NRA Family | Throwback Thursday: General Chuck Yeager (Before He Was Famous)

The dawn of the age of aviation arrived at exactly 10:35 a.m. on December 17, 1903, when a pair of brothers from Ohio flew their Wright Flyer at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, a distance of 120 feet at 7 miles per hour.

Just 44 years later, a young pilot from West Virginia would strap himself into the cramped cockpit of a rocket-propelled airplane—named for his wife, Glamorous Glennis—and fly it over the Mojave Desert in California at 700 miles per hour, breaking the sound barrier. It was a signal flying feat he would be celebrated for the remainder of his long life. Only in his early twenties at the time, that courageous test pilot was Chuck Yeager.