Contrails over the Mojave

In Contrails over the Mojave George Marrett takes off where Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff ended in 1963. Marrett started the Air Force Test Pilot School at Edwards AFB only two weeks after the school's commander, Col. Chuck Yeager, ejected from a Lockheed NF-104 trying to set a world altitude record. Marrett describes life as a space cadet experiencing fifteen Gs in a human centrifuge, zero-G maneuvers in a KC-135 Vomit Comet, and a flight to 80,000 feet in the F-104A Starfighter. After graduating from Yeager's Charm School, he was assigned to the Fighter Branch of Flight Test Operations, where he flew the latest fighter aircraft and chased other test aircraft as they set world speed and altitude records.