Flight 3-20-31
June 27, 1963
Pilot: Major Robert Rushworth
I don't have any comments on the prelaunch unless someone else does. I watched the oscillation on airspeed a11 the way along and I didn't ever think mine was coming back to the correct value when I finally launched. Just before launched I looked at the airspeed, inertial, and it was a little over 800, somewhere between 800 and 900 feet per second. All the way through the preflight it had been oscillating around 1,000, it came back in OK. At launch everything seemed normal. I was a little bit late, I think, on the throttle, probably a second. I pulled up to 15° alpha the minute I felt thrust and let it slowly drift back down to 12° and I felt the g force coming on. Then I started cross checking the g force and alpha and the most g I got on was about 2.4 and alpha was about 11 or 12°. Everything seemed normal there. I got it up to 42° on the pitch vernier, pitch vernier came in real nice, and I tried to establish zero pitch on the stick and get theta hold on and from that point on in comparing my time vs. altitude vs. my pitch angle. All I could see was I was going low. I started getting this the minute Joe called me. But it didn't look like I was more than on an average 2,000 or 3,000 feet low at every point, at 40 seconds 2,000 or 3,000 feet low, 50, 60, and at 70 seconds I was pretty much back on to the profile that I planned. All the time I had to fight theta hold. The discrepancies that I noticed is verified now in that the ball indicated 38° in climb and pitch vernier was approximately zero at 42°. So, on theta hold if there is a discrepancy there I'm going to have to fight it out. The tendency was theta hold wanted to force the airplane back down 38° and I kept pulling it back up to 42 so that's why I got low to start off with. I brought it back up over 42° somewhere just before burnout and I think that's why we came back in profile and back over the top. Had 180,000 feet just as Joe called me to go to delta psi on. I was watching a sideslip start and it got out to about 3 or 4° and I didn't know whether to give it a rudder pulse to pull it back. Since I was on roll hold, I didn't want to upset that. I went to delta psi, it came on, the needle came right back to zero, held for a second and then slowly drifted all the way over to the right, and by the time it got to the right I had already decided I was going to have to fight it so I used right rudder to get it back again which didn't touch it or made it worse. I shut roll hold off and brought it back in with the manual system, brought it back in with a couple of jabs, it came up to about 3 or 4° delta psi and one more pulse and I brought it right back and stopped at zero. It seemed for about 10 seconds there I felt I was going to go over the top sideways and back down the other side and broad side. Somewhere around 240,000 feet Joe made a transmission, I don't remember what it was now, but it sounded like he made it from the second floor. I could just barely read him, and I think that was about the time that I made a pretty weak comment too, that I didn't like the way this delta psi was showing me more than 10° error but I got it back in OK, and it was pretty steady from there on. As I approached the top, I could not get a good reading on the altimeter because it's off center and it's recessed so that I don't see any of the markings on the gage and I had to estimate as to what I had. Joe called me approaching peak and I checked the vertical velocity was somewhere between 100 and 200 and I watched it come down to about 50 and I checked my peak and I thought it was about 282 and I looked at it again after I got on the ground the position indicated about 283, and I'm sure it didn't go to 284 in the cockpit. Back to shutdown, I seem to be about 1/2 to one second behind on Joe's call according to the way the velocity was coming up. He started calling at 75 or 76 and he had already said shutdown before the needle had got to 5100 and I think I was about half to a full second behind him when I saw 5100 I pulled it off and probably overshot a little bit. The deceleration at that point as was the same thing last flight, practically nothing, I could hardly feel that the engine shut down, it was just quieter.
Rushworth: No, but it was very shortly after that I got this sideslip started and I estimated that I changed headings there at 10° there, so what reason I don't know. Why fly the roll hold function wouldn't hold that in there I don't know yet. I gave up on that.
Question: When you used roll hold the second time did you go ahead and continue pulling yaw with manual switch?
Rushworth: I don't recall that I had to use, if I did it wasn't more than once from then on, and when I turned it off again if I used anything it was rudder pedals from then on, but I never did get a transient that would upset the airplane any more than small oscillations when I got into reentry. It might have been working real good, because I didn't have any problem after that one time. I can't imagine what fired it off because we were 30,000 feet after shutdown and that's ten seconds, I can't imagine what caused that transient 10 seconds after shutdown. If it was a transient it must have started drifting off. The pitch attitude that I rotated to didn't seem to be any worse than the last one or any worse than any other one that I had done even though this was on 42° initially I seemed to get the impression of a much steeper climbing attitude after I had burned for about: 40 seconds. Even though the attitude didn't change I got the impression that I was in a steeper climb, why I don't know. The only thing I can think of was that the light coming into the cockpit was different, I think it just got darker and I could see I sensed that change in the lighting in the cockpit. I didn't get a sensation that I was pitching higher or lower, there just seemed to be a change of conditions in the cockpit that gave me that impression, which may be similar to what White had to make comment on.