JOHN BISSET/Stuff
Brian Beattie hosted Chuck Yeagar at Dry Creek Station in 2005 and has a signed picture of him.
It s been 15 years since retired Mackenzie farmer Brian Beattie hosted legendary pilot Chuck Yeager on his high country station. Beattie, 85, owned the 13,779-hectare Dry Creek Station at the headwaters of the Orari River, when Yeagar turned up for a hunting trip in 2005. Yeager, the first pilot to break the sound barrier, died aged 97 on December 7, and his death has brought back memories for Beattie who remembers Yeager as being a “fit chap’’. “I liked him,’’ Beattie said.
READ MORE: ”We were talking on the same wavelength, I knew what he was about, and he knew what I was about.”