I had another experience crop dusting that was funny as I look back on it. At the time, it was not quite as funny. I had been dusting cotton down in Mexico this particular morning for about two hours. I was running low on fuel, so I pulled up to the fuel barrel that was sitting at the end of the small dirt strip that we were using as a runway. I shut the engine down and then climbed up on the fuselage to open the tank cap to prepare to refuel. My boss was there to help me refuel. We had a hand pump for pumping the fuel from the barrel into the airplane. My boss stuck the pump in the barrel and then handed me the hose to insert in my fuel tank.
When fuel is stored in barrels out in the field, it tends to collect water because of the heating and cooling cycles that it is subjected to each day. This water collects in the bottom of the barrel. To ensure that we did not pump this water into the tank, we did not allow the feed pipe to touch the bottom of the barrel. For some reason, my boss forgot to raise the feed pipe off the bottom this time. I did not find this out until much later.
After the airplane was refueled, we loaded it up with insecticide and then started the engine. I took off and flew over to the next field to begin dusting it. It was a relatively small field, about 40 acres, with power lines on all sides. I came in over the power lines on my first approach and then pushed over to get down on the cotton. I flew along spreading the dust until I got to the power lines at the other edge of the field. I pulled up to go over them and the engine quit. I mean it flat quit. It did not sputter or taper off in power. It just plain quit. My speed carried me up and over the power line, but then I had to dump the nose to prevent the airplane from stalling.
Ahead of me was another cotton field with mature cotton standing 4 to 5 feet high. There were irrigation ditches running through the cotton with mounds of dirt piled up a couple of feet high along the sides of each ditch. I knew if I landed in that field, the airplane was going to go right over on its back, but I had no other choice. All I could do was try to make a soft landing. The airplane descended into that cotton and all of a sudden everything turned green. The prop was still windmilling and chewing cotton up and throwing it over the airplane like confetti. After a couple of tremendous jolts, the airplane stopped. I could not see a thing because of the flying cotton leaves, stalks, bolls, and tremendous dust clouds. I did not know if I was right side up or not, so I just sat there. I did not move, because once before in a similar incident I had unbuckled my seat belt in a panic and had fallen out of the airplane.
The dust and cotton leaves finally settled and I found that I was still sitting upright out in the middle of the field. I assume the reason I had not flipped over was that I had a full load of dust that helped to counteract any overturn tendency. I noticed as I sat there that the prop was still turning. I moved the throttle and the engine responded. The son of a bitch was running again, just as though nothing had ever happened.
Apparently, the engine had quit due to a big slug of water, but then it started up again as the engine continued to turn over due to the windmilling prop. I could not believe it. I finally shut the engine down, since there was not much I could do. I could not taxi because the airplane was stuck in the soft dirt.
The farmer who owned that field came out and began raising hell. I had destroyed about 2 acres of prime cotton during that landing. He wanted someone to pay for it. My boss finally showed up and we began worrying about how to get that airplane out of there. We finally worked out a deal with the farmer to have him tow it out with his tractor. He had to take down part of his fence to get the airplane out on the road alongside his property. We proposed to fly it off the road. The problem was that the road was extremely narrow and the wings would not clear the fenceposts on either side of the road, so we had to pay him to take down another 500 feet of fence for clearance on takeoff. That little slug of water out of the fuel barrel cost us a bundle of money.
Before takeoff, we checked the airplane to make sure that it was safe to fly. We discovered that one of the engine mount bolts had broken during the landing. We did not have a spare, so my boss decided to use baling wire to attach the engine mount to the firewall. You would think a guy would learn after being bitten once. My boss had already caused me to crash before and now he was using baling wire to replace an engine mount bolt. I should have let him fly the airplane out of there. I was too naive and trusting, though. I climbed in the airplane and started the engine while my boss propped it. I got airborne without hitting anything and then climbed up to begin the flight back up to the American border about 50 miles away. We wanted to take the plane back there to thoroughly inspect and repair it.
I climbed up to 1,000 feet to have some maneuvering room just in case the engine quit again. We really did not know for sure why the engine had quit. We strongly suspected water in the gas, but we could not prove it. So just to be sure, I gave myself a little maneuvering altitude in case the problem was of a different nature.
As the flight progressed, I began thinking about that baling wire holding the engine on. I began worrying that the wire might break and the engine might fall off. If that happened, the airplane would quickly tumble out of control and crash. I decided the best thing to do to cope with that problem was to fly low, so that I might get the airplane on the ground quickly if the engine started to vibrate loose. So I descended to 50 feet and proceeded on toward the border. I was really congratulating myself on solving that potential problem when I began to start thinking again about the possibility of the engine quitting. Mentally, I began thinking that the engine seemed to be running rougher than normal.
After 5 or 10 minutes thinking about that possibility, I decided to climb back up to 1,000 feet to get some maneuvering room. For the next half hour, I alternated from flying at 1,000 feet to flying at 50 feet for 5- or 10-minute periods or until one fear would overcome the other. I made it back to the border. After I landed, one of the mechanics wanted to know why I came in on the approach under the power lines on the end of the field. I did not answer him. It was too complicated to explain simply. He would not have understood.
I spent the next summer crop dusting in the Yuma, Arizona, area. The thing I remember about that area was the tremendous cottonwood trees bordering many of the cotton fields. Getting in and out of those fields with a duster was spectacular, to say the least, especially if it were a small field. I was almost doing hammerhead maneuvers at the end of each run.
After graduation from college, I went to work full time and never had the opportunity to do any more forest spraying or crop dusting. In some ways I missed the excitement of dusting. In other ways, I felt lucky to have survived. It was definitely the most dangerous type of flying that I have ever done.
My first job after graduation was with the Boeing Airplane Company in Seattle, as I mentioned earlier. I then moved on to California to work for the NACA. In 1958, shortly after the NACA became NASA, an educational program was developed to bring the aeronautics community to the edge of space. A group of noted space experts toured each of the NACA facilities and lectured the employees about the state of knowledge in astronautics. These experts included such celebrities as Wernher von Braun, Willy Ley, Kraft Ehricke, and Clyde Tombaugh.
These experts explained the fundamentals of space flight, such as how to get into orbit initially and to transfer from earth orbit to an earth-moon orbit or a solar orbit or an escape orbit. They explained celestial mechanics, celestial navigation, the makeup of the solar system, the characteristics of the moon and the other planets. The German experts discussed rocket boosters and trips to the moon and Mars.
This was in 1958, and yet they had already calculated the thrust and weight of the required launch vehicles and had planned the trips in detail down to the number of hours it would take to get to the moon and Mars and back. The other experts told us what to expect when you did get to the moon or one of the other planets: the strength of the gravity field, the surface temperature, the kind of atmosphere, the diameter and depth of the various craters visible to the as
tronomer, estimates of the nature of the surface material, and the probabilities of finding any life.
To us earthbound engineers, this was heady stuff. It was fascinating. It was almost unbelievable. We all knew there were planets, stars, and galaxies out there in space, but we did not realize how much was known about them or that we could actually travel to them using technology that was currently almost in hand. These experts talked as though we were going to make the trip the next day. They were only waiting for the mundane things to get done, such as actually building the already designed rocket launch vehicles. My God, here we were struggling to get beyond Mach 3 with an airplane and these guys were talking about accelerating to escape velocities of 36,000 fps to go to the moon and the planets.
I was never so fascinated in my entire life. I wanted to follow them back to the launch port. I wanted to travel with them to see the wondrous things they had described. I wanted to be a part of the team that opened the door to space. I did eventually apply for a job as an astronaut on the Apollo program, but by that time I was over the age limit. I finally managed to get a peek into space during my altitude flights in the X-15. It was beautiful—just like they described it.
I had an earlier opportunity to apply as a candidate for the original Mercury program, but I turned it down. Our director at the time, Walt Williams, asked both Neil Armstrong and me if we would like to apply. He said he would recommend us if we did. He advised us, however, not to apply since he said the Mercury astronauts would not be flying as test pilots, but rather as biological specimens in an automatically controlled spacecraft. He convinced us that we would not be happy simply riding in a can. He felt our future was much brighter in the X-15 program. He later left to become director of flight operations for the Mercury program. When he left Dryden to join the space program, he convinced a number of engineers to go with him. He also called on a number of Dryden people as consultants to the space program. I was asked to serve as a consultant in the area of piloting and human factors.
On my first trip back to Langley to participate in a meeting of human factors experts, Walt Williams introduced me to the Mercury astronauts. His introduction was, “Now, here is a real test pilot.” Walt was fiercely proud of the NACA, its personnel, and its pilots. It took me a long time to live that introduction down, but I soon became pretty good friends with most of the astronauts. I crossed paths with them many times during my assignment to the Dyna-Soar program and while flying the Rogallo Wing Parasev. I eventually checked Gus Grissom out in that vehicle.
Part of the Parasev checkout involved some instruction in sailplanes. I took Gus up to Tehachapi, where I rented a sailplane and made several flights with Gus to demonstrate towing operations and power off landings. On the way home, we stopped at an old bar in Mojave to have a couple of beers. The bar was owned by one of our former crew chiefs who had recently retired. We were warmly received and, in fact, quickly became the center of attraction when I introduced Gus as one of the Mercury astronauts.
From then on, we could not buy a drink. We also could not keep up with all the extra drinks that were thrust upon us. Every old desert rat, rancher, and prospector in the place bought us a shot of whiskey to go with our mug of beer. We finally had to sneak out after two or three hours of that kind of hospitality. We each had ten to twelve shots of whiskey sitting on the bar in front of us when we left.
That was a strange encounter—those grizzled old prospectors and desert rats drinking with an astronaut. The east meets the west. The old meets the new. The people are similar in some respects, but they are traveling at infinitely different speeds—one leading a burro through the desert and the other orbiting the earth in a spacecraft.
I sure hated to see Gus go the way he did. Gus died in a catastrophic fire in the Apollo capsule during a practice session for the first manned Apollo mission. He was one of my favorite astronauts. Wally Shirra was another favorite. He and I liked the same jokes.
My first research program as a pilot was a program to investigate the feasibility of obtaining substantial amounts of laminar flow on an airfoil at supersonic speeds. The testbed aircraft was an F-104. One wing had been covered with a fiberglass glove which served as the test section for the experiment.
The test flights were rather straightforward, involving a climbout to 35,000 feet heading eastbound out of Edwards. We continued eastbound until we reached the Colorado River at which time we reversed course and entered the Edwards supersonic corridor and then started accelerating back toward Edwards. The test condition desired was Mach 2 at the maximum altitude possible. On good days, we could maintain Mach 2 up to 60,000 feet. We would hold the maximum test condition until the low-fuel light came on and then, pull the throttle off and head for Edwards. During these research flights we were lucky to get 20 minutes of flight time. I flew over 100 research flights in the F-104 during that program and only logged 30 hours of flight time. Not a very good way to accumulate flight time.
My second research program was the ALSOR program. That was a fun program. It is not often that you can do acrobatics as part of a test program. That program was ultimately cancelled due to problems in deploying the balloon and tracking it. The objective of the program was worthwhile, but the effort required to achieve that objective was considered to be excessive. We had to resort to other sources for our atmospheric data during the X-15 program.
My next program was the Dyna-Soar program. The proposed X-20 Dyna-Soar was a small delta wing aircraft that was to be boosted into orbit and then flown back from orbit by a pilot/astronaut similar to the way the shuttle is flown back from space. The difference being that Dyna-Soar was to fly back from space in the mid-1960s rather than the early 1980s.
Dyna-Soar was well ahead of its time. At that time, no one was seriously interested in an operational vehicle similar to Dyna-Soar. In fact, no one was even serious about an operational vehicle with capabilities comparable to the X-15. Both vehicles were simply research aircraft to explore a new flight regime. We still do not have an operational Mach 6 aircraft 25 years after the X-15 achieved hypersonic speeds.
The Dyna-Soar started life as a follow-on to the X-15. It was to be a research aircraft launched on a booster rocket to explore the high hypersonic speed region. The goal was to reach speeds of Mach 16 to Mach 18. The flights were intended to be suborbital flights launched out of Cape Canaveral and recovered at one of the islands down range from the cape. The initial booster was to be the Titan I, a hypergolic fuel booster that could accelerate the proposed aircraft to the desired speeds. During the design, the weight of the X-20 increased and in order to still achieve the desired speeds, the booster had to be upgraded. We switched to the Titan II rocket, a more powerful booster. The Dyna-Soar ultimately ended up on the Titan III rocket which had the ability to boost the Dyna-Soar into orbit.
This major reorientation of the program was driven by several factors. One was the desire by the air force to compete with NASA’s Project Mercury for public attention. Project Mercury and its astronauts were being glorified by the media. Dyna-Soar was being ignored. A more compelling reason for orbiting the Dyna-Soar was to sell the Titan III booster.
The air force desperately wanted a more powerful booster for classified satellite payloads and the Dyna-Soar program offered an opportunity to market the capabilities of such a booster. The marketing strategy was a success. The air force gained approval for development of the Titan III, but then lost interest in Dyna-Soar. This loss of interest involved some life and death struggles within the USAF over control of orbital spacecraft. The aeronautical part of the air force conceived and developed the Dyna-Soar, but the space side of the air force owned and operated the boosters and also believed that any space missions must be under their control. The space side of the air force won the battle by selling the Titan III booster, cancelling the X-20 Dyna-Soar, and initiating its own manned space program, the Manned Orbital Laboratory (MOL program). It is such a pity that the Dyna-Soar program, a good sound research program,
fell victim to political infighting in the USAF with an assist from Robert McNamara’s Department of Defense. The Dyna-Soar could have opened up space to routine operations 15 years before the shuttle. Surprisingly, however, the USAF was not seriously interested in manned space operations. They were quite happy with their unmanned satellites and still have not developed a manned space operation 25 years later.
I was assigned to the Dyna-Soar program in 1959 as a pilot-consultant. In all, seven pilots were assigned as pilot-consultants: from NASA, Neil Armstrong, Bill Dana, and I; from the Air Force Flight Test Center, Jim Wood, Russ Rogers, Hank Gordon, and Pete Knight. For the next 2 1/2 or 3 years, we had three pilots at Boeing in Seattle at all times. The AFFTC and NASA pilots rotated on a monthly basis with Jim Wood, the chief consultant pilot being permanently assigned at Boeing.
I spent every third month in Seattle participating in the design process and flying the Dyna-Soar simulator for hours and hours on second and third shift while I developed entry control techniques. We flew boost simulations at Martin-Baltimore to demonstrate that we could manually fly the Titan booster into orbit with the Dyna-Soar vehicle on top. This was a very controversial issue. The booster designers had been using automatic control and guidance systems from day one. In their minds that was the only way to go.
I attended a talk that Wernher von Braun gave to the young Society of Experimental Test Pilots in 1959. At that talk, the subject of pilot control of the manned spacecraft boosters came up. Wernher said that the pilots should not worry about flying the booster. He said his booster designers could put a spacecraft into orbit much better than any pilot. This precipitated a heated argument with the audience of macho test pilots, but Wehrner ultimately won out. To this day, all manned space flights have been automatically controlled during boost.
At the Edge of Space Page 19
