Walker: The most outstanding thing that happened on this whole flight was the magnitude of the jolts and bangs that occurred in the airplane, including two or three after I went to the jettison position. Some of it might have been my own fault because after I shut down the engine the stage 2 igniter malfunction light came on and stayed on and I never reset the engine, so we could have possibly built up a back pressure that relieved when I went to jettison, although I am not positive about that.

I decided that waiting five minutes for a fire truck might make the difference in getting the launch. Considering that we were down to 40 seconds and the clouds were moving in up there, I could still see the lake, but I didn't know what was going to happen in ten minutes.

During the roundout, we went up to what I estimate to be about 1400 q, and I flew by the indicated 6°a which coincided with the horizontal crossbar on the 3 axis ball.

When I got up to the planned q I just pulled on back on the stick and got the nose uphill in a hurry and it stopped the advance of dynamic pressure. It seemed like it was very controllable as to how far you could let q build up and then bring it to a stop, especially since the nose had come up higher before that anyway.

During this time the only thing that occurred from the SAS was a lateral chug, chug, chug noise but there was no great change in bank angle magnitude at all, just a noticeable acceleration back and forth. There was no oscillation in pitch.

I made it to almost 30° q by 45 seconds, so it may be that the last run we made on the simulator was very close to the airplane.

I pushed over, and at this point, I had to fly a couple of degrees positive on a in order to fly zero g and I flew minus g by the indicator at zero angle of attack as we charged on up there. I could see the clock moving in. I got into position ready to stop at 80 seconds.

But I hadn't made it to 5,000 ft/sec yet when we came to 78 seconds, so I just let it run on and finally knocked it off at about 5,200 ft/sec indicated, which was in a good q regime, just above 500 psf. In the midst of this, I got the gain down and knocked off the Yar and the Yaw and did the rudder pulse, and was sitting there concentrating on not inadvertently moving the control system. I don't know whether I cut down on the amount of rudder input over what we practiced, but the directional excursion certainly wasn't as great and it gradually damped down. About this time I notice I was down around -4°a with no sensation that I was at negative g. This caused me to wonder whether the angle of attack was reading correctly, and subsequent events, if they are correct, confirm this. Every time I got up between 12° and 15° a the directional oscillation that ensued was similar to that that I had been led to expect from the simulator at 10° and 15°, and 20°a.

I didn't get any response from the lateral pulse at 5°a. At 10°a it kind of sloshed around so I didn't do a pulse, but just damped the motion. I had extreme difficulty getting it trimmed at the angle of attack and getting a pulse in there.

Meanwhile they were calling for a course correction and I decided to try to pull into a higher angle of attack while doing the turn, trying to combine two events, and the same thing happened again. Every time I got up to about 15°a we went to about +2°-3° sideslip and the associated side-to-side acceleration was great enough to be bothersome. It didn't seem to have any effect on the control input particularly, as I was able to counteract the indicated sideslip oscillation either by the side stick or both sticks.

Most of the time there were numerous bangs and crashes and high pitch angle jiggles and jogs occurring to the great distraction of the pilot.

I kept hearing these callouts from NASA 1 that I am low on the flight path, but the q is riding where I want it, and we came along to a couple of speeds that were a shade high, so I did do a couple of up and down change in angle of attack, and then continued on.

I don't know what to say about the fact that there was almost 10,000 feet discrepancy between the pressure altimeter and the radar, but I'm glad I flew the pattern by the pressure altimeter.

All I can say is that I believe it would be advantageous to do a couple of cross checks between the airplane attitude and the conditions existing in our indicated angle of attack, as I seemed to be using a tremendous amount of control for the amount of indicated that I had. I just flat ran out of trim and had to use force above 10° indicated angle of attack at one point.

I think we got the objectives. We checked the notch filter for dynamic pressure in lieu of Mach number and we did a reasonable amount of drag investigation at medium and low angle of attack -- and we struggled with the control system with the yaw damper off.

I turned the Yaw or Yar back on once to stop the directional oscillation and then turned it back off. Also, I had numerous trip outs on the pitch and roll dampers and pitch tripped out on me on the rollout and final approach. I reset the SAS but roll tripped out, I think, at ground contact. The whole thing seemed sick.
 
 

JW:dg

Typed: 7-18-62