2190) No, the idea here ... seemed to be that a man should have the ability to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and put his hide on the line and then have the moxie, the reflexes, the experience, the coolness, to pull it back in the last yawning moment - and then go up again the next day, and the next day, and every next day, even if the series should prove infinite - and, ultimately, in its best expression, do so in a cause that meant something to thousands, to a people, a nation, to humanity, to God. Nor was there a test to show whether or not a pilot had this righteous quality. There was, instead, a seemingly infinite series of tests. A career in flying was like climbing one of those ancient Babylonian pyramids made up of a dizzying progression of steps and ledges, a ziggurat, a pyramid extraordinarily high and steep; and the idea was to prove at every foot of the way up that pyramid that you were one of the elected and anointed ones who had the right stuff and could move higher and higher and even - ultimately, God willing, one day - that you might be able to join that special few at the very top, that elite who had the capacity to bring tears to men's eyes, the very Brotherhood of the Right Stuff itself.

Tom Wolfe
The Right Stuff (1979)
[ellipses in original]

2191) Anyone who travels very much on airlines in the United States soon gets to know the voice of the airline pilot ... coming over the intercom ... with a particular drawl, a particular folksiness, a particular down-home calmness that is so exaggerated it begins to parody itself (nevertheless! - it's reassuring) ... the voice that tells you, as the airliner is caught in thunderheads and goes bolting up and down a thousand feet at a single gulp, to check your seat belts because "it might get a little choppy" ... the voice that tells you (on a flight from Phoenix preparing for its final approach into Kennedy Airport, New York, just after dawn): "Now, folks, uh ... this is the captain ... ummmm ... We've got a little ol' red light up here on the control panel that's tryin' to tell us that the landin' gears're not ... uh ... lockin' into position when we lower 'em ... Now ... I don't believe that little ol' red light knows what it's talkin' about - I believe it's that little ol' red light that iddn' workin' right" ... faint chuckle, long pause, as if to say, I'm not even sure all this is really worth going into - still, it may amuse you ... "But ... I guess to play it by the rules, we oughta humor that little ol' light ... so we're gonna take her down to about, oh, two or three hundred feet over the runway at Kennedy, and the folks down there on the ground are gonna see if they cain't give us a visual inspection of those ol' landin' gears" - with which he is obviously on intimate ol' buddy terms, as with every other working part of this mighty ship - "and if I'm right ... they're gonna tell us everything in copacetic all the way aroun' and we'll just take her on in ... and, after a couple of low passes over the field, the voice returns: "Well, folks, those folks down there on the ground - it must be too early for 'em or somethin' - I 'spect they still got sleepers in their eyes ... 'cause they say they cain't tell if those ol' landin' gears are all the way down or not ... But, you know, up here in the cockpit we're convinced they're all the way down, so we're just gonna take her on in ... And oh" ... (I almost forgot) ... "while we take a little swing out over the ocean an' empty some of that surplus fuel we're not gonna be needin' anymore - that's what you might be seein' comin' out of the wings - our lovely lovely little ladies ... if they'll be so kind ... they're gonna go up and down the aisles and show you how we do what we call 'assumin' the position'" ... another faint chuckle (We do this so often, and it's so much fun, we even have a funny little name for it) ... and the stewardesses, a bit grimmer, by the looks of them, than that voice, start telling the passengers to take their glasses off, and take the ballpoint pens and other sharp objects out of their pockets, and they show them the position, with the head lowered ... while down on the field at Kennedy the little yellow emergency trucks start roaring across the field - and even though in your pounding heart and your sweating palms and your broiling brainpan you know this is a critical moment in your life, you still can't quite bring yourself to believe it, because if it were ... how could the captain, the man who knows the actual situation more intimately ... how could he keep on drawlin' and chucklin' and driftin' and lollygaggin' in that particular voice of his -

Well! - who doesn't know that voice! And who can forget it! - even after he is proved right and the emergency is over.

That particular voice may sound vaguely Southern or Southwestern, but it is specifically Appalachian in origin. It originated in the mountains of West Virginia, in the coal country, in Lincoln County, so far up in the hollows that, as the saying went, "they had to pipe in daylight." In the late 1940's and early 1950's this up-hollow voice drifted down from on high, from over the high desert of California, down, down, down, from the upper reaches of the Brotherhood into all phases of American aviation. It was amazing. It was Pygmalion in reverse. Military pilots, and then, soon, airline pilots, pilots from Maine and Massachusetts and the Dakotas and Oregon and everywhere else, began to talk in that poker-hollow West Virginia drawl, or as close to it as they could bend their native accents. It was the drawl of the most righteous of all the possessors of the right stuff: Chuck Yeager.

[...] Chuck Yeager was at the top of the pyramid, number one among all the True Bothers.

And that voice ... started driftin' down from on high. At first the tower at Edwards [Air Force Base] began to notice that all of a sudden there were an awful lot of test pilots up there with West Virginia drawls. And pretty soon there were an awful lot of fighter pilots up there with West Virginia drawls. The air space over Edward was getting so cain't-hardly supercool day by day, it was terrible. And then that lollygaggin' poker-hollow air space began to spread, because the test pilots and fighter pilots from Edwards were considered the pick of the litter and had a cachet all their own, wherever they went, and other towers and other controllers began to notice it was getting awfully drawly and down-home up there, although they didn't know exactly why. And then, because the military is the training ground for practically all airline pilots, it spread further, until airline passengers all over America began to hear the awshuckin' driftin' gone-fishin' Mud River voice coming from the cockpit ... "Now, folks, uh ... this is the captain ... ummmm ... We've got a little ol' red light up here on the control panel that's tryin' to tell us that the landin' gears're not ... uh ... lockin' into position ..."

But so what! What could possibly go wrong! We've obviously got a man up there in the cockpit who doesn't have a nerve in his body! He's a block of ice! He's made of 100 percent righteous victory-rolling True Brotherly stuff.

Tom Wolfe
The Right Stuff (1979)
[all ellipses except bracketed ones in original]

2192) [I]n the X-1, the X-1A, the X-2, the D-558-1, the horrible XF-92A, the beautiful D-558-2 [...] In those planes, which were like chimneys with little razor-blade wings on them, you had to be "afraid to panic," and that phrase was no joke. In the skids, the tumbles, the spins, there was truly, as [Antoine de] Saint-Exupery had said, only one thing you could let yourself think about: *What do I do next?* Sometimes at Edwards they used to play the tapes of pilots going into the final dive, the one that killed them, and the man would be tumbling, going end over end in a fifteen-ton length of pipe, with all aerodynamics long gone, and not one prayer left, and he knew it, and he would be screaming into microphone, but not for Mother or for God or the nameless spirit of Ahor, but for one last hopeless crumb of information about the loop: "I've tried A! I've tried B! I've tried C! I've tried D! Tell me what else I can try!" And then that truly spooky click on the machine. What do I do next? [...] And everybody around the table would look at one another and nod ever so slightly, and the unspoken message was: Too bad! There was a man with the right stuff.

Tom Wolfe
The Right Stuff (1979)
[all ellipses except bracketed ones in original]

2193) It was John Glenn who realized from the first that Project Mercury was like a new branch of the armed services, despite its civilian coloration. It would have simplified matters tremendously if NASA had given everybody formal rankings and had done with it. That way people such as [NASA Administrator James E.] Webb would have known were they actually stood. The seven Mercury astronauts could have been designated Single-Combat General, a category with the honors and privileges of a five-star general but with none of the duties and obligations of command. After his flight John Glenn, then, would have been promoted to Galactic Single-Combat General, a category ranking slightly above the Chiefs of Staff of the Armed Services and slightly below the Commander-in-Chief. Webb, as NASA administrator, would have been a two-star general and would have known the protocol for dealing with GSC General Glenn.

Tom Wolfe
The Right Stuff (1979)