Flight 3-18-29
May 29, 1963
Pilot: Joseph A. Walker
The flight went according to plan. I stated that due to turning off the roll hold I was late closing the speed brakes. On reflection that is incorrect. First the windshield glass cracked so I looked at that and sort of noted it was the inside glass and I could still see through it. I paid attention to getting hauled up to climb in altitude and then decided to turn off the roll hold for the rudder pulse and it was while I was looking at that I noted the speed brakes location and hustled that thing to the closed position having lost an additional 400 feet per second. And after that it was as advertised. Did two rudder pulses because I did part of a turn in the first one, tried flying with both the yaw and roll damper channels turned off and it ran from slightly wormy occasionally to not being too bad. Finally when I got down to about 3600 I decided that this was just redundant and I could do this all day so I turned the MH-96 roll and yaw on once again. It seemed like I couldn't get anything conclusive from roll rate as easily as I could from roll attitude for correcting and maintaining. It got a little more of a task as the speed bled off and the alpha got up. I think I rode right rudder just unconsciously which accounted for the turn off to the right. Our presentation scheme and usage worked like downtown. I felt considerable rate in heating as though I were leaning over a red hot toaster for a considerable number of minutes today. Smoke rose in the cockpit.