Parts of General Yeager’s Oral History with the Air Force have been declassified. Here is the first installment:
Yeager: I was getting a little bit worried they were going to put her (Jackie Cochran) in jail. (laughter) I was about ready to go home anyway. So we whistled out of there to Spain and then came back through Scotland and Keflavik, Iceland. We went from Keflavik across the ice cap of Greeland into Sondrestrom. I was doing all the navigating.
Q: You never broke down?
Yeager: No. It was a good airplane. We had a good crew chief.
Then from Sondrestrom up north of the Arctic Circle down to Goose Bay and then back into New York. It was a nice trip. It was beautiful to see and interesting as hell. We took a lot of films.
In the target folders, many of the targets, airbases, that we flew across, we had a camera rigged in Jackie’s (Cochran) Lodestar, a 35-millimeter. Many of the targets had colored pictures that I had taken on the trip in the target folders. It worked out real good.