April 28, 1964

OK, at drop point I felt as though I was in a real good position for an emergency lake landing on Hidden Hills, in fact even more so than I have been in the past. Of course, with the winds we have I believe I could nave easily made a northeast landing, I made a Northwest landing pretty satisfactorily.

On the drop I made a lunge for the drop switch and missed it and that's why I had that 2 second delay there. Had a little right roll off on drop and I was trying to correct for that and get angle of attack, either one of two things happened here, its easy to pull up with the Minney-Honey system but I looked up and saw 18° and about this time I was thinking about this Giannini probe, thought we might have a little interference there but we were not getting any buffet and I don't believe that we had gone supersonic at this time. Just about this time we were getting a callout from Bob that we were coming up on theta I was showing about 8° and maintained this to the pushover point. The 50,000 and 62,000 check point were right on, except for H dot. I pushed over on velocity this time and going through the 54,000 I was going through about 36 or 37 seconds and at this time the q was just going past 800, I held it just for a split second then pushed over. From there on everything seemed to be coming out as per simulator flight plan. I stabilized somewhere about 70,000 and made a lunge for the throttle, missed it and finally got it coming back pretty slow say around 35, well just under 3600 feet per second. As far as the dive brakes I was very slow in coming out with those but I was just a little over 400 feet per second by indicator, John, when I finally got them full stop. However, this time I looked up and my q was coming up slowly so I eased up a little on angle of attack about 3-1/2 and this seemed to stabilize it a little bit, I stabilized on 1325 and held it, however, I had to get up a little bit lower than I would say 75 feet per second as far as H dot to maintain with.

I feel as far as minimum thrust we had excess thrust in this configuration than what we had planned for. This was OK, the only thing is we ended up with about 74,000 and 4300 feet per second, 1325 q, somewhere in that range. I don't really have any feel of how long we held these stabilized seconds. The stabilized time I would say anywhere from about 25 seconds. On shutdown I dug into the atmosphere trying to decelerate and that was a pretty good deceleration I went over to hit roll hold and alpha hold and I couldn't feel the switches. I decided I would wait until I could at least get down to where I could see them before I started messing with the Minney Honey system. Just about this time I was getting energy management callouts from Bob and looked down and I saw this lake that looked familiar, in fact, it looked a lot like Rosamond. I was indicating about 60,000 and 3-1/2 and I rolled over and couldn't see Edwards. I said I'm pretty far up range but all of a sudden I made a right bank and there was Edwards sitting right under my nose. I can truthfully say that g suit works pretty good.

Coming around the bend on the downwind leg of 23 I played with the Minney Honey going to roll and alpha hold alternately, in fact, I think twice in there I used the CSS on the stick a couple of times. During this time I was on the 2-1 /2 to 3 acceleration and I didn't get too much quality of analysis on what this system was actually doing, by this time I was heading around 25,000 and making a turn on into 23. I got down, I finally picked up the smoke bomb, had a little bit of trouble seeing the runway markers, but saw the smoke bomb before I saw the runway markers, and I dived for this and held about 325 knots, cut over the ground, got my flaps down and like I was telling Joe, this darn thing just wanted to set up there and fly regardless what your airspeed was, with this system you just make an effort to get this airplane on the ground and the whole thing was accomplished on using sidestick only, however, when I hit I felt like I had about a 10 foot per second descent. I understand it came out to be about 3 1/2. I question these figures. It doesn't feel like one of my best days on this approach anyway as far as a touchdown. I had made an attempt to look at my airspeed when I was going through about 180. This is the first time I had done this because I got concerned about the low airspeed and he called out about 5 feet it felt like I was about 15 feet, anyway the run out was without any difficulty I didn't do any push pull maneuvers I forgot about them. The airplane yawed out .......... and came to a stop about midway of the runway., That runway incidentally is real good in some respects, its a lot better than 18.

I have no comments on the flight except one, here on the stabilized portion I kept getting a right wing down pulse as though I was trying to do an aileron pulse but the airplane seemed to be doing it by itself. In looking at the telemetry data I came to be about 5°. At the time I was thinking about this probe sticking out there, however, I can't really feed this back into the Minney Honey system it didn't feel like the adaptive system was doing this, it felt aerodynamic, and there was just enough you'd start trying to play q getting that stabilized and playing around with angle of attack and a11 of a sudden you would have one of these things to contend with, according to Bill he hasn't experienced this before. It certainly was there, and if I remember I would say about 3 or 4 times that it happened. I don't know how many times it showed up on telemetry and also during the stabilized run we were getting quite a bit of bank back there and I didn't experience this myself but it looked like we were getting some abrupt change in acceleration, longitudinal acceleration. I didn't feel this but it sure showed up on telemetry. This was a real high energy flight coming out of Hidden Hills. Of course, I felt I would like to have another 20 miles to go yet. My terminal points Bob, were 43O0 and 1325 q and 74,000. Well, it appeared to be a little high on thrust at the 54,000 foot point, I suspect to be a little bit late on velocity or high on thrust. I feel it may have been the latter. Comment on this Minney Honey system on the pushover part of the flight this was a pretty important part of the profile as far as being able to come out on your Mach number and on your velocity and altitude. We tried using the fixed gain and pitch on the simulator and also the adaptive, however, on the flight itself using the adaptive only and no roll hold the thing seemed to respond better on adaptive than the actual configuration than it did on fixed gain in the simulator. I went to about 2/10 of a g negative when passing through 62,000 I was a little high on H dot we were still heavy and I was at this time afraid of a premature burnout. However, I think the reason we didn't have a premature burnout we were one g and slow decelerating up to 430O feet per second under possible acceleration with 2 components at all times on the stabilized portion. The adaptive on this part of the flight program seemed to really behave itself. I think John mentioned that he was getting a little of this slow oscillation down here. I didn't seem to think this up at all. Any time I wanted that g meter it was doing everything I was asking it to do, it responded well.