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I was always afraid of dying. Always. It was my fear that made me learn everything I could about my airplane and my emergency equipment, and kept me flying respectful of my machine and always alert in the cockpit.

Chuck Yeager

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Chuck Yeager
Age: 97 †
Born: 1923
Born: February 13
Died: 2020
Died: December 7
Aircraft Pilot
Military Personnel
Test Pilot
Myra
West Virginia
Charles Elwood Chuck Yeager
Charles Elwood Yeager
Dying
Respectful
Afraid
Aviation
Learn
Equipment
Fear
Airplane
Cockpit
Everything
Machine
Aeroplanes
Made
Flying
Emergency
Always
Kept
Alert
Machines
Emergencies

More quotes by Chuck Yeager

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If you want to grow old as a pilot, you've got to know when to push it, and when to back off.
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Just before you break through the sound barrier, the cockpit shakes the most.
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The secret of my success is that I always managed to live to fly another day.
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Later, I realized that the mission had to end in a let-down because the real barrier wasn't in the sky but in our knowledge and experience of supersonic flight.
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It's your duty to fly the airplane. If you get killed in it, you don't know anything about it anyway. Duty is paramount. It's that simple if you're a military guy. You don't say 'I'm not going to do that - that's dangerous.' If it's your duty to do it, that's the way it is.
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Hey Ridley, that Machometer is acting screwy. It just went off the scale on me.
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There is no kind of ultimate goal to do something twice as good as anyone else can. It's just to do the job as best you can. If it turns out good, fine. If it doesn't, that's the way it goes.
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I have flown in just about everything, with all kinds of pilots in all parts of the world - British, French, Pakistani, Iranian, Japanese, Chinese - and there wasn't a dime's worth of difference between any of them except for one unchanging, certain fact: the best, most skillful pilot has the most experience.
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The first time I ever saw a jet, I shot it down.
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Never wait for trouble.
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In 1966, NASA took over in space, and it has been a bureaucratic mess ever since.
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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. It's duty.
Chuck Yeager
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I ran the astronaut school for six years, and I was the commandant and when I finished in '65, 26 of my guys went into space as NASA astronauts that I trained.
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There's no such thing as a natural-born pilot.
Chuck Yeager
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You do what you can for as long as you can, and when you finally can't, you do the next best thing. You back up but you don't give up.
Chuck Yeager
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Most pilots learn, when they pin on their wings and go out and get in a fighter, especially, that one thing you don't do, you don't believe anything anybody tells you about an airplane.
Chuck Yeager
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That to me is a bunch of crap trying to shoot guys up into damned space. What they're going to do is they're going to wipe out half a dozen people one of these days, and that will be the end of it.
Chuck Yeager
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After about 30 minutes I puked all over my airplane. I said to my self, Man, you made a big mistake.
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I have no regrets about my life. People ask, If you had to do it all over again, would you do it differently? No. That's speculation.
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At 42,000' in approximately level flight, a third cylinder was turned on. Acceleration was rapid and speed increased to .98 Mach. The needle of the machmeter fluctuated at this reading momentarily, then passed off the scale. Assuming that the off-scale reading remained linear, it is estimated that 1.05 Mach was attained at this time.
Chuck Yeager