Where is Chuck Yeager? slightly off-topic
Maybe a deep breath and get away from some of the personal affronts I have seen lately. So I'll affront Yeager versus some folks here, heh heh.
Lyman is very close to the Yeager persona, in my not so humble opinion. Met him personally twice. Once a formal affair when I was a yute, next time was really neat - 16th TFTS at Hill in 1979.
Desk clerk announces we have a VIP and we're welcome to get to the main briefing room, a theater deal. It's Yeager. He sits down on the edge of the stage and we just talk for about two hours. We ask questions and he answers, embellishes, brags, confesses, etc.
So 6 years later I am on the Northrop legal team for the lawsuit between McAir and Northrop about cockpit displays and avionics and such. Another pilot was an A-7/F-18 USN Lt Commander then flying for FedEx. Our third pilot was Yeager.
The other junior toad and I were getting $100 per hour for our work. We both made about $1000 one day when we checked out the F-20 at Edwards in order to fly the thing the next day. Sheesh - this was back in 1985, so a good deal, ya think? Yeager was getting $800 just to show up for anything, and I don't know what his hourly rate was.
So Lyman might have it pretty close. At our depositions the McAir team let Yeager go real fast, but I made about $500 that day for my grilling. Yeager was already well known for liking the F-20, so I guess McAir folks figured he was not gonna provide much to them.
In all fairness, I think if you got Yeager in a very informal situation that he had a yearning to attend, he could be pretty neat. In my case, we were the first squadron in the world ( and first to fly an operational FBW jet, I must remind a few here) and he wanted to talk with us and make a "show" at the squadron. That summer we had many dignitaries show up, and they all signed the bar we had in the rec room, shook hands and such. Yeager was the only one that just sat there with us and talked with us as aviator to aviator. Was a really neat time and place, I tell ya.
And now back to our regularly scheduled fray.