SubscribeThen you had men like Dave Scott and Mike Adams, who were two of Yeager's ARPS students. They were practicing low lift-over-drag landings one day in an F-104. In this maneuver, which simulated an X-15 landing, you gunned the afterburner for speed (and stability) and flared the flaps and tried to grease the ship onto the runway at 200 knots. As Scott and Adams neared the ground, the "eyelids" on the afterburner malfunctioned, opening too wide, cutting the thrust down to 20 or 30 percent of maximum. Visually they could tell that the ship was sinking too fast. Scott, who had the controls, gunned it but got very little response. They were dropping like a brick. Adams, in back, knew that the tail would hit the runway first, due to the angle of attack they were in, if Scott couldn't regain power. He told Scott over the radio circuit that if they tail hit he was ejecting. The tail hit, and in that moment he pulled his cinch ring and ejected at zero altitude. Scott elected to stay with the ship. The belly smashed onto the runway and the ship went careening down it and off into the mesquite. When the beast finally came to a stop, Scott looked back, and the engine was jammed up into the space where Adams used to be. Both men had made the right decision. Adams had been exploded up into the air and had come down safely by parachute. Scott's ejection mechanism had been broken in the torque of the initial impact and he would have been killed had he pulled the cinch ring, either by the nitroglycerine explosion or by a partial ejection.Mike Adams was killed in a 1967 X-15 accident. Adams was the first American astronaut to die during a space mission. He was posthumously awarded astronaut wings (for flying 50 miles above the Earth's surface on his final flight).
Yeager was tremendously impressed by these two decisions by two men in the very mouth of the Gulp. There you had it, with the ante doubled: the right stuff.
In reality, the crash happened on May 10, 1967, at Edwards AFB. Pilot Bruce Peterson was making the plane's 16th unpowered flight when he encountered a Pilot-Induced Oscillation (PIO) which cased the M2-F2 to roll wildly from side-to-side. The PIO had been encountered by Milt Thompson during the first flight, and intentionally researched on two other flights. The M2-F2 was turning out to be the least-stable of all the Lifting Bodies. So this was not an entirely unexpected situation for Bruce Peterson. He recovered, but was distracted by a rescue helicopter that strayed too close, and delayed just a split second or so before lowering the landing gear.More M2-F2 pix here.
The M2-F2 hit the ground with the gear only partially down, and flipped six times, coming to rest upside-down. Two men pulled Bruce from the wreckage (that's his helmet on the ground just in front of the nose), and he was severely injured. He was flown to UCLA Medical Center. Peterson had a long road to recovery but nonetheless lived to fly again, despite losing vision in his right eye due to a staph infection. As for the M2-F2, it was taken back to the Northrop plant in Hawthorne, CA, rebuilt (for $700,000) and redesignated the M2-F3. Meanwhile, while the M2-F3 was laid up at the plant, the HL-10 and X-24A programs continued. In its original configuration, the M2-F2 made a total of 16 flights.
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Good work, cenoxo
posted by squidfartz at 7:26 AM on August 28, 2006