PILOT'S FLIGHT COMMENTS

Flight 1-36-57 June 25, 1963

J. A. Walker

August 8, 1963

I think Russ had a more interesting time trying to get off the runway than anybody else had the whole day. He was worse than I am on NASA-1 for disappearing from the other end of the horn. I really can't say that there is any adverse difference from one airplane to another anymore. I was able to do the customary rapid roundout into the climb attitude and double check theta. We were on the heading in great shape and then proceeded to get carried away with making sure I got the pushover at the right place and drifted a couple of more degrees to the right so that accounted for getting off track. There wasn't much turn we could do in zero g in the pushover. But later on I made 2 left turn corrections of about 2░ each and I got parallel on heading again. The reason I called out "what's my q?" shortly after engine shutdown is the airplane was handling in a manner which led me to believe that the q had to be under 300 lbs. per square foot but the indication I had was speed of the order which would have indicated 600. The airplane was handling very sloppy which I learned long ago accompanied low q. After we drifted down and the indicator picked up what would have been another 100 lbs. it began to fly. The rest of the time was a case of staying level as much as I could. In executing the push downs I hoped they lasted long enough for the sweep of the rake and sure enough we were standing practically on top of the base at high velocity when we came by Cuddeback lake. At this point one of the most interesting things occurred when I went to full speed brakes out and above mach 3 to decelerate at reasonably low angle of attack, I had a periodic directional oscillation which didn't seem to be constant cycle and it didn't seem to be constant amplitude, just downright medium wormy directionally with the brakes pulled out. As soon as I went into higher angle of attack turn it smoothed out and it wasn't anything noticeable, as unexcited and smooth as ship 3 was under the same sort of conditions. Aside from a more or less constant use of some speed brakes all the way around the pattern to get down to proximity of the ground the traffic pattern was no strain and reference that call out to get that car out of the way, if it didn't move I was going to have to. Considerable banging and popping and smoke in the cockpit occurred on the way down the track until we got definitely down to near 3000 feet per second.