Chuck Yeager

The man who broke the sound barrier and the pilot Wolfe presents as the living embodiment of "the right stuff." He is unflappable and calm in any emergency. Test pilots copy even his West Virginia speech, commercial pilots copy test pilots and eventually he influences even pilots who have never met him.

Yeager flew in World War II and Korea and is the best of the Edwards test pilots. Although the common wisdom is that the buffeting a plane undergoes as it approaches the speed of sound will cause it to break apart, Yeager believes the buffeting will decrease and that going faster than Mach 1 is possible. He is correct and becomes the first man to break the sound barrier, a fact the Army classifies as top secret. By the time the information is declassified and the Army tries to excite public opinion, the moment has passed...