PILOT COMMENTS

Flight 1-26-46

Pilot: Joseph Walker


Walker: The flight was made according to specifications except that pitching over at the same rate in the airplane as you do on the simulator will get you low on profile. I checked zero g and a and finally wound up, when ground control called low profile, hiking the g needle slightly on the plus side of zero and holding it there. I may have run just a bit past on the time for initial pushdown, but I climbed steady on g from that point on and then hit the pullout prior to burnout. The airplane started popping and banging from the time we went by 70,000 feet. I was already over 4,000 ft/sec indicated by then. I never noticed the shutdown altitude or speed because I was concentrating on g for the burnout conditions. I didn't get as much out of trim response in the pullup when I went to shutdown as I thought I would be getting. I ran out of trim at 18°, so I had to use a little added force. It was flying real fine too up to the time I decided to stop the sideslip with yaw reaction control. I am not sure how many cycles it took me to discover that all I was doing was driving it further out, but I rapidly decided that neither the aileron nor reaction controls were doing anything but hurting me. I went to a lower angle of attack, which was right when I wanted to get the brakes out anyway, and it was more squirrely with the brakes out than with them closed. I finally got squared away and got well up on angle of attack again using the aero stick. I got up at least 18° a again with the brakes out. From that point on, aside from the slight oversight of a lateral pulse in which there may have been some unintended lateral control inputs on the first pullup to 20°a and I did the rudder kick at 5g on the second pullup. I noticed I was starting to pull back uphill again, and figured I was pretty well downrange and that wasn't the thing I wanted to do anyway, so we may not have gotten enough cycles steady after the rudder kick. We were steady, however, when I hit the rudder.

I want to go on record as saying that it's not the technician's fault that the 3-axis ball indicator is cross-switched, and I don't think it's mine. The two of us, together, were out there running through the check and I asked him to turn the ball nose toward the right, and I read the needle going to the right which means to me the relative wind is from the right, and I move the reaction control to the right to drive the nose back into it. Nevertheless, in flight for some reason, that I haven't been able to deduce, the opposite occurred and I wound up having to quick rephrase my sensations and go opposite to the sideslip needle and then the reaction control worked real good.

I didn't use any pitch reaction control. I didn't have the wild pitch motion at any time coming down or going back up that we had on the simulator. There is a noticeable decrease in angle of attack as the speed brakes come out, but it takes longer to get them out in flight. At 20° pullup on the reentry, I didn't use any roll reaction control.

I did 2 or 3 angle-of-attack steps but it was at about 2.4 Mach indicated rather than up around Mach 3 and then we got all kinds of roll and a steps the rest of the way downhill because the trim knob was so loose I couldn't get my thumb past it and down on the stick without brushing the thing to start a pitch oscillation. It worked real nice, naturally, during the climbout because you could sit there and run your thumb just a little bit and get plenty of action.

During the climbout, I had no trouble flying b and I had no trouble flying heading. As a matter of fact, I drifted over to 173° or 174° during the climb and when I went into the pullup to 20° I banked to the right a little bit and hauled the thing right back over on heading. In controlling a I got so used to watching the graduated needle on the simulator that I never paid any attention to the horizontal crossbar on the 3-axis ball. Of course, you lose faith in the instrument when one of the indicators is haywire. On the pullouts coming back I noticed that the a crossbar was sensing properly and at 20° it was null.

The ASAS was 100% in the green on both checkouts. I was up a minimum of 18°a when I cut out the roll SAS the first time and about 13°a when I switched over the second time. There were no transients either time. You just notice a little jar on the airplane about the same as when the SAS trips out during the check on the B-52. The ASAS green light comes on and I found out another thing -- you can switch the roll SAS off, get it to go over to ASAS, but you do not get a pitch SAS-off indicator light. You can immediately go to reset and be all ready to get back onto standard SAS when you want it, by moving the ASAS switch to off. The green light stays on, going out when this clunk indicates the system is going back to the regular SAS. It makes it a little handier, actually, than having to stand by, with ASAS off for instance, and be in a pickle trying to reset normal SAS by going through the whole switching sequence again.

I don't recall getting any residual oscillations or limit cycles. I didn't even notice the change in gain on the alternate SAS. It came out working just exactly as we wrote the specifications.

Naturally the engine ran fine. The only strain was connected with the coming on of two emergency pressurization lights which occurred when I went to pressurize. The lox light never went out. I rode the whole flight with the light staring me in the face.

I had plenty of peroxide for the APUs. I never got a low light. I didn't use a terrible amount of BCS, however I used more than none.

I thought that NASA 1 sure did a bang up job today.
 
 

Joseph A. Walker

Aeronautical Research Pilot