Yeager hurt at Rabun airport

(EXCERPT) By PEARCE ADAMS The Times

Legendary test pilot Chuck Yeager reportedly suffered only a minor
head injury around 3 p.m. Thursday after wind blew his World War II
trainer off a private runway in extreme Northeast Georgia in Rabun
County.

"It was something else to put an aircraft down like that and get up
and walk away from it," said Cary Thomas, chief investigator for the
Rabun County Sheriff's Office.

Yeager is best known as a test pilot pioneer in the late 1940s and
early 1950s. He was the first to break the sound barrier in 1947,
flying in an X-1 experimental aircraft. Six years later, he reached
1,650 mph in a Bell X1-A, becoming the first person to fly 2« times
the speed of sound.

The pilot also led the program to train the United States' first
astronauts and flew more than 100 missions in Vietnam.

Thomas said Yeager, 80, had landed a two-seat aircraft at a paved
private airfield at Heaven's Landing near Germany Mountain, which is
near Clayton. The runway was about 5,000 feet long.

Stacy Pooley, chief dispatcher for the county, said, "I don't know...

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