He says the recent death of Chuck Yeager – who 73 years ago became the first pilot to break the sound barrier – reminded him of a young red-headed pilot he’d met at an American air base during World War II.
One of those pilots lost beneath other headlines. One of those pilots who gave everything.
He was a good looking kid, about 20 years old, Jack Sherburne of Deerfield recalled. The same age Sherburne was at the time. Before he’d flown his own fighter, the P-51, into combat in the smoky, fiery skies over Europe.
This kid pushed his P-47 to its limit and beyond during a training mission in the fall of 1942. A blur, his plane crashed into a distant mountain top, in the northern part of Virginia. Lots of pilots died that way, experimenting and testing during and immediately after the war.
“I felt really badly he was killed and in fact we all did,” said Sherburne, 97, whose long life, wartime experiences and razor-sharp mind form a gold mine of detailed information.
“Over the years you forget those things, but you don’t forget Chuck Yeager.”
No, you don’t. Yeager, perhaps the most celebrated pilot in American history, died, fittingly, on Dec. 7, Pearl Harbor Day. He was 97.
He broke the sound barrier on Oct. 14, 1947, as a 24-year-old Air Force captain. He climbed down from a B-29 bomber at 25,000 feet and into the attached cockpit of a Bell Aircraft X-1, a sleek, rocket-powered plane that was released and fired through the sky, blazing across the Mojave Desert in California.
At about 43,000 feet, he reached a speed of nearly 700 miles per hour, easily topping the Mach 1 barrier of 662 mph. Yeager also disproved the theory that aircraft traveling at these speeds would break apart or crash.
“He had to be some kind of brave,” Sherburne said. “But he would not be crazy. It takes a particular type of person to do what he did. I think a lot of us would have loved to have done it, but he was the right guy at the right time and the right place. He was the forerunner of what the astronauts did.”
Trouble had followed these programs, the ones that were searching for speed and strength in the sky. It followed pilots like the 20-year-old red-head in Virginia. Diving from a high altitude to increase speed caused increased airflow inside the cockpit and froze his controls. He was helpless.
“He did a loop and he blacked out or he could not recover and the plane crashed,” Sherburne said. “That was the first time we knew about that problem.”
In a few years, changes would be made that would allow Yeager to turn into a human bullet. But, Sherburne will forever stress, don’t forget about the others, represented to him through a certain pilot.
He made sure to mention these wild trailblazers who came before Yeager’s feat, creating a foundation that led to more speed, durability and, eventually, the moon.
“We just didn’t know about the speed of sound at that time,” Sherburne said.
He got a good taste of this fast world in the clouds, before attending the University of New Hampshire, joining the New Hampshire Air National Guard and buying his farm in Deerfield 30 years ago.
He said he once flew nearly 400 miles per hour training in his P-51. “That’s always a problem, the G-forces,” Sherburne said. “I don’t know about it flattening your nose, but you could black out.”
Sherburne flew 60 combat missions over the skies of Europe, taking off from Italy, escorting bombers into battle, and firing one of six 50-caliber machine guns.
He retired as a lieutenant colonel. War stories like his don’t fade. And sometimes, they’re pushed to the forefront. Like when Chuck Yeager, once the fastest man on the planet, died.
“When I saw (that Yeager had died), I was just thinking that a lot of unknown young pilots had been killed, and they weren’t always killed by the enemy,” Sherburne said. “I was thinking about this kid who was killed. No one will ever remember him.”