PILOTS COMMENTS

Flight 3-14-24

January 17, 1963

Pilot: Joseph A. Walker

I think peak altitude was 246,700 feet! There's a 7 in there! This was a pretty smooth operation except for all those little miscellaneous gad fly type incidents; that is up until we started back and then the sizes of the gad flies increased but there wasn't any problem accrued to me due to the loss of one generator except for the difficulty trying to figure out how to run the right hand control stick and still try to reset with that hand. No noticeable adverse effect occurred due to the loss of #1 hydraulic pressure either. Unless possibly this accounted for a little bit more noticeable trouble shoving the nose toward the ground to keep from landing 5 feet in the air. I guess you judged from the type conversation that went on I did my level best to shut off the engine at the right time but a large gap was inserted between the attempt and the accomplishment. I managed to hook the throttle once with the finger and got enough room to get hold of the throttle and get it shut down finally. The inertial platform checked 100,000 feet at around 62 seconds and 1 had 4,000 feet per second instead of around 3,800 which accounted for my comment that we were high on velocity. I don't understand why we were high on gamma because when that call out came about I had been riding right on theta real good. It never overshot particularly on theta. When the call came through I dipped down about 3° for a little bit then called up and asked how that looked and sounded like it looked pretty good so I got back on theta briefly before all the other fancy motions went on, including a pitch pulse in attempting to get the throttle. The control system aerodynamically worked real fine except that I had a noticeable amplitude limit cycle type operation during the climb out which was lower frequency I think then we had in the flight in December but greater amplitude, and the same thing occurred on the down hill. I didn't appreciate very much change with q; they seem to come on around 500 q or so in that ball park and stayed about the same. I thought I wasn't getting any action out of Minneapolis BCS because of the large trends in yaw that were occurring; rather sloppy operation laterally too, so that caused me to switch over to the manual on position. Whereupon I discovered that rather large control inputs had to occur in order to cause the system to come on, particularly in yaw. The corollary operation to this was I did drift about 20 some degrees from heading and by the time I started back the other direction there was so far to go I was letting it coast and then I would go look at something else and when I came back it would have drifted off say 20 some degrees in the other direction, while I was moon gazing, looking at L. A., and those places. However, I promptly got 20° speed brakes out at peak altitude. I noticed as we started down that I was forced to use the pitch rate trim input in order to keep positive angle of attack even with the stick pulled back and finally wound up with the stabilizers bottomed out flying very smoothly in pitch and roll at about -10° theta. I had intended to switch over my theta bug up there but I saw this other going on and I didn't even worry about it any more. Finally decided that rather than sit with the stabilizer bottomed out I let it drop and let the nose stay down on theta for a while and then finally began to pick up angle of attack. I got it up to 23° and drifted on up to 25°. I worked between 23° and 25° all the way down in there. The only difficulty I had was lateral on the reentry. At the time that I went to beta on side slip presentation I had already gotten real busy at clamping down the heading that I had out bound, had that steadied out and the beta indicator came on at about 4° left so I centered out to around to the 2° left mark and boy you couldn't tell there was any directional oscillation from the cockpit at all. But I was bothered by a lateral deal that seemed to resemble a limit cycle type oscillation. So I was sitting there working the control back and forth continuously during the early portion of buildup of q in order to combat this tendency to rock back and forth and I appeared to be doing it right because I was able to hold it down by this means. Never got to 5 g; as Rogers Dry Lake which I kept in my left eyeball all the way down began to disappear behind the cockpit rail I reduced pitch rate command to zero, shoved forward on the control column, shut off the manual BCS on the Honeywell system, increased to full speed brakes and bored down hill at about 4 ° angle of attack until the q went up to an indicated 810 knots and then started to lift the nose. It was in fine position, ideal, wound into a left turn finally after wondering how come the pressure altimeter was going up hill and the other one was coming down hill as was the inertial vertical velocity concluded that inertial had gone off on accuracy. I had better get on the pressure instrument and stop before I did any bouncing this turn, closed up speed brakes and went into the pattern. I did a reset attempt shortly after the light came on but couldn't do it. Every time after that I followed the request for the attempt and nothing happened. It really came as not much surprise when I was informed in the middle of the turn on the final that we had no hydraulic pressure. How many feet from the mark?

Answer: 23.

Walker: Gosh! The light was still in my eyes during climb but I didn't have any trouble flying the profile and making corrections there too. As a matter of fact, there was no more of a problem once I got the nose down up at the top.

Question: Any peroxide?

Walker: Nope, no low light. On the landing I nudged the stick forward when the main gear touched. Along the road when this delta psi got marked up for the cockpit entry check list, that selected position would be off rather than standby, nothing was done about getting the standby selection put into the rest of the check list so it had a rapid warm up when I went to delta psi in flight and my null was no good when it did come on. Since I decided to ignore the vertical needle in this situation I was observing these 20° of heading changes on the main ball azimuth which I allowed to occur because it wasn't particularly bothersome at this particular time I drifted.

Question: Other than that, do you think you would say flying ..........

Walker: Oh, yes, right. We just started talking to Adkins here. We might use the heading hold if you want to do something else for a period of time up there. It will give you more minute drift situation than you could use up there to get that BCS to kick on normally. It did seem that I got better operation laterally from BCS when I went to "on" though than I had been getting with the automatic in flying. Whether it was just because of the rest of it that I realized the situation or not.