November 3, 1965

Lt. Col. R. Rushworth
 

Through the preflight checklist I don't have any comments. I suspected that the velocity indicator was not going to work when it varied from 400 to 800, but I thought it would come back in. Just before launch I took another check on it and it was back to 400 so I wasn't surprised that it was not working after we launched.

We got down to about the 2 minute point and there was a very, very noticeable clear air turbulence. This was about 3 times as bad as the buffet on the tanks that we talked about all through the climb. I expected to see that buffet in the tanks leave at 230 knots, 43,000 feet, but it didn't change at all.

At launch, it was kind of a hard launch and I suspect a lot of it was because of the clear air turbulence, however I did fall a lot deeper than normal, which is to be expected, and I got a fairly significant roll-off at launch that I didn't catch until I was over a good 20° and came back up. I don't think I went to 75% on the throttle, it was probably more like 60% and eased it on back. When I estimated I had gone supersonic, the airplane was flying without any buffet, and I made one roll input and got the impression that the roll stability was significantly less than I had expected from the simulator.

Longitudinal control wasn't quite as bad as I expected. I didn't catch the high a at launch, but the first thing I looked at was about 6 or 7° and just eased it on up. I checked at 12°, the trim position, which was exactly what I had been looking at, at the simulator. The longitudinal stability there, and I estimated speed about 1.2 was probably a little better than I expected, or a little better than what I'd seen from the simulator.

On up into the pushover, and I got over to zero g and zero a, actually I got to -1° a for a full forward trim and I didn't get to check a later on, I was playing around with the internal-external switch. Finally realized that it was in external about the time Jack said, "it's six seconds to go," and I was getting behind. I got the switch ON, got it up to, I think a little higher than 5° angle of attack at tank jettison, and hit the tank switch. I think it was on Jack's second call, he said I was in the area to launch and something like "get rid of them," I hit it that time. I was all set up.

The pitch-down was just about what the simulator showed except the damping, as the pitch-down started, was much better. It wasn't erratic at all and it just pitched on over to zero g, zero a, and no violent maneuver at all. I was real pleased with that. Got the engine shutdown and looked for the base.

From there on the airplane handled fairly normal as I remember it, with the ventral on, the longitudinal stability. Then I made a couple of motions with the stick and angle of attack up around 10° and it was less than what I expected, which was quite surprising. I got into a slight pitching oscillation in the turn. After that, everything matched all the way around until I got playing around on the down-wind and I got a little bit too far out with my speed brakes out. Touchdown was a little harder this time than what I expected. Ventral jettison was normal.