2. X-15 radios - real good.

3. APUs - No. 2 was slow in coming up. I turned it on and sat there for what seemed like a good 10 seconds before I got any indication of hydraulic pressure but then it came on up. Normally no. 1 overshot considerably and hung for a long time above 4000 but finally came down.

4. Damper System - Other than this one failure on 14, seemed to be perfectly normal. When it stopped it was about 3° airplane nose down or leading edge up and then at the end of the test it kicked and went back to about 2°. I didn't bother to re-zero in there even though we had this failure because I wasn't sure what this would do, so I just left it. I didn't notice any motion of the stick during the remainder of the check or of the indicators on the panel in the roll mode or anything else, so I wasn't sure that it was proceeding properly.

5. Inertial Platform System - worked great before launch. The only thing there again was the velocity. I read 900 on the way out, it should have decreased a little bit on the way back in but it didn't. But I wasn't too worried about velocity.

6. Flow Direction Sensor - was good.

7. Launch Space positioning - fine, no problem. "Except you got off your heading, is all!" Well, that was after launch. OK, this is the launch phase too. All right, at launch I intentionally held in some right aileron and tried not to put any - "Right?" Yes. "Right aileron?" Right. To prevent the roll off to the left. "It rolls to the right?" No, the last time I rolled to the left. "The airplane always peels off to the right." OK, I helped it this time. "Did you hold right in there?" Yes. I'm sure I did. So that accounted for the turn there. I turned about 5° by the time I got the wings level from the launch heading and so during the pullup I just cranked it on back to the launch heading which turned out to be real good as far as the track.

8. Launch transients - The only launch transients were those that I induced myself. I don't think I had an overshoot on a; I think it came up to about 10 and held nicely in there. During the rotation it dropped down once to about 8° and I pulled it back up. q came up within a second or so of what it should have been.

9. Engine start - Normal.

10. Unforeseen incidents - No.

2. Altitude profile versus simulator - was beautiful, good correlation all the way. It got a little confusing because Jack was leading me quite a bit on some of the callouts. I had to convince myself that what I saw in the cockpit was better than what he was seeing and so I used the clock and the other various cues for the profile and it came out right on. "He was coming in ahead of you then?" Right. We've changed the procedure; we don't say get ready for pushover, or countdown to pushover. Instead, we just say standby for pushover a second or two early but he was leading me a little more than that; so I'd have to wait two or three seconds after he said it before it actually came up. I think you have to make sure that we don't lead too much on these callouts because it does become a little confusing. "You think you're getting behind?" Yes. You have to go back to the instruments to make sure that you're still right. The shutdown was right on according to everything in the cockpit. And I shutdown at 4500 indicated.

3. Unforeseen incidents - "There wasn't anything unplanned during the boost then, was there?" Except this initial rolloff and the correction back to course.

l. Burnout transients - None in glide phase. "Let me ask you right here, Milt." OK. "You pitched down to a pretty good negative angle of attack?" Yes. I had 3° negative when I looked at it. "Yes. This wasn't good." Well, what happened was that at shutdown I had still a plus 200 positive rate of climb; the q was dropping off a little faster than I thought it should, so I thought I'm going to catch that q and that's why I dumped it. I actually did it on purpose and got down to about 3° negative. There was no problem so I held it. "Very good." I held it for a little bit and then finally came back to zero when it looked like I'd stopped q from dropping off. "So you were trying to get your H dot and q within bounds during this time?" Right. It was an intentional maneuver. Then I held the q pretty constant, right around 700 maybe 690 or so. It was a little slower decelerating than I had remembered on the simulator and I almost started the turn at about 4300 ft/sec or 44. I didn't pull in on the a, I just rolled and banked it over and waited a little bit. I finally came up on a and got up to 9° indicated. on mine and held it steady for maybe 5 or 6 seconds at 9°' while I was decelerating through 4. I'd say that first point was real good as far as the q and if 5 seconds is adequate time on the a it should have been good, because it was right at the 4000. Then I rolled level and because I hadn't held this a for a long enough period of time I hadn't turned as far as the flight plan had indicated. Because I hadn't turned far enough, I ended up on a heading of 220 and dumped it over to keep q from dropping off after I rolled level. About that time I saw the fire warning light. I immediately decided to get rid of the engine peroxide and went to jettison. While I was doing this I let the nose drop through even more. I checked back after I jettisoned the peroxide and the fire warning light was still on and this was taking a lot of my attention. In the meantime, I had cranked in some positive trim and kept fighting that. I was a little undecided whether to get down in a hurry and see if the fire was going to go out or just what to do. I finally thought, well, it hasn't gone yet so I might as well sit here. Then I decided to come back up and drop this q off. I think I saw a maximum of about 1100 during this pushover. It may not have been that high but I know it had built up. I pulled it back up and then tried to get back to 700 q at 3000 ft/sec but I was still too high at 3000. I probably got 700 q at about 2800 ft/sec. But then again because I hadn't made a far enough turn to the left on the first turn I wasn't sure whether to go ahead and crank her on to the right or not. "Could you see the base?" I couldn't see the base. I decided not to pull to 9° because it was already too late Mach number wise. So I just kept on going and tried to stay somewhere near 700, at the same time watching this fire light. I finally got down to, I guess about 2000, or somewhere near this when Jack says go ahead with the dampers. "How did you rate controllability before the fire warning light came on?" Pitch is probably about 2-1/2. You pull up to it. I wasn't using trim in this period and it sort of takes a little while for the force trim to back you up and get it up there, but when I finally got up to 9° I could hold it very precisely. I felt that there wasn't more than maybe a quarter of a degree oscillation around 9 for this short period of time. Roll is 2-1/2 and Yaw 2 or 2 1/2. You don't even worry about it in these turns with dampers on. There's no indication of any sideslip or any concern with controllability. "This trim follow-up is a pretty good feature right in here." Yes. I'm still not at home enough in the airplane to be using trim much because I tend to use it and then forget it and be fighting it with force trim later on; so instead, I try to just leave it at zero and use trim follow-up to do these turns. Then it works out real well. In the simulator I do all my practicing using the trim and then when I get in the airplane I do it the other way. I've gotten smart now and maybe the last day before I fly, I fly it just like I do it in the airplane. When I did get the call on the dampers and got yaw and roll off, there was no roll-off in the airplane. I was still on the side stick and it felt perfectly normal; it really didn't seem to change at all the basic airplane handling at this Mach number. I'm not sure if at that time I had the brakes out, did I? "I don't know." They may have been out. "Do you recall when you turned the dampers off? We got the impression that you never turned them off." No, I turned them off. It's somewhere between Mach 2 and high key. Because I had them back on at high key. It was a very short duration during which they were off but I didn't have enough time. I turned them off and helped get on the side stick; went to the center stick and wobbled the wings a little bit and then decided to start looking for landing and so on, and turned them back on. So they were off momentarily. I have no idea how many seconds but as I say, you have the appreciation that the airplane is very stable in there and if the speed brakes are out it helps also. "Do you have a feeling whether it was past Cuddeback or before Cuddeback?" Oh, it was after I was past Cuddeback. "It looks like your brakes probably were out." Yes. "Let me have a rating here for the dampers off and if you can differentiate between the center and side stick, it will be fine. Maybe you didn't have long enough time." I didn't disturb the airplane except in the roll axis, with the dampers off. "This is the one that will cause you to yaw?" Right, but I had no indication of any tendency to induce a b oscillation. And I feel that with the configuration, whatever it happened to be, and I'm sure it probably was speed brakes out, that directionally it wouldn't have been any worse than a 3, and in roll probably a 3, in pitch still 2-1/2 because none of this fed in to the pitch axis. "And this was with either stick?" Right. "You couldn't notice any difference between the two?" The center stick feels real normal to me and you could do probably a good job of flying it all the way. If all this other stuff hadn't happened, I had intended to fly it all the way from Cuddeback with the center stick and make a couple of turns.

5. Glide energy management versus simulation - Glide energy management worked out real good.

6. Approach and landing - The approach and landing, really no problem. I got a little high on a as I was coming subsonic, saw it, and dumped it on down to 8 or so then got back up to 10 or 11 after I was subsonic in the turn. I had a little airframe buffet occasionally but nothing unusual. Somewhere in there I cranked the trim all the way nose down and came on in for the flare landing. "Milt, I noticed you did get a good bit of oscillation there just before you put your flaps down. Is this the time you're talking about?" When I what? "Looks like about 10 seconds or so before flaps down." No, I was S-turning back into the runway, because I intentionally overshot to get rid of some excess energy. Then just before I put the flaps down, I cranked it back on to the runway heading. The flaps came down probably in the middle of the flare and right after I completed the flare, the gear came down. "Then if you had seen anything it would be the fire warning light?" Yes. "How about giving me a pilot rating just as you saw the fire warning light, as it came on and include the whole psychological feeling." It's a case of mental preoccupation and you have to rely on, from that point on, the basic stability of the aircraft to keep you out of trouble. I just let go of things and was moving switches and handles in response to the fire warning light. If you didn't have a real good airplane at this time you could get into a lot of trouble. But, I only diverged in pitch and built up an excessive H dot in here and q went up a little bit but this is real forgiving, to be able to be distracted this way and still not get into a real problem. "Well, I'm sure there are places in the profile where you've got your hands full of airplane and you wouldn't have time to do anything else." Well, yes. Normally you don't even think about the airplane but when something like a systems problem comes up then usually you devote time to that. "You know the pilot rating chart we have. If you try and hook the mission to it too could you extrapolate a rating of the whole problem including the airplane and the psychological effect, the pressures that you're under." On this particular mission. "I'm thinking of this type B.~ Yes.

Maybe 4 in pitch. "What I'm trying to do is sort out the modes that were the most problem to you." Right. Roll probably 3, and heading 3. "OK". The most critical one of course, as far as getting the airplane back, is pitch. If you go the wrong way, to any extent here, the energy management aspect comes into it. "Well, you did sort of overshoot in your q." Yes. "While you were concentrating on these other." That's what I mean, that by also going to a high q, you're losing energy pretty fast. So it gets into a situation where you could double your problem by not being able to get back to Edwards. "Yes." So, it's probably the most critical axis. And requires the most, well the best "Coordination?" characteristics. "OK. Anything else you want to add?" No, except that this is probably the least visible to the pilot too, in pitch. In other words, you get an awful lot of 9 regardless of what you're doing in roll. You don't get so much in yaw but the yaw needle is right in the center of the instrument panel and you can see if it starts going out. Whereas, pitch, very small angles are involved here; from a good 700 q to 1500 q there's probably no more than 3°-angles difference and you just don't receive it as rapidly. "What were you actually flying here? Were you flying a or the q meter? What was your scan pattern?" q was the primary one in this area and H dot to keep you at this q and then occasionally check on a. But H dot and q are the primary ones. "And there's enough lag in these, if you do fall behind, to take you a little while to get them back." Right. It doesn't take much of a deviation in q to really build up a tremendous overshoot in q and it takes you a while to get it back off again.