2. Launch transients (q, f, y) - Nothing unusual in the launch transients.

3. Unforeseen incidents - No unforeseen incidents.

2. Rate control task (q, f, y) -

q 2 1/2 , f 3 , y 3 .

The reason for this was apparently I had a thrust misalignment and kept drifting off to the left and was working trying to get back over to the right.

3. Altitude profile versus simulator - Was not checking too well as far as time was concerned. The velocity and altitude checks from the inertial system looked pretty good. It looks like theta was off because I just looked at the cockpit film and, of course, you get a little parallax looking at the film which would indicate that I was a little low, but looking at it from my eye level it looked right. Yet, Hdot was a little low at shutdown and I actually overshot 5200 fps by about 50 or 60 feet per second during tail-off. So, if the simulator prediction had been right I should have gone at least to the 220,000 feet point. However, other than being late on time, I had the impression that I had a little low thrust and it could have been a low theta.

4. Unforeseen incidents - The only unforeseen incident was this tendency to drift off to the left.

2. Controllability (RAS ON) - Was getting a little squirrelly until I finally got RAS on. I turned roll and yaw on and it stopped it and held it real good. From there on up to the peak I probably only made 3 roll inputs and maybe 3 or 4 yaw inputs. I got a slow drift in beta. In pitch, I trimmed on down with the stabilizer and the airplane seemed to pitch over a little more abruptly than the simulator after shutdown. Then as I trimmed on down, I started a pitch rate and it overshot zero, but I kept on trimming down until I got to about +l degree on the stabilizer and the airplane ended up wanting to trim negative alpha, about 1 - 1 1/2 degrees. We'd seen this on the simulator and we weren't sure that it was just the simulator control rigging or what it was, but it did show up here. The controllability in pitch overall during the going up part would probably be about 3 or 3 1/3, roll 2.5, and yaw 3.

3. Operation of "comp. b" - I didn't turn on computed beta because I didn't get the call and I was trying to keep yaw pinned in pretty well.

4. Controllability during pitch maneuvers -

q 3 1/2 , f 2 1/2 , y 3 .

You are kind of working one of these against another. You use trim for some effect in starting a up and then you try to keep the rate down with reaction control and it's just not as nice as it could be pitch wise. It seems like the deadband in rate is a little larger than you'd like it to be. Pitch wise, it's not as good as you'd like it to be without RAS. You can pretty easily initiate a pitch oscillation with reaction control input and you spend a lot more time than desirable in the pitch mode.

During the reentry I left roll, yaw on even after I got the call to turn them off because I got into this pitch trim thing. It could be either the airplane trim or that I was still in the area of decreasing gamma because the airplane seemed to want to trim at about 23 to 24 degrees alpha with about 21 degrees stabilizer. So to try and settle pitch down, I left roll and yaw on, retrimmed the horizontal, and finally ended up engaging pitch RAS because I got into a little pitch oscillation in here. At this time you're starting to pick up q and if you decide your trim is off aerodynamically, then to get it back down in retrimming the stabilizer it's pretty easy to set up something so I decided rather than to fool around with it, go ahead and engage pitch RAS. Beta's starting to move in here and again, this is pretty much as you see in the simulator. However, it appears that the damping is a little lower, combined, in the airplane. It does tend to want to set up this beta oscillation in here as the q is rapidly changing.

"Want to comment on those RAS deadbands while you're at it?" Roll and yaw were real good. I think they're well within anything that you can get rate wise that would be acceptable. Pitch, I think, is too large rate wise. I think if you could clamp down on it, it would improve. In fact, I'd much rather see the RAS operate as attitude control rather than rate. You can get the information from the platform itself. This is really, in my mind, what you are working with in ballistic flight, attitude hold rather than rate. You're never working with very large rates, so you have to have a threshold for RAS to operate on rate wise and you get a lot of deviation within this threshold that I don't think you would get if you had an attitude system. There you could set a 2 or 3 degree attitude deadband and it wouldn't bother you at all, but in rate if you get a 1/2 degree a second in 4 or 5 seconds you can be 5 to 10 degrees off. I completed the reentry, but it seemed pretty normal. I didn't pick up the g that I should have during reentry because alpha did drop off. I finally picked up about 500 feet a second Hdot and opened the speed brakes to full and turned whatever RAS I had on at that time off. I think I still had yaw on and then went right to yaw SAS and roll SAS off and ASAS off and started a turn to the right. It felt pretty comfortable in here, surprisingly. The last time I did this damper off it felt awfully unusual and you felt you had much more roll rate than desirable. Of course, I wasn't trying to set up rapid rolls as I did the last flight. I rolled over fairly rapidly and stopped it and then rolled back pretty rapidly and got more rate than I really wanted out of it. This time I was probably a little more cautious and rolled it over and it didn't feel bad at all. In fact, roll and yaw would probably be no worse than 3 1/2 in this region. In looking at the cockpit film, it was between about 3.3 Mach number down to about 2.7, somewhere in there. It was only one direction of bank angle, but I was doing a little bit of turning in there. Alpha was probably about 4 to 5 degrees, and this is full speed brakes. Then I turned ASAS back on and was going to set up for the requested SAS on, brakes in, condition and because of energy I had to make a turn in here and by this time I got the brakes back in I was down to 1 1/2 Mach number. In here, everything is pretty good. You have no hesitation about racking it up and I'd say it's probably 2 in pitch and 2 1/2 in roll and 2 in yaw, in this condition. You really don't worry about rapid control inputs or anything else in this condition. You feel you can adequately ask and get what you want without over shooting or without initiating any sideslip or anything.

5. Glide energy management versus simulation - Was probably about as expected. You do have a little bit of a control problem getting rid of this much energy because you're hanging on the straps as I say, and it is a little uncomfortable to fly this way, you don't feel natural. But, there was very good agreement in this area.

6. Approach and landing - The approach was very normal up to the completion of the flare and on flap deployment, I got a trim change and a tendency to balloon. I dropped the gear on the way up and it seemed that following this there was even more of a tendency to hold that altitude or even gain altitude. I checked my trim to make sure I wasn't out of trim again and finally ended up rolling full nose-down trim on the little sidearm trim. I still couldn't get the nose over to start the airplane back down again, and ended up pushing with the left hand on the center stick. I'd guess I had 15 to 20 pounds on the center stick in addition to force on the side stick. I felt finally that I had lost side arm trim somewhere in here which would have accounted for it. "Had you noticed. it before?" No, it was fine in the pattern, I used trim during the entire approach. It was just after flap deployment and gear deployment that it seemed to have been loose. However, it should have been the other way in this case because I had pretty well trimmed up preflare for fairly high q. In fact, I was about 350 knots and trimmed for 1 g. So if I had lost trim it should have been pull required, but it wasn't. Roll seemed to be still in good shape right in there. It just seemed like the stabilizer was trimming in the wrong direction about this time.

B. Describe and rate the most adverse piloting task experienced on this flight.

I imagine the reentry would probably be the most adverse piloting task. Even with all the assistance you kind of feel like you're sitting on the end of a pin and you hope that all the stability that's predicted to be there is there. Theta, once you finally get it settled down and decide that you've got the alpha and don't have any retrimming and so on, holds pretty well and you can get off the RAS and do a pretty good job aerodynamically. At that time it's probably a 3. Prior to that when you are required to retrim anywhere in here, it gets pretty bad. If you decide, as I did in this case, that my stabilizer setting wasn't proper and giving me too much alpha and decide you need to retrim as q is increasing, you're setting up a pitch oscillation. I'll rate:

Initial q 4 , f 3 , y 3 1/2 - 4 .

Terminal q 3 , f 3 , y 3 1/2 .

It's about 4 in pitch, once you get everything settled down. In roll, it seemed to stay the same throughout here and doesn't get any worse than probably 3. Yaw, as I say, starts moving around regardless of whether you have yaw damping and yaw RAS, and I'd guess probably 3 l/2 to 4 on that. 3 l/2 at the start and then 4 as you're getting into this and it finally damps out and gets back to a good rating again. The magnitude never exceeds probably a degree in either direction, but, like I say, you are depending on the airplane to have what it's supposed to have.