X-1

Deep into airplane literature these days, I am now reading The Right Stuff, a book that has—dare I say it?—the right stuff. Reading it makes me appreciate, anew, its author. I'm not as keen about Wolfe's later, fictional phase—Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man in Full—but I worship his earlier, groundbreaking, positively transcendant nonfiction phase: The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline, Baby, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, From Bauhaus to Our House, and the remarkable people, places and things of The Right Stuff:

"Somehow Yeager [left] was like the big daddy of the skies over the dome of the world. There were even other pilots with enough Pilot Ego to believe that they were actually better than this drawliin' hot dog. But no one would contest the fact that as of that time, the 1950s, Chuck Yeager was at the top of the pyramind, number one among all the True Brothers."

"His wife was a brunette named Glennis, whom he had met in California while he was in training, and she was such a number, so striking, he had the inscription 'Glamorous Glennis' written on the nose of his P-51 in Europe and, just a few weeks back, on the X-1 itself."

"The X-1 had gone through 'the sonic wall' without so much as a bump. As the speed topped out at Mach 1.05, Yeager had the sensation of shooting straight through the top of the sky. The sky turned a deep purple and all at once the stars and the moon came out—and the sun shone at the same time. He was going faster than any man in history, and it was almost silent up here, and he was so high in such a vast space that there was no sensation of motion. It would take him seven minutes to glide back down and land at Muroc. He spent the time doing victory rolls and wing over wing acrobatics while Rogers Lake and the High Sierras spun around below."

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