Date: August 25, 1966

Pilot: John B. McKay

Well, as far as the before launch, I don't have any particular inputs on what happened there. Everything went real smooth. Mike Adams called up and during the BCS part of it he did state that what he was calling out, as a nose up and a right yaw at the same time, he wasn't familiar with the way the side rocket looked. He got a little closer, and his input was that we were not getting ..... at all, it was just his inexperience in reading the thing out. So I think we got to get BCS all the way. The launch itself was real fine. The direction, the compass was right on there. Did not have to make any adjustments. ... the windshield and everything like that. I'd like to confess here, just about the time that I had gotten a call from Bill, saying that I had a good light, I was just bringing the handle out of jettison back into pressurize and got ready to hit the throttle. So thank you, Bill, that gave me a little confidence. That was after you said we had no telemetry. Well I don't think we had jettison more than a microsecond. I looked up at the tanks and I don't think they even blipped, and I got it back into pressurize and immediately got the throttle on, and that was why I was asking Bill for some, I forgot, that we did not have telemetry, and I kept asking Bill for a thrust readout of chamber pressure. I don't think he read me because he did not come back. Well anyway, be that as it may, I went to about 13 or 14 degrees on the stabilizer and got 11 - 12° when Bill asked me to watch my alpha. I was reading I think between 12 -13. Bill, I did not get any buffet at all. The time of theta was right on. Just about the time you mentioned 'check your theta, standby for theta', I was reading about 28 and I came right on. The boost phase was really without anything else. I corrected a little right or left roll once in a while. Just before shutdown I had a little funny thing that happened. I started diverging out a little, some degree of left yaw. Put a little right rudder into it and it aggravated it. I am sure this was misalignment of the rocket engine. Well, I said, this wasn't the way to go here. I don't know whether we were getting a little delta ... effect in there or what, but it wasn't very much, about a degree and a half, so I just let it go and I really did not feel it at shutdown. Other than that, the boost phase was real normal. I shutdown on time at 84 seconds and I think it went on up to about 84.5. I don't know whether this was the plume off or not, but I looked up and we were just coming off. Well, I got the experiment on, and looked at the velocity and it was just coming 5100, so I think we shut down somewhere on the required velocity. mentioned that we were reading about 5150 on radar. I did not see what the shutdown velocity was, I kept my eyes glued from 80 seconds on up to the shutdown; I kept it glued on the timer. Well after shutdown I got the micrometeor experiment on before Bill's call and then I immediately went to zero beta, got the delta psi on and I went to RAS. The RAS seemed to work real well. I took my time and got each channel on but we did not get any transient on each of them, so at the time I began to put a little confidence in it. From then on it was just strictly a per simulator flight. We went over the top. I was seeing 253 just about the time Bill was saying we still had a little climb left. I was essentially going through zero. Everything looked real good. (It was awfully hard to tell there Jack, it looked like when I called you there, you were climb .......... ) Well, when you read 257, I figured, well, there goes that minus 6000 that we can always chop off radar. So, I figure we hit the flight plan profile fairly well. Coming back in as we began to lose altitude I gradually worked up on the trim, got 20° about the time we got to around 180, cut the experiment off at 170, went back to standby on delta psi, and the beta needle took a little blip off to the right and came back and centered. Oh yes, there was one thing I did forget; before drop and after drop we were reading right down the middle on beta. There was none of this asymmetry in yaw. We were still flying 003, that's the funny thing about that. ? Well I have always thought that even when you were reading the ball in the middle, there was something with the pylon there, but we were reading right on today. As far as the re-entry, I had a little trouble holding 20°, full back stabilizer trim, and I let my attention to the forecast around Antelope Valley, I was trying to find the field and I looked back and the alpha meter would have drifted back down to about 15 or 16, that would bring it back up. About the second time this happened I got the call from Bill to keep it coming down. I don't think I got over a thousand q. It felt like a real comfortable re-entry. Just before we started picking up some q and also as we were going over the top, I could feel RAS working. It wasn't as tight as we may have had it in the #2, but it certainly did the job real well. There was one little phenomena, I could feel pitch up, RAS input and the airplane would lurch just a little, just a hair and the alpha meter would go up to about 20-25° as though the plume of the bottom of the nose rocket would go off and try to tell the ball nose to do something, and it was transmitting it back to the cockpit, but I am sure that this is not what we were actually doing. The re-entry, like I was saying, was real normal, there was no trouble as far as energy management. I decided to get my brakes in just about the time I started my left hand turn back into the field, and it was about 3.5 or 4 g. I can't really say that it was a real comfortable turn, but I had to let up on it once in a while to breathe. By that time Pete called me and I went to jettison. I got Bill's call to get the pulse for Dr. Kordes, however, by the time I got turned around and headed downwind I was transonic so I had to give these pulses up. It was all an energy management deal and I did not feel like getting them in a 3.5 g turn. We did get some buffet going transonically and maybe we got enough there to satisfy his requirements. In fact it appears that the buffet seems to persist a little longer than usual. Well, from there on it was strictly standard. I could have held it off for another couple of hundred feet and hit the smoke bomb there, but Pete was doing such a good job of telling me I was diverging toward the ground there, I let it settle on in. Touchdown I guess about 190. For the first time since I've been flying these birds, that thing went right down in the middle of the runway. (No wind today) I am not sure wind is always the factor. I think maybe old Herman really serviced all your struts pretty well today. Other than that it was just a carbon copy of the last one we did. Probably a carbon copy of the next one if we come out of Smith's Ranch. ? I saw about 4.5, we may have hit five but I was trying to keep my eye on angle of attack, and it was such a clear day I was trying to look out and see, you know, pick up a few points here and there. But I never did see 5, but that does not mean we did not get it. But whatever I had, I held for a brief period of time. I say a thousand and it may have been just a little under a thousand q that we actually hit. I believe we may have gone a little higher than this as I kept getting a call from Bill to keep coming down. I did put the nose down. I skipped just a little bit, but on my right turn I think we may have hit maybe a little over a thousand, but it was comfortable. I would say that just about the time I got the call from Bill that I was Mach 3 and I forgot the altitude. I was reading about 65 in the cockpit on inertial. I forgot the input that someone gave me but it was quite a bit different than what the pressure was. From there on it began to decay out. ? Coming back down? It appeared to be working real well then. In fact, my two checks that Bill gave me at 80 and 110 were right on the money as far as velocity and altitude. In fact they were even closer than what the simulator showed. They seemed to home right in. ? ASAS looked good. ASAS looked real good on the re-entry. ? Never got a computer malfunction. I guess you heard these read-outs that we were giving after. ? I could not tell there. In fact, I did not even notice I was not on inertial at all on the final part of the flight. ? Right. The only thing I could say, Marv, about the inertial is that when they begin to decay they decay very fast. But it did the job. ? Yes I did. ... deceleration as you are picking up a little bit dynamic pressure, you really have to concentrate on holding the alpha. Every time I let up on it just a little bit why it was going past 20 and then I came back again when I got this Mach trim change, around Mach, oh about 3.5 or 4 coming back down through 90. From there on you really have to press in a real conservative concern effort to really hold that angle of attack in there. You can't have your head out of the cockpit and be star gazing like I was.