After 13 revolutions, Yeager ejected just 5,000 feet above the ground. Falling through the sky, the smoldering ejection seat was briefly snared in his parachute lines and struck him, damaging his helmet and burning his face.
The incredible video in this post, recently released by the Edwards Air Force Base History Office, shows then-Col. Chuck Yeager lost control and crashed an NF-104A on Dec. 10, 1963, at Edwards Air Force Base (AFB).
Col. Charles E. “Chuck” Yeager, who had broken the sound barrier 15 years earlier, received the task of setting a new altitude record of 120,000 feet with an NF-104A, which was a modified Lockheed F-104 Starfighter. He lost control on the second of two preparatory flights, and the aircraft entered a flat spin at 65,000 feet. Despite his attempts to restart the engine and his successful deployment of a drag chute to pitch the nose down, the nose pitched up again, and the spin continued.
After 13 revolutions, according to the Center for Land Use Interpretation website, Yeager ejected when he was just 5,000 feet above the ground. The smoldering ejection seat became briefly entangled in his parachute lines as he fell through the sky and struck him, causing damage to his helmet and burns to his face. He landed near his plane’s burning wreckage, a few miles north of Mojave town, where USAF rescue personnel from Edwards picked him up.
The NF-104A was a production Starfighter, a Mach 2 interceptor plane that underwent heavy modifications with the addition of a liquid-fuel rocket engine at the tail base and reaction-control thrusters to allow maneuvering at extremely high altitudes. It was for training pilots in the new Aerospace Research Pilot School at Edwards that such zoom flights were developed as part of the emerging manned space program.
In the film The Right Stuff, which was adapted from Tom Wolfe’s best-selling 1979 book, Yeager’s crash received a heroic description (click here to read the excerpt from Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff describing Yeager’s NF-104 ejection). During filming in 1983, the stuntman playing Yeager falling through the sky, died when his parachute failed to open. Of the three NF-104A aerospace trainers that were built, one survives on static display in front of the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School at Edwards.
Photo by U.S. Air Force
