That’s my recollection as well. The movie made Gus Grissom look like a panicky screw-up (and made Chuck Yeager look like a deity).
That’s actually been my impression of Gus Grissom until now. It sounds like he suffered an unfair character assassination by the book and the movie, made all the movie tragic by his death in Apollo 1.
I think it’s a mistake to take the film The Right Stuff as any sort of reference to the real people. Been a while since I’ve seen it, but I remember it as cartoon-ish and sometimes silly. Another thing was Yeager as a near deity - he was certainly revered in the test pilot community, but he was also an incredible asshole. Insufferable to everyone but a few close to him like Jackie Cochran. I’ve met numerous people who met or knew Yeager and not one has ever said the first nice thing about him. The film did show Yeager screwing up in the F-104, but didn’t capture just how unpleasant a person he really was.
Gus Grissom was known to be a very serious person, a fighter and test pilot and engineer. IIRC, he was the one who decreed you weren’t an astronaut until you went into space - being selected wasn’t good enough (might have been Schirra, who was similarly gung-ho and sensitive to rank and hierarchy). After the event with the Mercury capsule he said, at a press conference, that he was quite scared when his suit filled up with water and nearly dragged him under. That was a pretty startling admission for one of the Mercury astronauts.
For what it’s worth, I believe him that the door malfunctioned. Even with the capsule sinking to the bottom of the ocean, he must have known any exaggeration or lie could have been easily proven false.
Of course, it came out in 1983 (when I was just 15)—and which was pre-internet, of course—so I took it as a near-documentary. Which is a real disservice to Grissom—especially since he was unable to defend himself.
I’ve no idea why Yeager got the hagiographic star treatment whereas Grissom was pilloried. It seems remarkably unfair.
The Right Stuff starts off in the days before the Mercury program when test pilots were dying on the average of one a week. Wolfe put the spotlight on Yeager because he was top dog of the test pilot brotherhood. When the Mercury program started up, a number of the test pilots chose not to apply because they knew they weren’t actually going to “fly” the capsules. Instead they were going to be, as Yeager supposedly said, “spam in a can”.
I recommend reading/listening to the book to get a better understanding of the dynamics of the personalities involved.
Yeager later became very covetous of his role in running a test pilot school that many potential astronauts went through before selection. He came to see himself as a sort of gatekeeper. Andrew Chaikin’s book about the Apollo astronauts describes Bill Anders being selected for NASA without having been to the school and Yeager then trying to get his selection rescinded.
So he may have been disdainful of “spam in a can” in the early years, but he sure seemed to have a chip on his shoulder later about missing out. I recommend reading further to get a better understanding of the dynamics of what a huge prick Yeager really was.
I’m not sure the film showed Yeager “screwing up.” My read of the film’s intention for that scene is that, while the sissy astro-naughts are being serenaded in a huge party with a famous fan dancer (not even a real stripper!), for the job of being spam in a can, Yeager is out there doing real test flights, putting his life on the line (and nearly dying). The film even takes the liberty of saying Yeager took the plane up without clearance, because who needs rules? Which was not true, of course. The actual flight depicted was a scheduled, supported flight. What good is taking a test flight if no one is recording data?
I enjoy the film, but a lot of it is annoying happy hooey.
And yeager supposedly said he would never have a Black test pilot.
IOW, fully on-brand for Tom Wolfe.
Whatever the intention of the film, Yeager definitely screwed up with that F-104. We’re probably flirting with a hijack of this thread, so I’ll make this my last contribution on the subject. Here’s a web site with a series of articles / journal entries by Bob Smith, one of Yeager’s test pilot cohorts.
Smith makes the case that Yeager was unprepared for the zoom flights in the 104 and completely failed to understand how the plane handled when departing usable atmosphere. While acknowledging Yeager’s skills with regular aircraft, Smith described him as being uninterested in briefings, making the same mistakes over and over again, and directing wrath toward those not in his favor. He also disagreed with much of Yeager’s description of the incident in his book. Here are a couple of quotes:
Chuck Yeager had proven that he was the master of airplanes, many times. In my close dealing with him in attempting his zoom flights he proved another thing. In briefing him repeatedly, I began to fear that he could not or would not accept that he needed to learn new techniques to fly a craft into a space-like environment. But as his attempts progressed I noticed that he was unable to perform the vital and necessary job of accurately flying a very steep climb, totally on instruments. He failed miserably on that and it caused his accident and loss of the airplane, and ultimately the loss of that project. I was terribly concerned that he was not equipped for the space portion of the flight, but we never had the chance to find that out.
And…
In my opinion Chuck was one of the great test pilots of our time but proved he was out of his element in the AST.
Incidentally, I’ve read Yeager’s autobiography. Kind of amazing that he comes off as a spiteful, backstabbing prick in his own book.