I've seen few episodes of aircrash investigation (mayday), and I've seen multiple times pilots trying to crash where they will do less damage on ground.

My problem with the OP's comment is that a couple of different things are stated as universal truths, even though they definitely aren't.

There’s many voice recordings, instrument logs, and even ATC conversations of people aiming doomed aircraft away from populated areas. Military pilots may have different priorities as they can eject, but many civilian pilots have spent their final moments trying to minimize casualties.

Exceptions defiantly exist, but it’s a very common reaction.

Yeah these are by far the most harrowing ones to listen to. You can hear the resignation in their voices before they steel themselves to try anything left to avoid loss of life on the ground.

Real rough shit.

I do expect having an ejection seat might alter behavior, as well as the encouragement of an ATC. And Yeager was a test pilot who was part of a community of test pilots...

In my memory, my impression of Yeager's brief anecdote was that "the pilot heroically sacrificed himself to save the lives of innocents on the ground" was a common enough bullshit news story that he wanted to debunk it. A pilot would be focused on saving himself and his aircraft to the fullest extent possible.

Test pilots are also generally avoiding populated areas where civilian airports are often very close or even inside them. The trope of military jets crashing into a desert, ocean, or farmers field represents the most likely outcomes.

Maybe Chuck Yeager was a selfish asshole.

There are many incidents that prove this wrong. The comment above yours is one example.

Chuck Yeager emphatically was a selfish asshole, but...

> There are many incidents that prove this wrong.

No, there aren't, and your saying so is just a failure in logic. Literally every instance of a crash would have to play out the way you insist it should, with a pilot taking into account the presence of population centers before ejecting, in order to "prove this wrong." (incidentally, I read your comment about having read every incident report involving an ejection since 1999. This is the sort of comment that, in the absence of further information, arouses skepticism and not trust.)

The tag team duo of MiG pilots who crashed in Michigan a couple of weeks ago didn't even agree on whether it was time to eject. They certainly hadn't placed the plane on some kind of safe trajectory (it landed literally right next to an apartment building). For that matter, maybe that incident is somehow an argument for selfishness: if they hadn't punched out right when they did, they would have been outside the envelope for a safe ejection.

So you posit that the ejection seat adds some selfishness to the pilots? Because I’m not kidding there are a lot of incidents where we have inflight recordings of pilots without ejection seats steering away from populated areas in their last action, as well as the incident where an Israeli pilot with an ejection seat choose not to eject (and died) moving his plane off line.

Then, I’ll just tell you in my personal experience in the airplane, I’ve seen 2 pilots risk their lives moving away from a town and not die (luckily) but crash and destroy their airframe. The other pilots I flew with, I’d say 95 out of 100 would do the same.

Maybe Chuck was just a selfish asshole.