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.