Fasten your seat belt and get ready to meet Victoria Yeager, Chuck Yeager's co-pilot extraordinaire
Independent Women’s Forum is pleased to announce that Victoria Yeager, who will soon be putting on Chuck Yeager Aviation Day, is the latest entry in our popular series of Champion Women profiles.
Victoria is the author of a new book, “Chuck Yeager: What a Ride,” by “Chuck Yeager’s favorite co-pilot.” Chuck Yeager Aviation Day, to be held September 28 in Yeager’s beloved West Virginia, is “dedicated to commemorating the life and legacy” of Yeager and “instilling a passion for flight and innovation among young people, fostering a new generation of dreamers and trailblazers in aerospace.”
Girls in Aviation, which is part of Women in Aviation International, will have a big presence at Chuck Yeager Day. Victoria says that General Yeager, who encouraged the legendary pilot Jackie Cochran, was supportive of women in the field.
Yeager thought that top-tier women pilots were often better than their male counterparts. But as supportive as he was of women pilots, General Yeager drew the line at women in wartime combat. “When she’s in the air, she’s a warrior,” he said, “but if she’s shot down, she’s a sex object.”
Victoria and General Yeager, who was the first pilot to break the sound barrier and celebrated in Tom Wolfe’s 1979 book “The Right Stuff,” met hiking the high Sierras. She was pretty adventuresome even before she met her pilot. She is credited with blowing the whistle on a human trafficker who was posing as a CIA agent and whom she met in Cambodia. This escapade involved a high-speed taxi chase with the trafficker. She was a producer on a sports show and actress, who played the detective in the Harrison Ford movie “Witness.”
Fasten your seat belt and meet Victoria Yeager. We think she has the right stuff, too.
