PILOT'S FLIGHT
COMMENTS
Flight No. 2-36-63
February 17, 1965
Pilot: Lt/Col. Rushworth
Rushworth: All things
in the prelaunch seemed to be normal until I got the hydraulic system on.
The sideslip needle was off to the left to the bottom part of the airplane
indicator. This was about two degrees the best I can guess at it. This
is the little button on the bottom of the glass. Right after launch I looked
to see if I was still going to have that same sideslip and it wasn't there
so the only thing I can think of was the airplane was on the hooks a little
bit differently, or getting flow on the nose. Things seemed real normal
right after launch and on the climb out. Sideslip was practically zero.
On the climbout I got to my theta at the 28 second point just about the
time Jack called. The sun was right in my eyes and I couldn't see the instruments.
I pushed over to zero angle of attack and Jack gave me one call there but
I don't remember what it was now. But I got a check at Mach 3 and according
to my inertial altitude I was right on the track. At about 3400 ft/sec
the engine went blurp and I got a little deceleration. I looked at the
g meter and I was just a little below 0g. I may have made a little pulse
right there but it seemed to be too soon for the engine to be getting affected
by the 0g conditions. All the way up the track, going for altitude my checks
were right on. When Jack called me peaking out on top, I was reading a
little over 96,000 feet and still climbing a little bit. The conditions
matched what I saw in the simulator so everything was looking real good.
I got up to 5° angle of attack and started the pulses. I gave a little
pulse in pitch. The airplane responded real slowly so I gave it another
jab and I got a good oscillation going which seemed to be at least neutrally
damped and possibly a little divergent. I didn't let it go as long as I
normally would have, or as long as I normally did in the simulator because
it didn't look like what I had expected to see. I turned the pitch damper
on first to low gain, stopped the oscillation right away, and then I flipped
it on to high gain. I turned the yaw damper and the roll damper off. Let
me go back to before I turned the dampers off. All the way up the track
I seemed to be getting little indications of roll and the airplane seemed
to be very, very loose in roll stability with the damper on. I don't know
whether some of this was coming from the heat effects or what it was but
I kept getting little motions in roll and constant requirements for correcting
in roll all the way up. "Zero alpha." Yes. Also constant sideslip oscillations
all the way up. When I turned the roll and yaw damper off at the normal
time, the airplane didn't seem to be any worse than it had been. It seemed
to be well trimmed in roll. I gave it a very small pulse and immediately
got a large deflection in roll, I guess about 30°. I made one correction
at that and tried to get another rudder pulse in which didn't deflect the
airplane too much but the roll stability seems to be practically nil. I
turned the roll damper back on and started pulling up for angle of attack
and about the time I got the call from Jack that I was going down hill,
turned the yaw damper on and got up to just about 8° angle of attack
and turned them off again. I took one look at the airplane and just started
to give it a pulse and the gear came out. Jack was talking away and things
were going along real nice and I couldn't seem to get a word in there to
tell him that I had a little problem. It took several seconds to get the
airplane righted and dampers back on, very much similar to the nose gear
coming out. Once I got it righted, I realized that I had a tremendous sideslip,
I guess 4° and it took a lot of rudder deflection to get sideslip to
zero. This persisted all the way down until I got subsonic. Once I had
gone subsonic the airplane handled reasonably well. While supersonic, I
had a little more trouble getting angle of attack to come in. When the
gear went out I think that the q was between 600 and 700 and it seemed
to take a long time to get q down to 400. I just couldn't seem to pull
the airplane up in angle of attack with all that sideslip causing me problem.
All the way down from, I guess the last 50 miles, the radio transmission
on 286.8 was absolutely horrible. I could hear Jack talking but I couldn't
understand a word he said. I think it was the receiver: I don't think that
I was that excited about it. The pattern seemed to be pretty normal. From
my practices yesterday I was continually undershooting. I seemed to be
high all the way around but I figured I undershot a little bit. I got the
pressurization handle back on after touchdown. At about 10,000 feet, I
switched on SAS cutout and a hard pushover on touchdown. At the low q conditions
between M = 4 to M = 1.5 I had to use a lot of aileron deflection to counter
the large rudder deflection. In order to make the turn to the base I had
to release most of the left rudder and skid to the right.