PILOTS FLIGHT COMMENTS

Flight 3-36-59

October 30, 1964

Pilot: Milton O. Thompson

Thompson: Ready, I guess. When I got to 4,200 and rolled into the turn, I didn't have enough H dot, so I didn't get the a right away. I finally got it on up to 9° and probably got 5 or 6 sec of what I considered real stable 9° a as it was going through 4,000. I hadn't turned more than about 10° when I finally got down to about 3,800. I guess this was due to delaying getting up to 9°. I rolled out and had a heading about 220; shortly after that I saw this fire warning light. The first light I saw, I think, was second stage ignition malfunction over on the left panel. When the fire warning light came on, I forgot about the profile momentarily. It bothered me a little to see the light come on, and it bothered me a little more to see it stay on; but 4 hours later when I looked back at it, it looked like it was blinking faster, and that really bothered me. But, I had let q build up to a thousand, maybe 1,100, in this period of time and finally realized this wasn't going to do any good; so I pulled back up, and I was trying to get 700 q back again at 3,000. I don't think I got there; I got probably 700 at 2,800 foot per second. By this time, I wasn't real sure whether to turn or not because I couldn't see Edwards, but I thought, "Well, I'll just hang on to 700 and come on in." Then I got the call for brakes at Cuddeback (I think it was brakes there), but I delayed them and just kept on coming down at 700 q or somewhere in this area. Is that when you said you want brakes now?

Then I got a call somewhere around 2 or below to shut the dampers off. I reached up and turned yaw damper to fixed gain first and thought, "That's wrong," so I shut yaw off and turned it back on and shut it off right. I got roll off, and there was no roll at all in the airplane. It's just perfectly normal; felt real good; real stable; so I went over to the center stick and moved the wings around a little bit with the center stick. By this time I was almost in high key, so I turned the dampers back on and went into the approach pattern. I had no problem in the approach. I trimmed again about 3 units nose down, or full nose down, on the pitch rate trim in the approach and put the flaps down about 330, somewhere in there. At 300 I dropped the gear (you sure could feel them clunk down this time) and felt real fast, and then flew it on into the ground. I figured the angle of attack was pretty low. I don't know what touchdown speed was but dumped the nose as soon as the main skids hit and probably picked the tail end up again, and then, soon as everything settled down, came back in on the stabilizer to stop in this short stop procedure. No problem.

(?) I think I put them out right after I touched down, I'm not sure.

The loads actually seemed lighter, both on the captive flight and on this flight, than they do on the ground; it could be adrenaline helping it, or something, but there is no problem force-wise. The travel, whatever it is, is OK on this particular airplane.

Question: Any questions for Milt?

Thompson: No, it finally went out at, I guess, high key. Somewhere in there I looked down and it was finally out.

Question: Did you see any signs of fire in the airplane?

Thompson: Yes, there was one other thing: when the fire warning came on, I lost number 2 source of course through the auto fire system, and then in selecting peroxide jettison, I got rid of number 1 too, so when I went to pressurize in the pattern, it didn't pressurize.