Yeager: An Autobiography by Chuck Yeager
|
List Price: Our Price: $3.98 You Save: $4.01 (50%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $0.01 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of Yeager: An Autobiography
Book Review: Yeager: An Autobiography - a four star book about a five star man!
Summary: 4 Stars
Yeager: An Autobiography - was a very interesting book full of good gossip about the life of a five star test pilot in the Air Force.Book Review: Yeager is a good read
Summary: 4 Stars
Yeager is a good read for anyone interested in what has been called the greatest generation of all time. He is a true American hero.Book Review: Good Pilot, Better Self-Promoter
Summary: 3 Stars
There is no question that Chuck Yeager was a good and courageous pilot. In addition to his place in the record books as the first to break Mach 1.0 in the Bell X-1, he has also managed, through good P.R. work to have everyone think he is the greatest pilot who ever lived. I have talked to people who have extensive contacts among the Edward AFB test pilots, and they said the general consensus is that, although Yeager, as I said, is good, he is most certainly NOT the "greatest pilot who ever lived". It is just that those who were better didn't have the knack for getting a lot of good press on their side.
For example, while many think Yeager's flying the X-1 with a broken
rib is cute or "gutsy", I think it is grossly foolhardy. Similarly, astronaut Frank Borman says Yeager also behaved irresponsibly in taking the NF-104 aircraft beyond its capabilities in trying for an altitude record. Yeager got the plane into a spin, almost killing himself as well as ruining the reputation of a fine aircraft. While Yeager's jealousy of the NASA astronauts is understandable (because they got more publicity and "goodies" than the Edwards crowd got), his taking cheap pot-shots at Neil Armstrong is uncalled for. He may have considered the Mercury missions, "not real flying", but then how does he explain that so many other test-pilots at Edwards such as Deke Slayton, Mike Collins, Joe Engle, even Neil Armstrong himself wanted to go over to NASA themselves and fly in space? This is because people with a better educational background than Yeager's could see that, beyond the Project Mercury "human-cannonball" flights, the future direction of spaceflight would lead to the Moon (i.e. flying the Gemini missions to rendezvous
and docking and the Apollo missions actually landing there, 250,000 miles from home). This would require "The Right Stuff" no less than what Yeager did.
Although his World War II and later aviation exploits are interesting, his descriptions of practical jokes and hard drinking binges, along with his stories about Pancho Barnes and Jackie Cochrane drag on and on interminably. I would have preferred reading more about his flying experiences, about what it is really like to fly high performance aircraft. I guess he figured that the average person wasn't really interested in this, but rather the "out-of-the-cockpit" antics of hot-shot pilot. By not giving the reader a view of the grandeur of aerospace exploration and mankind's first steps to outer space, I am afraid this book strengthens the view of the fellow I mentioned above that, had World War II not come along, Yeager would have spent his life as a coal miner in West Virginia.
Book Review: Good Yarn, but it streches it a bit too much in 1971
Summary: 3 Stars
Yeager is a great war hero. Not every one becomes an Ace, not everyone gets one of the much vaunted Me-262 jets as kills. Not everyone gets five kills in a day (or was it something like that?), and not everyone gets shotdown and evades the enemy sucessfully.. to top it, not everyone breakes the sound barrier for the first time in the world.. All this happened to yeager and it is a great read.
However his attitude to indians and towards India leaves me aghast. Yeager spent the years leading upto 1971 in Pakistan as some kind of a special advisor to the Pakistan Air Force. So his impressions of the War that led to the creation of Bangladesh begs to be believed!.. Some snippets.
"India invaded East Pakistan" (It didn't),
"India wanted to annex and keep East Pakistan", (excuse me, why is Bangladesh an independent country?),
"India flew MiG-21J fighters" (MiG-21Js did not arrive till 1976),
"Pakistan shot down 104 Russian jets of the Indian Air Force" (only 24 of the 72 aircraft lost were actually russian),
"PAF whipped its ass in the sky" (this is under dispute to say the least),
"I personally counted all the 104 wrecks by going around in a helicopter" (How can he do that when only 20-30 aircraft actually crashed in Pakistani territory?)
I actually felt happy when he wrote that his aircraft was totalled by the Indian Air Force - come to think of it, was that the reason behind his incredible yarns from the subcontinent?
There is another story that never finds its way into his autobiography. Yeager writes about Indian Prisoners being in awe of him when he visited them in some interogation room. they even asked him "are you the same yeager who broke the sound barrier?". That may have been. When Yeager asked one of them "How were you guys navigating the russian aircraft accurately?" - The answer by the prisoner "The Compass and Eyeballs Mark 1!"...
Book Review: The right stuff and the not so right stuff
Summary: 3 Stars
Chuck Yeager is an accomplished man, no doubt about that; he was an ace pilot, officially the first person to break the sound barrier, a USAF major general and all those nice stuff. This book is about his career adventures, antics with his P 51 Mustang such as trimming some farmers trees, his life in the desert, time at the Pancho's bar etc etc and it gives a glimpse of his calm, cool and confident nature. I read this first just after college when a friend recommended it as the life of "the greatest combat pilot ever". Now, why would he be the "greatest", I don't know... what about the zero pilots? didn't they display as much courage and skill, if not more? I think Chuck Yeager's status is partly due to his achievements & skills and partly due to our tendency to oversimplify things. One gets the impression that breaking the sound barrier was a solo act - Yeager figured out the physics, designed the machine, flew it in spite of his rib pain and boom...crossed and handled the sonic barrier i.e. the engineers and the others had nothing to do with it. Then he pops up in the news suing companies every now and then...like the one against AMD because their CEO said this in a press conference "Just as the achievement of Chuck Yeager signaled the beginning of a new era in aviation, the 1GHz processor ushers in a new era of information technology". Had Goodlin not asked Bell for the extra moolah, most of us probably wouldn't have heard about Chuck Yeager either.