Chuck Yeager, pilot who was first to break sound barrier, dies at 97

Yeager's postwar exploits helped pave way to space exploration and were immortalised in The Right Stuff

• Chuck Yeager: a life in pictures

Chuck Yeager, the American test pilot who became the first person to break the sound barrier and was later immortalised in Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff, has died aged 97.

The feat that guaranteed Yeager's fame happened in 1947 when the former second world war fighter ace climbed into a small Bell X-1 experimental rocket plane named Glamorous Glennis that was loaded in the bomb bay of a B-29 bomber and released over the Mojave desert.