January 16, 1964

Things went real fine up to launch. At launch, I came off and I had a little bit of left stick in and I think I even rolled a little bit to the left. Came on with the throttle and I eased it up feeling for the stop. I never did feel it, so I gave it another little shove and then finally got a call that I was about 90% and I came back and just guessed at where I should set it. Put the chamber pressure in, figured I had somewhere near it and then looked down at alpha and couldn't see it so finally got my hand up so I could see that and it was a little high at the time. I noticed it about 15° so I dropped off there to 10 and about this time I started cross checking on some of the inertial instrumentation and it looked like I was still on the B-52. So, I think the problem in getting rotated was the convincing yourself that these things weren't working and you had better get started on this alternate thing. So, I kept to 10° and looked at something else, looked back and thought I still had 10°, I noticed that I drifted down to 5 shortly before it was time to push over and I pushed over on the callout and on my time, and I may have been a little high on g there. I didn't intentionally do this but as it turned out the first indication I got that I was excessively high, I think I got a call at 90,000 or 92,000 from Jack. Then I went ahead and carried it on out to engine shutdown and I shut down on your callout and I believe my time was about the same. It seemed to correspond pretty well. Because I knew I was high I hesitated a little while and even started the nose down. Things didn't look familiar from this altitude. I was looking for landmarks. I saw a bunch of clouds and finally after pushing the nose aside I decided that was the ocean down there off Los Angeles so I intentionally started down when you gave me a call that I was heading down. I didn't get a good impression on how fast I was coming down until the q started building up and then when you said the q was building up I checked and I had about 12 or 1300 q at that time. I leveled it out and then I rolled into a left bank, turned the damper to fixed gain, did a couple of small kicks, rolled over to the right a little bit and did a couple of more small kicks, and then got your heading of 210 to Cuddeback. And, about this time I still looked awfully high so I agreed with you when you said brakes and came out with these and got to the field and still had, I think, about, well from your last call about 60,000 feet and 2.2. So, I wrapped it up into a turn, pulled quite a bit of g for a period of time getting turned around there and used speed brakes during most of that turn on down wind. I still had 35,000 feet so I kept using brakes all the way around and when you called bring them in, why I was still high and fast so left them out for a period of time after this. Came across the edge of the lake and I was pretty fast, and oh, probably still about 350 when I came across the edge of the lake and shortly after that dropped the flaps and the gear and I had brakes out either then or it started them out, so I landed again with full brakes. I started back up after I'd gotten these things accomplished, realized that I ballooned up and started flying towards the ground again and the attitude on touchdown didn't seem too high, but apparently it was up around 17° angle of attack at touchdown. Touchdown didn't seem too hard. As soon as I touched down the nose came down, I picked the flaps up and then came back on the stick and it tended to drift off to the right but it wasn't at a rate of any concern so I just let it drift, didn't try to correct for it.

Question: (?)

Not off, I turned it to fixed gain. I never did turn it off because I was getting concerned about getting rid of some altitude. It's pretty nice, it's a lot better in the airplane and the adaptive system is a much more noticeable improvement in the airplane than it is in the simulator. SAS is better in the airplane than it is on the simulator but by a certain small percentage SAS is much better than the simulator. You don't feel the trim follow-up. Of course, this is fairly high q, small surface deflections and in talking with Walker, you won't feel this trim follow-up until you get into these low q regions and large surface deflections. However, it felt very straight forward, the response seemed to be much better than is indicated on the simulator. I was still on sidearm for the landing. After looking at some of the records when I got back that there were some pitching oscillations, this didn't seem to bother me, I mean I probably was aware that they were there, it didn't seem to be any real problem and I think very likely what was happening that I was holding some force and finally just pushed it to alleviate the force and I wasn't real concerned about it. I had mispositioned it somehow and it was indicating about 2 on the scale. I rolled it back to zero when even, well Butch called right away and said that it passed.