High Flight October - December 2020 VOLUNTEER AWARD WINNERS Volunteer of the Quarter Awards: Attention Team Chiefs, though award winners have not been selected over the last couple of years, please keep on submitting your choice for Volunteer of the Quarter and Volunteer of the Year according to the following schedule. To all Team Chiefs, please make your nominations for the Volunteer of the Quarter awards to Wayne Fetty no later than (NLT) the 15th day of March, June, September, and December. If we do not receive nominations by the date above of each of the specified quarters, we will not name a Volunteer of the Quarter. Please drop off the written nomination or email it to [email protected] NEW VOLUNTEERS We are continuously blessed with new people volunteering their time to help us here at the Museum. Since the last issue of the WASSUP, we have not added to our team of volunteers. The Museum is always looking for a “few good men & women” to add to our team. We have had some additional “NEW” volunteers sign up in 2020, but they have yet officially not started volunteering so they will be covered in future newsletters. High Flight 1 October - December 2020 LONG-TERM MUSEUM VISITORS PASSES For those who do not use a Government ID card to access the Base, a revised list of volunteers has been sent to the Base Access Control Officer for the new Defense Biometric Identification System (DBIDS) card that will allow you access to the base. This list includes the name of volunteer’s spouses, if applicable, or the parent/guardian of volunteers who have not already reached driving age. The Air Force- mandated background check on the individuals listed will be accomplished, at the Visitor’s Center when the DBIDS card is issued. When you come thru the Gate, just show them that card. They will scan the bar code on the back, and you will be on your way. THINGS TO REMEMBER: (1) DBIDS cards will be issued ONLY to the persons on the validated list allowing them access to the Base. (2) If your spouse needs unescorted access to the Base to drop you off or pick you up, he/she will need to get his or her own DBIDS card. The DBIDS cards were requested for the current period, BUT if you picked up a new DBIDS card before the expiration of the old one, the new one will expire one year after the issuance of the new one. (3) Keep your eye on that expiration date. Do not forget to get your “NEW DBIDS” card before your current one expires! (a) You will need to call Pass & ID, Bldg. 900, and make an appointment to renew your DBIDS card. Phone Number is: 586-239-4159. (b) Hours for Pass & ID are: Mon: 0800-1500; Tues thru Sat: 0730-1500 (4) Your Social Security number will be required to be confirmed before your DBIDS card can be issued, so you will have to present either your physical Social Security card or a copy of a physical IRS Form (such as a W-2) to confirm that number. DBIDS cards are issued at the Vehicle Registration desk in the Visitor’s Center, north of the Main Gate at the intersection of M-59 and Jefferson Avenue. Due to staffing limitations, the Visitor’s Center is closed the Saturday before a Federal holiday, Sundays, Federal holidays, and on Saturdays and Mondays for lunch (time varies depending on their workload). DBIDS cards have been requested solely for participation in Museum activities, the performance of Museum business at other on-Base locations, and transportation to/from on- Base eating establishments. Do not use this pass for any other reason! High Flight 2 October - December 2020 Please, please, please! Recruit your family members and/or friends to volunteer @ the Museum. Our 2020 Season has ended, and even with Covid and a reduced season, we desperately need weekend docents, so please recruit your family & friends to sign up as weekend docents for our 2021 Season. Remember, if we get enough volunteers to serve as Docents, we will not have to do so many days! Our special Tuesday/Friday teams could also use more volunteers. We have a ‘NEW’ Volunteer Coordinator who will be organizing/scheduling the docents for 2021! High Flight 3 October - December 2020 Chuck Yeager, 97, pilot, dies; his prowess broke the sound barrier, opened the skies Chuck Yeager and "Glamorous Glennis," the speed machine he piloted through the sound barrier in 1947. Chuck Yeager, who piloted the Bell X-1 experimental rocket plane past the sound barrier and thrust America into the dawn of the space age, died Monday. He was 97. His death on the 79th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, was announced via his official Twitter account, which according to The New York Times, cited his wife, Victoria. General Yeager’s 14- minute sprint over the Mojave Desert on 14 October 1947 is considered the most important airplane flight since Orville Wright swept over the sands of Kitty Hawk for 40 yards on 17 December 1903. There were, however, few accolades for the 24-year- old captain. No ticker tape parades, no handshakes from the president. The flight occurred in the early dark days of the Cold War and was filed away as top secret. The public would not know of the feat for months. Then Captain Yeager instead celebrated with a few slaps on the back and a round of martinis at the Happy Bottom Riding Club near Muroc Air Base. For the unassuming aviator from the backwoods of West Virginia – his first radio transmission after passing the elusive Mach 1 and breaking the sound barrier was “Ah, we have problems. This ol’ Mach meter is plumb off the scale” – that was plenty of praise. Born in Hamlin, W.V., Charles E. Yeager developed an acute sense of machines, their parts, and how they worked in unison from his father, a gas-well driller. Enlisting in the Army Air Corps just before the attack on Pearl Harbor, General Yeager initially served as a warrant officer maintaining aircraft. By 1943, he was in flight school; by the next spring, a P-51 Mustang pilot, escorting bombers out of England. On his ninth mission, he was shot down and eluded capture only with the help of a French farmer and the Resistance. When he was ordered stateside to recover, he successfully petitioned Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower to allow him to instead return to the skies over Europe. Blessed with 20-10 eyesight – his fellow pilots swore he could see forever – General Yeager became a top fighter pilot, shooting down in one day the five planes needed for designation as an “ace”; one day a month later, he downed four more. After the war, General Yeager found himself in the same place he was at the beginning of his service; on a maintenance team. It proved to be the High Flight 4 October - December 2020 opportunity of his lifetime. He worked on aircraft at Wright Field in Ohio, and after any plane was tuned up or repaired, he made sure he was the pilot to test it. That way, he got to fly almost every fighter on the flight line. His flying ability caught the attention of Colonel Albert Boyd, who was trying to build a cadre of top pilots for what became the military’s first test-pilot division. Boyd would soon get to test the mettle of these recruits. Across the continent, at Muroc Air Base in California, Bell Aircraft was testing its X-1 with civilian test pilots, who then were considered superior to military “fly boys”. Bell engineers were confident the plane could break the sound barrier (Mach 1 is 742 miles per hour at sea level; slightly less as altitude increases), but funding problems threatened to ground the tests. The cost of hiring civilian pilots was too high for the postwar US government. The Army Air Corps, soon to be christened the Air Force, assumed responsibility for the tests. The next task for Boyd was choosing the X-1 pilot. Some superior told Boyd the pilot should be a West Pointer, others said he had to have an engineering degree. But Boyd and his assistant, Colonel Fred Ascani, kept coming back to a junior officer. “Though (Yeager) lacked a college education, Boyd considered him the best instinctive pilot he had ever seen,” Air Force historian James Young wrote in the book, The Quest of Mach One. Ascani was more expansive: “Yeager flies an airplane as if he is welded to it – as if he is an integral part of it. His ‘feel’ for any strange airplane is instinctive, intuitive and as natural as if had flown it for 100 or more hours….” No one, earthbound or ethereal, will ever be a clone of Yeager. Never, ever.” As the flight team traveled to Muroc, the only doubts about the young pilot seemed to be whether his superiors could rein in his sense of adventure. “He was a little hard to tame,” said Jack Russell, crew chief on the X-1 program. “I’d flown with him before and we were never right side up.” On his first test of the X-1, a glide test, the rocket plane and General Yeager were released from the dark belly of a B-29 into the blinding sunlight at 18,000 feet. General Yeager immediately piloted the plane into a series of unchoreographed rolls. The danger of the mission, however, was always apparent.