TESTING THE LIMITS
While his flights in the X-1 guaranteed celebrity, it was Yeager’s performance over the next seven years that earned him pre-eminence –indeed, legendary status– within his own peer group, the experimental test pilots at Edwards. Yeager has called these years his “golden age of flying and fun.” It was an age when the limits of time, space and the imagination were being dramatically expanded. And Edwards AFB was the place to be, the place where a whole stable of exotic research aircraft were probing the unknowns of flight and where new experimental prototypes appeared on the flight line in seemingly endless numbers.