46 pages • 1 hour read
Tom WolfeThe Right Stuff
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1979A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “The Angels”
Chapter 1 introduces the reader to the dangerous, high-stakes life of a military test pilot through the eyes of Pete (a Princeton graduate) and Jane Conrad. The angels referred to in the chapter title are what Wolfe calls the “death angels,” namely, the wives of test pilots like Pete who must cope with the fact that men in this line of work die on a weekly basis (2, 3, 6).
The book opens with a vivid account of the events of an unnamed day in 1955 in Jacksonville, Florida. News of a flight test accident has spread throughout the community of death angels. Jane Conrad nervously waits for an update about her husband, Pete. As the day proceeds, it becomes clear that Pete is one of two pilots unaccounted for. Jane assumes that her husband has died (7). In fact, Pete is on duty as the squadron safety officer for the day. He is one of the first people to track down the fallen aircraft and find its deceased pilot, Bud Jennings, whose charred body has been decapitated by the impact of the crash (5-6). This affair starts a grim, unrelenting cycle for the Conrads: an accident, Jane’s uncertainty over whether it involves her husband, the identification of the victim, a funeral for a friend and fellow pilot, repeat.
The macabre routine follows the Conrads to Pete’s second assignment, the Group 20 flight test unit at Patuxent River Naval Station in Maryland. More tests, more crashes, more funerals. Jane begins to hallucinate that Pete has died, picturing that a military or church official is walking solemnly up the driveway of her home to deliver the unwelcome news of her husband’s demise (10-11). A string of accidents occurs at Patuxent River, involving everything from a mechanical failure in the aircraft to a malfunctioning parachute.
Though Jane marvels at the ability of her husband and his friends to joke about the dangers of their occupation (she compares their discussions of flight and its perils to “talking about sports” [8]), the chapter’s conclusion suggests that she has grown accustomed to the notion that “there was a coffin waiting for each” pilot (14).
Chapter 2 Summary: “The Right Stuff”
In Chapter 2 Wolfe provides a general overview of the training and culture of military pilots. This is defined above all by the notion of “the right stuff,” the ineffable combination of bravery and skill that allows a pilot to ascend to the heights of test flight.
Wolfe begins by describing the intensely competitive training of military pilots. This consists of “a seemingly infinite series of tests” that Wolfe compares to a “ziggurat,” an ancient Mesopotamian pyramid with “a dizzying progression of steps and ledges” (17-18). On the first day of basic training, prospective pilots are told that one in three of them will not graduate to flight (18). Those who do reach this level are then subjected to increasingly difficult exercises like landing on an aircraft carrier (for Navy pilots) (18-20) or piloting the claustrophobic T-33 (21-22). Moreover, minor health defects like a slight deterioration of eyesight can result in a pilot being grounded (22). Even combat experience is no guarantee of success for a military test pilot (32). The overall effect of this selective training process is to winnow the group of trainees down to the very best pilots, those who have proven themselves to have the “right stuff.”
Wolfe is quite candid in his descriptions of the excesses of the “hot young fighter jocks” who do manage to make it to test flight (22). Dangerous and illegal practices like “hassling,” or mock dogfighting, are almost expected of these individuals (23). Heavy drinking is common (26-8); egos are inflated to an almost messianic degree (29-30). This is what it takes to confront the “binary problem […] Right Stuff/Death” that is the very occupation of a test pilot (25). As Wolfe notes, a Navy pilot with a full career of 20 years has a 23% chance of dying in a non-combat accident; similarly, there is a 56% chance that these pilots will have to take the risk of ejecting from their aircraft to avert disaster (15-16). Very few pilots remain who can thrive (let alone survive) under these conditions.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Yeager”
Chapter 3 focuses on Chuck Yeager, the “ace of all the aces” who becomes the first human being to travel faster than the speed of sound (called “Mach 1” after the physicist Ernst Mach) on October 14, 1947 (32). This takes the reader back in time to before the events experienced by Pete and Jane Conrad in Chapter 1. Wolfe then works forward from Yeager to October 4, 1957, when the first artificial satellite, Sputnik I, was launched into space by the Soviet Union. This marks the beginning of the so-called Space Age and the founding of NASA in the United States.
Wolfe centers the chapter on Muroc Field, later Edwards Air Force Base, an isolated patch of the Mojave Desert in California populated by the spartan, makeshift community of heavy-drinking test pilots. After an impressive combat career in World War II, Chuck Yeager arrives at Muroc as a pilot for the XS-1 project that aims to break the sound barrier of Mach 1. A previous attempt to do so by British pilot Geoffrey de Havilland had ended with his death (37). After de Havilland, it was thought that no aircraft could possibly withstand the extreme conditions of flight as a pilot approached the speed of sound. Two days removed from a horse-riding accident on a night of drinking at the nearby Pancho’s Fly Inn, Yeager accomplishes the seemingly impossible by exceeding Mach 1 and landing safely (40-44).
Following a period of secrecy about the XS-1 project, the military finally announces Yeager’s achievement in June 1948 (45-46). This sets off intense public interest in test flight and the pilots (see, for example, the 1952 film, Breaking the Sound Barrier). Tests continue, and by November 1952, Scott Crossfield reaches a speed of Mach 2 in the D-558-2 aircraft (48). According to Wolfe, this is the proverbial golden age of Edwards Air Force Base, a five-year period in which it “remained primitive and Low Rent, with nothing out there but the bleached prehistoric shrimp terrain and the rat shacks and the blazing sun and the thin blue sky” (49).
Yeager retires from test flight in 1954 (52). By October 1957, Edwards is upended by the Soviets’ successful launch of Sputnik I. Although the US government had already announced plans for a satellite of its own, and both the Air Force and NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, NASA’s predecessor) were working on a piloted spacecraft, the public and political perceptions of Sputnik change everything (53). The narrative around test flight is now dominated by the discourse of the Cold War and fears of Soviet nuclear aggression. The New York Times claims that America is engaged in a “race for survival” (55).
Two distinct projects emerge from the arrival of the Space Age. The first, codenamed Mercury, will try to send the first human being into space in an unpiloted capsule that will orbit the planet and then return to Earth (57-59). The second, the X-15 project, will attempt to develop a spacecraft controlled and operated by a human pilot (59-60). For the young flight jocks at Edwards, X-15 is the leading edge of technological innovation and human exploration. By contrast, the first subjects of the Mercury Project will be chimpanzees, mere “spam in a can” (60).
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
The opening chapters of The Right Stuff provide both an arresting account of the peculiar lives and subculture of military test pilots in the 1940s and 1950s, and a short history of the aeronautical developments that precipitated the Space Age. Wolfe’s narrative focuses principally on two representative figures: Jane Conrad and Chuck Yeager.
Jane, wife of pilot Pete Conrad, exemplifies the unique family and gender dynamics at work in the insular world of military test flight. In one sense, she is the stereotypical image of the mid-century American wife and mother; Wolfe depicts her awaiting the arrival of her breadwinning husband every day in their picturesque suburban home in Jacksonville, Florida (2). On the other hand, Jane must deal with the intense uncertainty and psychological trauma that comes with Pete’s occupation. Chapter 1 of The Right Stuff details Jane’s growing fear at the prospect of her husband’s untimely demise, a possibility that the “fraternity” of male pilots—frequently depicted as drinking and carousing together—does not seem to take seriously (17). Over the span of a few years, the Conrads experience the death of more than 10 friends and colleagues in Jacksonville and then later at Pax River, Maryland (11-14). Each day Jane is left to wonder whether her husband will be next: “the Princeton boy she met at a deb party […] would never quit, never withdraw from this grim business, unless in a coffin” (14).
The other central figure in this section is Yeager, “the most righteous of all the possessors of the right stuff” (35). In Wolfe’s portrayal, Yeager is the embodiment of the untamed, freewheeling lifestyle of test pilots in the Wild West of Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert. Indeed, Yeager’s major personal accomplishment, breaking the speed of sound (Mach 1) in the X-1 aircraft in October 1947, occurs in the aftermath of a night of heavy drinking in which he breaks two ribs. This is simply part of the “military tradition of Flying & Drinking and Drinking & Driving” (41). For Wolfe, Yeager is “the right stuff”: brash but unpretentious, reckless, and mostly importantly, talented like few other pilots. “Manliness, manhood, manly courage,” as he puts it, “there was something ancient, primordial, irresistible about the challenge of this stuff, no matter what a sophisticated and rational age one might think he lived in” (21). This cowboy-like milieu of “hot young fighter jocks” presents a strong point of contrast to Wolfe’s description of Jane Conrad (22).
The end of Chapter 3 transitions to the new challenges of the Space Age. With the sound barrier conquered, the next frontier of aeronautic exploration is outer space. This is signified by the launch of the first artificial satellite, Sputnik I, into space by the Soviets in October 1957, 10 years after Yeager’s historic flight to Mach 1.
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