I just watched the news reel of the flight where he broke the sound barrier a couple of months ago. Man that was nuts.
The Bell X-1 was basically a rocket with wings. The hatch was on the side, right in front of the wing. Bailing out and surviving would have been a tricky proposition for a completely healthy man, let alone one with broken ribs. (Yeager had broken his ribs a few days earlier in a horseback-riding incident.) That thing was a suicide machine.
Here's an interesting article about the aircraft.During WWII, Yeager was shot down over France and taken in by the French Resistance.
He made ace in a single day.
Yeager had 20/10 vision. This gave him an edge in dogfighting. He could see the enemy before they saw him.
The engineers loved Yeager as a test pilot. He had a real knack for explaining exactly what an airplane was doing, and the engineers were able to make the correct modifications as a result.
He encountered the new German jet fighter, the Me-262, at one point during the war. He later quipped, "The first time I saw a jet, I shot it down."
If you haven't read his autobiography, I highly recommend it. Like I said in the blog post, it's so fantastic that, if it was fiction, readers would consider it utterly unrealistic. The fact that it's not fiction is what makes it so fascinating and impressive.
Here's the "breaking the sound barrier" scene from the movie
The Right Stuff. I'm not ashamed to admit that I get a little teary-eyed at the part where the music kicks in. It's just so dadgum triumphant.