The information that I got from the ball, artificial horizon was when I had theta vernier pegged out at zero, I was showing just a little over 20° on the ball. Trying to cross check and see which was wrong with the 3 indications that I had, the ball, and pitch vernier, and angle of attack I could never convince myself that I was right or wrong until I got the pushover point and decided that it didn't make any difference then, I had already gone by the time. The next check at Mach 3 was on, the check at Mach 4 was on, and everything went normal after that. I shutdown at an indicated 5700 fps and it looked like it went up close to 5800 fps before it slowed down. Everything was fairly normal after that, except I couldn't get the rate of descent that I wanted until I got back to about Mach 4.

In the landing pattern I seemed to be a little bit faster than usual, I don't know why. When I got closer to the ground, I had more speed than I had planned for and I was also lined up with a strip on the runway so trying to maneuver off that and getting the flaps down at the same time I ballooned a little bit and finally decided I had played with it long enough and just stabbed it on the ground about 210 knots. I thought I was pretty close to the smoke. I did get the full right stick in at 150 knots. The airplane was tracking pretty straight at the time, but I had the impression that it would have gone left had I not done anything. The rolloff to the right wasn't sharp at 150 knots, I think we could go back to 175 in that area.

During the profile shortly after burnout, and for about 2 minutes, there was a continual small amount of smoke or something that resembled smoke coming up from the bottom of the cockpit which lasted until I got to Cuddeback. Also in this time period I got the crack in the windshield and I would estimate that it was between 80,000 and 90,000 feet at around Mach 4-1/2 when it cracked. I wasn't looking at it at the time, but I had just checked on the mirror before that and as I checked it again, the crack had appeared. I checked the mirror on the way up and all I could see was clouds in the distance. I couldn't get a definition of the horizon and I checked it again at 100,000 feet when I leveled off and got the same look at the same clouds. The clouds stood out but I could never find the horizon to say that I had seen the horizon. Today the visibility was worse than what we normally have when we are flying.

I pushed over on time and I shut down on speed.

Question: Visibility because of the clouds, Bob?

Rushworth: No, visibility because of the haze.

Question: Did you notice any oscillations on beta?

Rushworth: I wasn't on beta during the flight, I was on beta on launch and we had the usual 3/4 of a degree off. It seemed to be normal. I will add a couple of more things; in the angle of attack error that we had, it seemed to be hunting also, perhaps not hunting, but wandering about a ±1/2° and beta needle was moving but it wasn't even moving the width of the needle, but it was wandering or hunting a little. At slow rate of about 1 cycle per 5 seconds. It wasn't that much. From burnout all the way through the glide portion of the flight I observed a continual slow oscillation, small, in pitch which gave me the impression that we were flying with about 1/2 of the normal damping in pitch. So, since my last flight, something has happened to the damping or at least to the airplane. It's not giving us the same damping as I had on my last flight on the same mission.

Question: Did it seem to smoke more or less?

Rushworth: The smoke amount wasn't any greater, it just lasted longer. Normally it's all finished in about 3O seconds and this continued on for as long as a couple of minutes after shutdown. I have seen it higher in intensity, but I have never seen it last quite this long.

Vensel: Jack, how did the launch panel go?

Russel: Fine, I don't know how the radio was out there for you, but NASA-l was good.

Rushworth: There were a couple of times that NASA-l spoke that I didn't hear what he said, it sounded like he started talking before the radio started working.

Engle: We had a bad microphone there for a while, we changed microphones.

Rushworth: I could hear good all the time, there were times when transmissions seemed to be hollow, but I could hear good all the time. I hear better in the X-15 radio than I could on the B-52 radio.