YEAGER MAKES FAREWELL FLIGHT.

Byline: Bhavna Mistry and Charles F. Bostwick / Daily News Staff Writers

Fifty-six years after he first took the control of a fighter plane, America's most famous test pilot made his last flight piloting an Air Force jet Sunday.

In the front seat of an F-15 fighter, Chuck Yeager streaked faster than the speed of sound above Edwards to open the second day of an open house honoring the 50th anniversaries of both the Air Force and of Yeager's own first supersonic flight back in 1947 in an X-1 rocket plane.

``I can hang it up going out on top,'' Yeager said after stepping out of the cockpit before thousands of spectators.

At age 74, Yeager is hanging up his military helmet following a career full enough for four pilots: shot down over Nazi-occupied France in World War II, he escaped back to Britain to fly again and became a double ace; he became the first man to break the sound barrier; he served as the first commander of an Air Force school to train astronauts; he survived the crash of a rocket-boosted F-104 trying to set an altitude record; and he fought a new war flying B-57 bombers in Vietnam.

``I just fly the plane,'' said Yeager, surrounded by hundreds as he signed autographs. ``It does all the work.''

Eclipsed in fame by America's astronauts in the mid- and late-1960s, Yeager gained a whole new round of fame after his X-1 rocket plane exploits were featured in the movie ``The Right Stuff.''

Yeager will still fly his personal P-51 Mustang - the same kind of plane in which he shot down 12 Nazi fighters, including a Messerschmitt jet - but no longer will be allowed to take aloft the latest of America's warcraft.

As part of the day's activities, Yeager's also rode in a B-1 bomber and encouraged the younger generation to continue in his footsteps.

Yeager actually retired 22 years ago as a brigadier general, but he continued to fly as an Air Force consultant. Every October he opened Edwards' annual air show with a sonic boom. Sunday's flight was his last.

Short, tough, no-nonsensed, with an inimitable West Virginia drawl, Yeager says the Air Force was his life. Son of an natural gas driller, he grew up hunting and fishing in the hill country, and joined the Army straight out of high school.

``He's one of the last of our great heroes,'' said Doug Mullin, 39, of Phelan, who waited in line and had Yeager's sign a copy of his autobiography. ``I'm just glad I got to meet the man and be at this event. This is being a part of history.''

In his autobiography, he says he got airsick his first airplane ride but signed up for flight training in a ``flying sergeant'' program because sergeants were exempt from kitchen duty.

From there he went to combat duty over Europe in World War II.

After the war he got to Ohio's Wright Field - then the center of testing - by a fluke. As a pilot who had been shot down and evaded capture, he could be stationed at the base of his choice. He chose Wright because it was the closest to his parents' West Virginia home, where he'd moved in his pregnant wife, Glennis.

From Wright, Yeager was sent out to Edwards - then Muroc Air Base - as maintenance officer for a new jet fighter, the P-80. There he drew the attention of the test program's commander, and eventually was made a test pilot himself.

He volunteered to fly the X-1 rocket plane, and made history.

Yeager's fame faded in the 1960s with the emphasis on America's space program, from which Yeager was excluded because he had no college degree. While the Mercury astronauts were on the cover of Life magazine, Yeager went back to a combat unit.

But Yeager is more famous than ever now, thanks to writer Tom Wolfe.

Wolfe's account of the early space program depicted Yeager as the personification of what Wolfe called ``cool courage'' embodied by the best test pilots. Wolfe gave it a name: ``The Right Stuff.''

Yeager downplays the impact of the movie, saying he got more fame out of the Delco car battery commercials he appeared in.

Ironically, Yeager had a bit role in ``The Right Stuff'' - he's the guy sweeping up inside Pancho Barnes' Happy Bottom Riding Club.

Yeager says he is irked when people ask him if he thinks he's got the ``the right stuff.''

``The question annoys me because it implies that a guy who has `the right stuff' was born that way.'' Yeager wrote in his 1985 autobiography: ``I was born with unusually good eyes and coordination. I was mechanically oriented, understood machines easily. My nature was to stay cool in tight spots. Is that `the right stuff'?

``All I know is I worked my tail off to learn how to fly, and worked hard at it all the way. . . . The secret to my success was that somehow I always managed to live to fly another day.''

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6 Photos

PHOTO (1--3--color--ran in AV edition only) Legendary test pilot Chuck Yeager flies an F-15 Strike Eagle, above left, one last time over the crowd Sunday at Edwards Air Force Base, where Charles W. Stines and his son Charles R. Stines, below left, marveled at the sight. Above, Maj. Gen. Richard L. Engel, in glasses, congratulates Yeager after his flight.

Hans Gutknecht/Daily News

(4) Chuck Yeager sits in front on an F-15 bearing the same name, honoring Yeager's wife, as the first jet that broke the sound barrier.

(5--ran in AV edition only) An F-14 stands among the jets on display Sunday at Edwards Air Force Base.

(6--ran in AV edition only) ) Alan Pirnham of England naps under the wing of a Lockheed Super Constellation.

Hans Gutknecht/Daily News