Originally Posted by
BEagle
Read
NF104 | Birth of a Spaceplane to get an accurate view of the overconfident, arrogant and vindictive Yeager...
His incompetence and failure to follow the mission profile led to the destruction of the NF-104A. Following which, his influence with the accident investigators ensured that no verdict of 'pilot error' would be entered.
The portrayal of Yeager is indeed less than flattering in this online version of events.
Here's an account of Yeager's NF-104A crash and ejection in these chapters from Bob Smith, the lead Air Force test pilot for Aero Space Trainer program:
NF104 | Unwanted Record for Chuck Yeager
NF104 | Spin, Crash & Rescue
NF104 | Accident Board (Strike Three for Me!)
Bob Smith's assessment of the cause of the NF-104A crash:
The facts are clear. Chuck Yeager proved incapable of doing the job. He was totally outside his element. He was a natural pilot who had learned by experience and feel, but never really understood stability, just ‘sensed’ how airplanes would act, but aerodynamics and space dynamics are night and day. If he was to fail, I expected it to be outside the aerodynamics region.
But not even that can excuse his accident, which was his fault, alone and was an error of bad pilot technique during normal, aerodynamic flight. His shortcoming was inability to gain and maintain the 70 degree climb angle. That required strict and delicate airplane control. No more and no less.
His failure to do that made the space flight moot. He made the mistake, not once but on each of his four zooms, exaggerated on each until his accident was inevitable long before he departed his familiar flying region His failing started at the moment he began a 3½ g pull up to the required 70 degree climb. He never once made his immediate angle close to 70 degrees thus losing so much energy that he could not fly high enough to stay out of trouble. Worse yet, he repeatedly started climb at a lower angle, then pulled the nose up later losing energy even faster and making the situation far more critical. He needed time outside the atmosphere to use the reaction controls to nose over and he denied himself that time with poor piloting in his element of expertise, aerial flight.
In effect, what he did was climb far too shallow and then pulled up very steep in aerodynamic flight to a hammerhead stall, which in any F-104 meant an irrecoverable pitch-up and likely spin.