One of them told me, "We weren't trained to do acrobatics. We're precision fliers. If I handed you a test card and told you to go test an airplane, you couldn't do it. You'd bust your ass." That was probably true, but I kept after some of the sore losers, waxing their tails every chance I got.
I flew six to eight hours a day; I flew everything they had, including most of the captured German and Japanese fighter planes. (The Focke-Wulf 190 was the only one in the same league with the Mustang.) I checked out in twenty-five different airplanes. I never did understand how a pilot could walk by a parked airplane and not want to crawl in the cockpit and fly off. I could not honestly claim to be the best pilot, because as good as you think you are, there is always somebody who is probably better. But I doubt whether there were many who loved to fly as much as I did. Nobody logged more flying time. My feet touched ground just long enough to climb out of one airplane and service check another. I even flew the first prototype jet fighter, the Bell P-59, which had been secretly tested out on the California desert in 1942. Its crude engines were vastly underpowered, so there wasn't an exhilarating sense of speed, but I marveled at how smooth and quiet it was compared to prop airplanes, and I flew that first jet right down the main street of Hamlin.
If you wanted to fly in those days, you had only to ask a crew chief to check you out in an unfamiliar cockpit, brief you on the systems and characteristics and then fire the engine. Everything about airplanes interested me: how they flew, why they flew, what each could or couldn't do and why. As much as I flew, I was always learning something new, whether it was a switch on the instrument panel I hadn't noticed, or handling characteristics of the aircraft in weather conditions I hadn't experienced. Unlike many pilots, I really learned the various systems of aircraft. A typical motorist is content to drive without knowing a spark plug from a crankshaft; a typical pilot is much the same. The gauges in the cockpit tell him as much as he wants to know about his machine. You've got to love engines and valves and all those mechanical gadgets that make most people yawn to have an eager curiosity about an airplane's systems. But it was a terrific advantage for me when something went wrong at 20,000 feet. Knowing machinery like I did, and having a knowledgeable feel for it, I knew how to cope with practically any problem. I knew what was serious or manageable. All pilots take chances from time to time, but knowing- not guessing-about what you can risk is often the critical difference between getting away with it or drilling a fifty-foot hole in mother earth.
And it also set me on a path that would change my life.
It was my feel for equipment that first brought me to the attention of Col. Albert G. Boyd, head of the flight test division.
The Jet Age arrived for me the day when I was seated in the cockpit of the Lockheed P-80 Shooting Star, the first operational American jet fighter. What a breathtaking ride-like being a pebble fired from a slingshot. Cruising straight and level, I flew at 550 mph, faster than I had in a full-throttle power dive in my Mustang. I felt like I was flying for the first time. I greased that thing in on landing, happy as a squirrel hunter who had bagged a mountain lion. The life of an engine in those early jets was practically nothing; after only three or four hours an engine would burn out, and we had so many fire-warning lights in the cockpit that I finally unscrewed the bulb. But since the Shooting Star was always being repaired, I logged more jet time than anyone else: the airplane couldn't go back into service until the maintenance officer checked it out in the sky. So, right from the start, I was probably the most experienced jet pilot in the Air Corps.
Flying those primitive jets was tricky. You had to be cautious opening the throttle because the engine temperature would climb enormously. So, you'd ease up on the throttle slowly, making sure you didn't go over the red line on the temperature gauge. The landings were even trickier. Flying faster than ever before, you had to line up your approach faster and more accurately than with props. The Shooting Star didn't decelerate very quickly, and its rate of acceleration was even worse, so if you came in too slow, you couldn't get your power back for nearly twenty seconds, and by then you might be heading into the ground. We lost several jets and pilots that way. Like somebody said, it was like trying to learn how to ride a race horse after riding only on elephants.
But I adjusted quickly, and in August 1945, I accompanied Colonel Boyd and a detachment of fighter test pilots out to Muroc Air Base in the Mojave Desert to conduct service tests on the Shooting Star. I was the detachment's maintenance officer. Muroc, about seventy miles from Los Angeles, was the site of ancient lakebeds that were six miles wide and eight miles long, perfect landing fields in the middle of nothing but scrub and Joshua trees. During the war it was used for practice bombing and secret test work. The place looked like the ass-end of the moon, and little did I know at the time that I would spend sixteen years of my life there.
We flew off the north end of the lakebed. There were six pilots and six or seven jets, working in temperatures way over 100 degrees. And we worked our fannies off. Especially the ground crews. The jets were constantly breaking down which meant that the maintenance officer was logging more flying time than anyone else in test hops. Colonel Boyd watched me fly, and he also saw that I was on top of the maintenance and the mechanics. At the end of a week of testing, he ordered one Shooting Star flown back to Wright, while the others were returned to the factory. He chose me to fly it back, which really frosted the major in charge of the fighter test section. "Colonel," he said, "I think a test pilot should fly it back." Boyd said no. "Yeager is a maintenance officer who knows the airplane and understands the system, and he'll get it back there." And I did.
If you love the hell out of what you're doing, you're usually pretty good at it, and you wind up making your own breaks. Other than being forced by circumstances to live apart from Glennis, I was as happy as I ever was. If I could fly and hunt and fish, I had nine-tenths of it all. Rank didn't mean a whole helluva lot, except that I needed more money. If they had decided to make me a general, my first question would've been: Do generals get to fly? I wasn't a deep, sophisticated person, but I lived by a basic principle: I did only what I enjoyed. I wouldn't let anyone derail me by promises of power or money into doing things that weren't interesting to me. That kept me real and honest. Job titles didn't mean diddly. Assistant Maintenance Officer might not be a title that would really impress Aunt Maude, but if it meant that I could fly more than anyone else, I'd stick with it for as long as I could. I loved being in the Air Corps because I was a trained combat pilot, and that's where all the airplanes were. But I wasn't thrilled by all the regulations, orders, and chains of command; and over the years, I bent most of their rules into pretzels if they ever got in the way of what I wanted, especially when it came to flying off somewhere to hunt or fish. In the end, though, I figure they got more out of me than I got out of them.
I wasn't a saint, for sure. I could raise hell with the best in the bunch. But pride was a big part of me, and I never tried to be who I wasn't. I thought I was as good as the rest of them. And when it came to flying, I was better.
I was self-conscious about my lack of education, especially in comparison to the test pilots. With jets coming into the picture, flying would get more complex and technical, and I worried about keeping up without an engineering background. I wasn't particularly impressed with the skills of the fighter test pilots, and after the service tests at Muroc, they felt even worse about me. That the old man had chosen me to fly back the P-80 really stuck in a few craws. When I detected that kind of petty jealousy, I couldn't resist rubbing their noses in it, so I became ruthless in my dogfight tactics against the test pilots, waxing them so often they had to sit on pillows.