Date: April 28, 1967

Pilot: Maj. M. Adams

For me the checklist went real good today. I never got behind at all. We could have if we'd worried about the radio which did not work too well from approximately, I think it was ten minutes down to about two minutes. In between I had a little trouble receiving, but I had a lot of chase support relaying and nothing sounded wrong, so I pressed on and it all worked out real well. We got down to the launch, dropped away with the engine, got a good light and rotated. I should mention that just before launch I looked up at the precision heading and roll, and again they were looking erratic. They were jumping maybe one to two units, both of them, and they looked noisy and when I see something noisy I hate to rely on it. Then during the rotation they still looked noisy, like they were not precise indications, so I flew mostly the eight ball to control my heading and my bank angle. When I got the call to make a slight correction, I didn't really correct it on the ball, I just turned to the right a little bit and rolled it back out and pressed on, and it looked like it worked out pretty good. I was keeping track of the time on theta and theta started coming down - it was approaching 20 some seconds so then I started concentrating on the vernier and then it looked like I had another problem come up. The theta vernier seemed to be overly sensitive. I could never get it in the center, and when I put in a small correction to correct toward it, it would jump to the other side and I started to chase it all around so finally I just more or less flew about five a and put in little inputs towards it once in a while to try to center it. So I think there is something wrong either with the setting and the sensitivity or just the sensitivity itself, because I could not control theta. I had the same problem on the last flight evidently. I just thought, in the last flight I did not do such a good job but now I just think that compared to the simulator and what I saw in the first flight, that there is something wrong with the sensitivity of theta. (?) Well I never really switched, I cross checked to see that I was holding the right a there to hold that q, but if I had the wrong q holding that a would still be wrong. I did have about 5 or 6 a somewhere in there. So I think the q vernier would bear watching. I also looked at the precision heading and roll, during the boost, for the rotation and it was still noisy so I gave up on that and I just went to the eight ball like I said before. In the burn while I was trying to hold q I checked b and it looked like I did have a little thrust misalignment. I'd say that I might have had about maybe 1° of nose left to contend with, and I'd take it out part of the time and I guess it was building with velocity and it started to slip back in, and I kept trying to correct it as we went along. There was a little problem, I think, with the inertial velocity readout. I noticed a little glitch in the turn, it jumped around maybe 50 feet per second. From about nine it would jump up to 950 fall back to nine. We rolled out on the launch heading it was down around 600 and it stayed fairly stable after that. But then during acceleration during the boost, it seemed to be sticking and erratic. I would not expect the rate of increase to be linear but it should show a constant increasing trend and it was not doing that. It was speeding up and then it would slow down and then it would jump again, and as it got near to 4600 I noticed it, up around 48 it made one final fast swoop up towards 5000. The time was looking about right so I shut down when it hit 5200, but the clock showed 83 seconds. An extra long burn time, and I think I got a little more overshoot than you normally get, so I think the inertial velocity might bear looking into. So due to my control or the q vernier or something, we got - we never went high enough. I was getting Jack's calls real good and I had made up my mind when I saw us peaking out, I had about 164, I wasn't going to extend the experiment, and he said not to and we didn't. Going over the top flying the eight ball I kept q about equal to zero on the eight ball and got up to about 20°. I could feel the onset of g during the reentry, and saw the H dot decreasing and I anticipated or I think I over.......... a little bit, because I started to level off and then I saw, well it was still down around 800, and it seemed to be holding there and so I came back in with some and I ended up holding 15 a for the rest of the reentry. Then when I was satisfied that it had re-entered, about 600, I pushed over and put out the speed brakes and started coming home. For some reason I heard, about in between 50 miles from Cuddeback, I could hear some kind of noise, sounded something like the BCS out there firing. I thought maybe I had, for some reason, had the RAS on then, and I looked down, the switches were off. It was kind of a swooshing noise, periodically. Then I turned off the BCS to see if that would help and it still seemed to be making that noise, so I turned the BCS on, forgot about the noise. I don't know when it went away. It seemed to have the right energies. It came over the high key. I got the call to put the speed brakes in a little early, which I didn't want to do, but it was a good call because I ended out over the high key with 40,000 and at about Mach one. Then in the pattern the only time I really felt like saying anything, which wasn't important anyway, I noticed that the transmitter had a lot it sounded like garbled back ground tones, so I don't think the radio then was transmitting in the aircraft very well. Used speed brakes in the pattern quite a bit. Probably left them out a little bit too long because I was a little bit short of energy at my aiming point out there. Got all the switches, flared, flaps, gear, and touchdown, and that is about all I have to say about the flight. Oh, I heard just one little thump. I don't know what it was. It just was a very very small thump going out, so I thought as long as Colonel Sorlie was out there, might as well take a look and see if it was something external. He didn't find anything and I never heard it but that one time so it didn't turn out to be anything. It was a very minor thump. (?) No. I did not seem to have any trim difficulties. I held my 10 a in the rotation instead of 11 as I was told to do. It seems like I over rotated and I never quite got back there, but I don't think I had less than 10, and it seemed like I had plenty of authority this time. (?) No. During the boost there was no trim roll to contend with.