Flight 3-19-30
June 18, 1963
Pilot: Major Robert Rushworth
Down to somewhere around 11 minutes as Jack was going through the analyzer check, I noticed the altimeter had gone to pot and it sagged from 45,000 feet down to about 850. It stayed there and held regardless of what Jack did except hold the switch which brought it back up. At 4 minutes when we rolled out of the turn, I started the pressurization and the altimeter came back on up to 46,000. It seemed to hold good there. The vertical velocity had gone up to 50 feet per second and all the calls I made to Jack didn't correct it. It finally went to 100 feet per second in climb. The launch was normal and light up was real good. I think I got it up to about 75% or 80% and felt it light and pushed it on up to stop, I was worrying about getting it over the stop and watched the chamber pressure come up. The red needle indicated about 610 and the white needle about 590. I went into the climb which seemed to be many seconds late getting on to the 2 g point although the angle of attack was good all the way. I had started with 12° as planned and about the time I got to 10°, I had just barely 2 g's. At this time, the only thing that seemed to be wrong was the time; it was quite late. Shortly after that, I asked Joe for altitude check and he said 70, and I was reading 60, so I figured that wasn't going to work and I gave up watching that. A little later on I made the correction in heading that he asked for, and a little later on, just before shutdown, I got a side slip. The needle just wandered over and I pushed back and forgot about it because I was closing down on the shutdown time. I shut down just as I went by 5200 fps. I think that was pretty close. The clock then shutdown at 383 seconds and the chamber pressure needle had stuck at about 610 somewhere, later on the red needle unstuck. From there on, the one thing that I wasn't too familiar with was the pitch changes from the reaction control were a little bigger than I expected from what the simulator showed and just before I got to the top, I got to a -5° on a. In comparing that with the theta that I expected, that seemed to be real good and I should have been able to look down at the whole valley but everything seemed normal for attitude as what I compared outside and then I began to disbelieve that the angle of attack was very accurate at that point. Later on it seemed to be normal and I went back to flying angle of attack all the way. I did 20° on reentry and since I couldn't believe the vertical velocity which I was planning to dump the nose when I pulled out the bottom on that I just held the 4 g's for about 5 seconds and dumped the nose then. With Joe's calling I was going to be 10 miles long, I kept the nose down and got "q," I think about 1200, 1250. The next call on checking on altitude was 70,000, just what I expected to be so everything was fine from there in. Into the traffic pattern I made a pretty wide sweep at the base getting in the last side slip. Russ called me 5 feet and I pushed the nose over to get down to the runway and just as I thought the skids touched, I dumped the nose forward which I would say was just about like my last landing. Somebody said the nose gear, main skids came off the ground at that time, it didn't feel gross to me the way I did it. The usual left drift on the runout, I made some hard control movements to keep it straighter across over the rough spots.
Russel: Good, we got an 815 which we have been worrying about a little bit and 221. I was sort of interested in how the ground track looked on that big long turn. Were we getting wind out of here?
Rushworth: You were calling 11 and 9°. I was reading 4° higher all the way.