Pilot: William Dana

Date: August 21, 1968

This is Flight 1-79 flown on August 21. It went about as smoothly as most. We had a little trouble with No. 1 APU compartment warning light. It would not Push to Test, but the malfunction was in the push to test circuit rather than in the warning circuit itself. Herm checked out the actual signal and it did give us a warning light so we went. As luck would have it then, after Herm troubleshot it, it would Push to Test so we ended up with a good airplane from that respect.

The next problem we had was a little radio trouble outbound. It eventually came to my attention that when I went to squelch disable we seemed to solve all radio problems simultaneously, so I let that be a word to the wise and left it that way. I remained on X-15 radio and squelch disable from twenty minutes to launch until after landing, and the noise level was never really objectionable. I probably read every transmission that was made today from the time I went to squelch disable on. I think that was probably the only time that's happened to me also. So I intend to fly with it that way as a matter of policy from now on.

The other problem we had was that the alpha gage was reading 5.5 to 6° in the turn. This sounded a little high even for in the turn. It turned out to be a combination of low B-52 airspeed and probably a very slight misalignment of X-15 alpha gage. After we got on speed and rolled, alpha was reading 3° before launch which sounds like it was in within a degree of being correct.

After launch and really, there were not very many problems. I got a little high on theta. About 1' high on theta for a while and I did not get it down just as quickly as I should. I kept the heading hanging in there pretty nicely. There was more thrust misalignment today than I have ever seen, but we got the thrust misalignment taken out with rudder.

The test was pretty good. When John called 90 thou I did not get my altitude but my Mach was 3.2 which was about 100' a second fast but well within what I considered acceptable limits.

I shut down on velocity and I never noticed what the tailoff took me to. I shut down on 4950 and I don't know how fast we went thereafter. The plane was loose by my standards which is Ship 3's standards. From then on, from the time we shut it down until Cuddeback, why the plane struck me as being quite loose. We got the Yaw RAS on immediately and the auto cut-off on, and worked our way down to about 2 - 3° alpha and turned the Pitch RAS on. Maintained 2 - 3° alpha until peak altitude and was sure that our tracking was keeping all three axes pretty much as desired. Somewhere in the high altitude trajectory I noticed that the beta needle was right and the precision heading needle was to the left. I checked my eight ball heading and it indicated that the yaw needle was working correctly, and that's the one I wanted to believe anyway so I centered that. Then I did not notice beta until back down around 200 thous somewhere, at which time it was reading correctly again. Alpha appeared to work correctly intermittently throughout the entire profile. Even over the top occasionally alpha looked like it was reading about right, but it was antagonized by pitch BCS inputs. When you would give it a good nose down blip why alpha would rattle around pretty good.

We got over the top, and by the way I saw 263.9 on my inertial altitude going over the top. We settled down on attitude and tried to track within our desired limits but I don't think we made it. I saw 3° in roll and pitch a couple of times, and at least a degree and a half in yaw. Yaw was the axis I was working hardest on.

Coming back in it seemed to wiggle around quite a bit including as we got aerodynamic. I was quite shocked at the call that we were at 130 and 1 g, because the airplane was so loose I felt like we should have been a lot higher than that. But I turned the RAS off and tried to keep my g up coming in. I let my g's get down. I knew that I was going a little low on profile and I didn't correct it. Why I did not correct it, why I don't know. I think because I knew I was high on energy and I wanted to keep a little g on the airplane. I got John's heading and distance calls coming into Cuddeback. We got our speed brakes out. We were a little late getting the turn starting downhill, so most of the way in from Cuddeback we were high and fast, but towards the end there we got down and hit high key at about 35 and Mach l. From then on it was, as far as I was concerned, just another traffic pattern. I was more concerned about Chase 4, who was having engine trouble at the time, than I was about myself. We came around the pattern quite normally. Got a good flap and gear deployment and touched down right on the marker.

Other than the minor discrepancies I mentioned - eight ball nose and radio, why I could not detect a thing wrong with the airplane. Yes. The experiment went up on John Manke's call at an indicated 235 thousand feet. I felt it go up quite smartly. It went down on his call and I don't remember that altitude, John, but the switch went down when Manke called it, and the lights went out long before we got to 210. I did not check the altitude but peripherally I caught both lights going out a long time before we got back to 210,000.