over outcome, no control over pick-and-choose."
Yeager is renowned for his resilience, having been shot down over Southern France in 1944, eluding capture and joining up with the French Resistance. When he broke the sound barrier in '47, he did so with several broken ribs from a horseback riding accident only days earlier.
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