The big day came. We flew down from Edwards, accelerating all the way, and pulled up and launched the rocket. Our engineers in the Point Mugu control room watched in horror as the rocket soared up to 600,000 feet and then came down headed right for San Nicolas Island. It impacted just offshore. The navy range safety officer was furious, but our engineers were smart enough not to stick around for a postflight debriefing. Those rockets seemed to have a mind of their own. They refused to go straight. We did not go back to Point Mugu for some time. We later partially redeemed ourselves when we fired a rocket for the navy at Point Mugu.
The weather flights were made very early in the morning. In fact, we usually got airborne before sunrise and were uprange over the launch area by daybreak. Weather information was critical since the massive flight preparation effort was initiated or cancelled based on real time observations.
The morning of my weather flight was a classic desert winter morning. It was cold, freezing in fact, but the sky was crystal clear and there was not a hint of a breeze—a beautiful morning for a flight. The launch lake was Mud Lake. I flew up to the launch area as the dawn lit up the rugged landscape. The desert is very pretty early in the morning with the pinkish glow of the dawn. I was really enjoying the sights. I could see over 30,000 square miles of desert from my cruise altitude and there was not a cloud in sight. I started a leisurely turn back toward Edwards as I passed over the launch lake.
As I rolled out on heading to Edwards, I lit the burner. I wanted to make some simulated X-15 approaches when I got back to Edwards and I had to burn up some fuel to get the weight down for the touch and go landings. I was supersonic by the time I arrived at the high-key position for my first simulated X-15 approach. I chopped the throttle, extended the speed brakes and started the turn to low key. As I decelerated through 0.9 Mach, I lowered the flaps to the takeoff position. I was now configured for a simulated X-15 unpowered approach.
In this configuration, the maximum lift/drag ratio of the F-104 was 4.5. The subsonic lift/drag ratio of the X-15 with landing flaps was also 4.5. This was a rather low lift/drag ratio for unpowered landings and special techniques had been developed to ensure consistently successful, smooth landings. I held 300 knots indicated airspeed around the pattern through low key and rolled out on final, right on speed. I picked up my aim point on the north edge of the lakebed and dove at it until I reached the flare altitude of roughly 800 feet. At that speed in the dirty F-104, you were coming downhill at about 18,000 feet a minute at a -18 to -20 degree flight path angle. The flare to come level was a rather gentle 1.5 g maneuver and I extended the gear and flew the airplane gently down to touchdown. Shortly after touchdown, I added power, retracted the speed brakes and lifted off for a go-around and another simulated X-15 approach.
I climbed back up to the high-key position and then started to dirty up the airplane for another approach. As I extended the speed brakes and lowered the flaps to the takeoff position, the aircraft started to roll off to the left. I applied aileron to counteract the roll off but I could not stop it. I added full rudder but it still kept rolling. I finally added throttle and lit the burner, hoping to get some more airspeed and some more control effectiveness. That worked. As I accelerated through 350 knots indicated, I could stop the roll rate. I managed to roll the aircraft upright and then began to troubleshoot the problem.
I knew I had an asymmetry problem. I either had an asymmetric speed brake or an asymmetric flap problem. I had retracted the speed brakes and the flaps simultaneously when I applied power to gain airspeed, but I was not sure whether everything had retracted. I checked the flaps in my rearview mirror and both leading edge flaps were up and locked. I could not see the trailing edge flaps. I recycled both the speed brake and flap switches to the closed and up position respectively, but nothing changed. I still needed full aileron and full rudder to keep the wings level. I tried a few other ideas, but nothing worked. I was now beginning to wonder how I was going to get that damn airplane on the ground. I could control it at 350 knots, but I could not land at that speed. If I slowed down, I could not stop the airplane from rolling off. The awful truth slowly confronted me. I would have to eject.
I really did not want to eject on such a pretty morning, but there was no way to get that thing on the ground safely. I called NASA-1 and asked if Joe Walker was on the radio. I told them I had a problem. They said they would try to get him on the air and I asked them to hurry because I was getting tired of holding full aileron and rudder. Even with full trim, the forces were quite high. Walker finally came on the air. He was in the pressure suit checkout van being suited up for his flight. I told him the symptoms of my problem and he decided that I had a split trailing edge flap situation with one down and one up.
He suggested I recycle the flap lever to the up position to attempt to get both flaps up and locked. I had already tried that, but I gave it another try. No luck. Joe asked if I had cycled the flap lever all the way from the up to the takeoff position and then back up again. I said no. I had only cycled the flap lever from the up position to a position just below it and then back to the up position. Joe suggested we try it his way. I moved the flap lever from the up position all the way to the takeoff position and then back to the up position. As soon as I moved the lever to the takeoff position, I knew I had done the wrong thing.
The airplane started rolling again, but this time I could not stop it. The roll rate quickly built up to the point where I was almost doing snap rolls. Simultaneously, the nose of the airplane started down. I was soon doing vertical rolls as the airspeed began rapidly increasing. I knew I had to get out quick because I did not want to eject supersonic and I was already passing through 0.9 Mach. I let go of the stick and reached for the ejection handle. I bent my head forward to see the handle and then I pulled it. Things were a blur from that point on.
I felt a terrible pain in my neck due to the seat acceleration while my head was bent forward. I felt the air hit me like a crashing wave in the ocean and I began to tumble violently. Then I noticed something flopping around in front of me. I focused on it and realized it was my ejection seat. I still had a death grip on the ejection handle which was attached to the seat by a cable. I knew I had to let go of that ejection handle and get rid of the seat or it could foul my chute. You cannot imagine how hard it is to let go of something when you are falling through the air like that. That handle was my security blanket. I could not let go but I finally did. Within a couple of seconds the chute streamed automatically toward my feet. Apparently, I had ejected inverted and I was falling upside down. When the chute blossomed, I had my neck snapped again. Luckily, it was in the other direction.
When I finally ended up hanging under the chute, I realized I was having trouble breathing. I checked to see if I had pulled the green apple for my bail out oxygen and, just for good measure, I pulled it again. Apparently I was getting oxygen, but I was not getting enough, so I finally loosened my oxygen mask. The flight surgeon and I later realized that when I was breathing rapidly after all that excitement, the metered flow from the emergency oxygen bottle did not supply enough gas volume to allow me to fill my lungs. I was getting sufficient oxygen but nothing else. I suggested that they modify the orifice on all bail out bottles to allow a higher flow rate since I was pretty sure everyone who ejected would be breathing rapidly. I am not sure if they ever modified them. I did not have the opportunity to eject again, so I will never know.
I watched the airplane as it snap rolled toward the ground. It hit the ground in the bombing range, near the road on the east shore of the lakebed. It exploded on impact and a huge column of black smoke rose from the crater created by the impact. At NASA they quickly spotted the black smoke and began looking for a parachute. They could not see one. I had not said much before I ejected. I told Joe that, “it was going,” as the airplane began to roll off after cycling the flap lever. I did not tell them I was ejecting. They did not know where I was or what my altitude was when all this occurred. They just h
eard my last call to Joe and then nothing. They called a couple of times to try to reach me, but then Whitey Whiteside saw the ominous smoke cloud. They did not want to believe it but deep down they knew I was dead. They had not lost a pilot since Howard Lilly was killed in 1949. The gloom was pretty thick. The pilot’s secretary, Delia Mae, was crying and a number of other employees were visibly shocked. At that time we were a small, close-knit group at NASA and everyone really cared about his coworkers.
In the meantime, I was slowly descending in the parachute and drifting toward the south end of the lakebed. It was only 7:30 A.M. and still a beautiful morning. I was swinging back and forth under the parachute due to a slight bit of turbulence and I remembered a recent lecture on parachuting that recommended that you cut two riser lines at the rear of the chute. This would minimize the oscillations and also give you a forward velocity for maneuvering the chute. I looked up at that big orange and white chute and then down at the ground several thousand feet below me. I thought to myself, “Bull hockey.” There was no way that I was going to cut two riser lines on that chute. The chute was fully blossomed and working fine. There was no way that I was going to “fix it” under those conditions. “Don’t fix something if it ain’t broke.”
It took about 15 minutes to get to the ground and I had gotten pretty proficient in steering the chute and damping the oscillations by pulling on the shroud lines at the right times. As I approached the ground, I unbuckled all my straps to prepare to jump out of the harness just prior to touchdown. This procedure was recommended to ensure that I would not be dragged along the ground by the chute after landing. Again, I reconsidered. I knew it was possible to misjudge height coming down in the desert in a chute like that. There were instances of people jumping out of the harness 50 or 100 feet up in the air because they had misjudged their heights. I decided I did not want to do that, so I stayed in the harness until my feet hit the ground.
It was a gentle landing and I stood up quickly and gathered up my chute. I had landed near the road along the east shore of the lakebed. I walked over to the road about 100 yards away to hitch a ride up toward the crash site. I assumed that someone from NASA would be there. I did not make it to the crash site because I saw a NASA vehicle coming up to the road from the lakebed and I flagged it down. Joe Vensel, our chief of flight operations, was in the vehicle. He was on the way to the crash site. He almost cried when he saw me. He was convinced that I had been killed in the crash. We drove back to the base for a quick debriefing and an examination by the flight surgeon and then back to NASA for breakfast in our cafeteria.
Our director, Paul Bikle, was also very relieved to see me, but he was concerned that Joe Walker might have gotten emotionally upset by all the excitement. He went down to the mating area to talk to Joe and found him to be very relaxed and ready to go on his X-15 flight. Joe Vensel and I had previously stopped in to see him to assure him that I was all right. The X-15 flight proceeded as planned and Joe achieved an altitude of 160,000 feet. At the flight party that night I was the center of attention rather than Joe, since I had made the headlines in the local paper.
There was some humor associated with this ejection. When the crash and rescue team arrived at the crash sight, they noticed three main F-104 wheels in the wreckage. They immediately assumed there had been a midair collision between two F-104s, but they could not find any other extra parts. Joe Walker solved the mystery when he revealed that he had the crew store a spare main wheel in the gun bay in case of a flat tire on cross-country flights.
The following week I was sent back to the Lovelace Clinic in Albuquerque, New Mexico for a physical exam to see if I had any neck or back injuries from the ejection. I went to Old Town for dinner the night I arrived. As I was driving back to my motel, a young high school student pulled out of an intersection directly in front of me and I hit him broadside. I ended up in Lovelace Clinic that night with Dr. Randy Lovelace sewing up my lip and putting a cast on my broken hand. The car was totaled. I spent the next day undergoing various examinations to see if I had sustained any injuries from my F-104 ejection. They found no broken bones or spinal injuries so I was sent home. Dr. Lovelace was very upset about the fact that I had survived an ejection without injuries and had come to Albuquerque and sustained some very visible injuries. He somewhat seriously suggested that I tell the folks back home that my injuries were a result of the ejection and that they had been overlooked by the Edwards doctors.
The tail number on the F-104 that I ejected from was 749. The final epitaph to the ejection incident was a punchline by Bill Dana in response to my emergency call, “Roger 749, you are cleared straight in.”
GOING FOR BROKE
As a final reward for his contributions to the X-15 program, Joe Walker was allowed to make the maximum altitude attempts in the X-15. As mentioned earlier, the simulator predicted that the X-15 could easily achieve altitudes in excess of 400,000 feet. It also predicted, however, that the aircraft could not consistently reenter safely from altitudes above 400,000 feet. The simulator also indicated that the reentry had to be precisely flown to preclude aircraft damage entering from 400,000 feet.
To provide some pad for potential problems or pilot error, it was decided to try for a maximum altitude of only 360,000 feet. This provided a 40,000 feet pad for cumulative errors. This sounds like a lot of pad, but it really was not based on previous experience. Bob White had overshot his intended altitude by 32,000 feet on his last altitude flight from a planned 282,000 to an actual 314,000 feet. It must be remembered that the X-15 was climbing at over 4,000 feet per second just prior to burnout or shutdown. Thus, if the pilot was 1 second late in shutting the engine down, he would go 4,000 feet higher than planned.
We also determined from calculations and past experience that an extra 1,000 pounds of thrust would add about 5,000 feet to the maximum altitude. The engine thrust varied from engine to engine and also varied somewhat from flight to flight. Engine thrust varied from a low of 57,000 pounds to a high of over 60,000 pounds among the various engines. This could not always be accurately predicted before a flight because thrust varied with atmospheric density. A 1-degree error in climb angle also resulted in roughly a 5,000 foot variation in peak altitude.
If you added up all these seemingly insignificant deviations from the planned values, it was very easy to deviate 15,000 feet in peak altitude from the planned value. We tried to compensate for these types of errors by cross-checking speed, altitude, and rate of climb at various points during the climb and adjusting the final shutdown conditions accordingly, but this did not always prevent large errors. To compound the problem, our inertial system was not always accurate and our backup radar information did not necessarily agree with our inertial data. The pilot quite often had to average out all the data in real time and adjust the planned flight using his best judgment.
To assist the pilot in this demanding task, the engineers finally developed a computer program to predict the maximum altitude on the basis of inertial data. This prediction was displayed to the pilot on a separate altitude display. This prediction program became very accurate near the end of the program, but it had its growing pains during its early development.
Joe did not do a buildup series of flights prior to the maximum altitude flight. On his previous four flights in the last four months before his maximum altitude attempt, his maximum altitudes were: 209,000; 92,000; 111,000; and 220,000 feet, respectively. His previous maximum altitude was 271,000 feet, but he had made that flight six months earlier.
On his only altitude buildup flight, Joe reached an altitude of 347,800 feet. The flight plan called for an altitude of 315,000 feet. Joe overshot the planned altitude by almost 33,000 feet due to a higher-than-expected engine thrust, a longer-than-expected engine burn, and a one-and-a-half-degree error in climb angle. An error like that would be awfully tough to explain to the FAA Air Traffic Control. Luckily, we did not have to file a flight plan with the FAA. Of course, we did not have much conflicting traffic
at that altitude either. Joe did not have the altitude predictor available on this buildup flight. It was available on the final altitude flight, but its performance had not been demonstrated. It was actually being checked out on that flight.
The final maximum altitude attempt was made on August 22, 1963. It was planned to a peak altitude of 360,000 feet. Joe was in excellent spirits before the flight. He had made the buildup flight a month earlier and there were numerous problems and delays getting the flight airborne, but Joe seemed to take it all in stride. In fact, I cannot remember him being happier at any other time.
An examination of the events leading up to the flight revealed an unusual amount of problems. The X-15 was first mated to the B-52 on August 5th for a flight attempt on the next day. This flight was aborted prior to launch due to bad weather conditions up range. Because of continuing bad weather, the aircraft preflight functional checks were rerun in preparation for another flight attempt the following week. During these checks, a problem was encountered requiring that the X-15 be demated from the B-52. It was mated again and another attempt to fly was made on August 13th.
This flight attempt was aborted after take off due to an APU problem. After some troubleshooting and repair, another flight attempt was made on August 15th. Bad weather up range caused the flight to be aborted. During the return to landing, the pilot attempted to start the number one APU in order to check its operation. It would not operate properly. Following this abort, the X-15 was again demated and all preflight checks were reaccomplished. Another engine ground run was made on August 19th.
At the Edge of Space Page 16
