The post flight reports on a flight that went according to Hoyle are extremely dull. The only thing that I could discover about this airplane is that we converted a tendency to rock laterally to a tendency to sideslip, and this wasn't really bad as long as we had enough q to have an aerodynamic flying machine. Lets save this program some expense and throw the ventral away. I'm not sure that we need to go to the extreme we have been through today just for everybody to go home feeling real happy about it being Christmas time but Merry Christmas, and who ever sent that chase up there had runners and eight animals with horns? (I forgot to mention that up on top.)

One comment I had: I guess you didn't like that pulse about 20° I think it was around 22° to 23° a. Comparing pulse results is difficult because of the short length of time between the pulses. Angle of attack comes down because the q has gone down so far. I decided just as well get down on angle of attack and run with the reaction controls. The change of damping was noticeable, the decreasing in damping action of the directional oscillation almost a parallel line as the q indicator went towards zero.

So I reached down and found the proper switch in the sun's glare, I got RC on automatic, flew the rest of the way over the top, got back up to 15° or 16° a and as the vertical velocity decreased through 800 fps towards zero, I knew that we were still well above 4000 fps and stuffed out full speed brake and the lake was at a steep angle underneath, and came on down. Closed them for the 3200 foot a second pulse which I judged by my indicator was around 8 or 900 q, subsequently verified. That was practically 1/2 oscillation to full damp. Just the input from the aileron caused the sideslip and then it slowly closed toward zero. I had a little trouble with the sideslip running about a degree and a half to the left all during the flight and on the landing I felt as though I was riding right rudder and a slight amount of aileron to stay aligned with the runway.

In spite of previous intentions to do so while flying the pattern with zero trim on the side stick, unconsciously when I went to release the stick after making skid touch down I discovered I was also already in the process of pulling back on it to hold up but I think I let go in time and it was back to zero before the nose hit the ground. And I guess I served Jim McKay's purpose and mine both simultaneously when I went zero trim and I was just going to let go so that came out even.

I had limit cycle, I think I was either at 1450 or even 1500 q (that's a little more difficult flying 6° a in that airplane than it was on the simulator, by the way, it seems to be more lightly damped). All the way up, the whole way through, I even got a little bit when I finally eased back on q and was holding the 20°. Course corrections were no difficulty, naturally, we had enough q to move the airplane.

56O psi on chamber pressure, I was expecting the engine to automatically cut off in the neighborhood of 80 seconds and had to make a wild grab for the throttle when it didn't, so I saw over 5600 fps at shutdown. I don't guarantee that I was watching the gauge at that time, seeing that with the hand down there was a bright light in my eyes. The reaction controls noticeably improved the stability of the airplane at reduced q on most any angle of attack that I passed through while I was up there. And I turned them back off around 3600, 3500 feet per second. No problem in the pattern, squat switch knocked the whole works off the line including the warning lights.