172 - Rogers E. Smith: The Test Pilot Who Flew Everything

but it goes back to the basics and I said aggression and patience it's a different equation with thrust factoring so you can do some phenomenal maneuvers the prospecting you could go up and turn around and so on but your opponent is going to be watching you do this and clapping but yours you're up there as a constant Target and he's shooting it down [Music] when you think of giants in Air Force Aviation you might recall names like Chuck Yeager Bob Hoover maybe even Robin olds or John Boyd but do you know the name Rogers E Smith well you should because he is a former Royal Canadian Air Force pilot who then spent many years in the Air National Guard retiring as a lieutenant colonel he then flew for NASA for a number of years flying the x-29 X31 F-15 SR-71 and most importantly today he is my guest here on the fighter pilot podcast Rogers Raj welcome to the show yeah Roger's fine and it's a pleasure to be here but it is it is Rogers with an s that takes it is it's my grandmother's surname so I have two last names Rogers Smith that's why the E helps yeah all right guard buddies would say what is your real name is it Rogers myth or Roger Smith so it's Rogers all right but Roger's fine well what about Chuck Yeager and Robin olds and Bob Hoover and all these guys are you okay with me throwing your name in with that group well I doubt that I'm uh right up with them but they're names that I know and uh one that I flew with that's Chuck Yeager okay a flight later on in his time he came to the supersonic flight uh uh the Sonic Boom at every Air Force day at Edwards and so we invited him at the 50th anniversary of SuperSonic flight to talk at Nasa and how I got him to come was promising my ride in the front seat in an F-18 really so we did that exactly great pilot oh good well I imagine you have tons of stories that's why I'm so glad we finally made this work turns out we only live less than a mile apart no that's amazing I drove over to pick you up to come out here but I could have walked because we're just down the street when you're in town I know you have other places well I'm really looking forward to this we met through uh our mutual friend Billy Flynn and so I told him last night we would be discussing uh your career and SR-71 and whatever comes to mind so he sends his regards you probably keep in better touch with him than I do I do and he he came to as a Canadian exchange to the test pilot school first at Edwards that's how we met all right and then he he did ultimately fly he flew the harv the thrust factoring F-18 he threw with us we got to fly the thrust factoring F-16 as a result of the cooperation wow and he was the squadron commander of the same Squadron I was in in the Canadian Air Force four for one squatter fantastic so I know him well good well let's go back to the beginning Raj what got you or who got you interested in aviation in the first place I mean a lot of kids right stare up at the sky and look at airplanes and think that's amazing I want to do that some want to be firemen or whatever else but Aviation bites a lot of kids and how did it for you well I had an uncle I I grew up and was born in western Canada in a place called Dawson Creek Way up in the north and my father joined the Air Force in the second world war and was shipped off to England as an armorer and so my mother and I came to Toronto in Canada and I lived right next door to uh my aunt and my my aunt's husband was my uncle and he was at that time flying in England as training people and beam flying but he was in my life my hero and he flew airplanes I I wanted to fly airplanes ever since and I wanted to be an engineer I wanted to um understand the technical side of it and be a pilot ultimately a test pilot so I that's what what it came from and when I first flew in the Canadian Air Force in training the very first airplane I flew was a Harvard we called them T6 and I'd never been on another airplane ever before so people say how did you ever get the bug well it's my uncle and he was my hero and okay so that's you said something I smiled and nodded at but I'm not sure I understood what you said did you say beam flame yeah that's how they in Europe in bombing how they got so they could oh like do all weather bombing and so on they sent beams over the targets or intersecting beams and they had to learn how to read the equipment and fly the beams so he flew an Anson was a twin engine trainer in those days teaching people how to fly the beam he was in a pilot in the Canadian Air Force okay Royal Canadian Nerf well that's what's great about having the podcast is I can learn something every single episode just like every flight right you're always learning something as long as you think that way you will yeah yeah true all right so let's talk about your stint in the Royal Canadian Air Force maybe if there was any challenge getting in I know at least in my life getting in the Navy wasn't so easy and getting through flight school but what was that like and what did you end up flying so for me growing up as I did in the center of Toronto which was in a I would say A working class area it was safe enough but he ever you had to know your way around the streets okay so I I went to school in in both public school and high school uh almost 100 of my friends were Jewish the whole the dominant it was a Jewish population in that area in Toronto and one of the things for me to be competitive at school they believed in in working hard at school I had to work twice as hard to keep up with him so all through those two things I worked really hard at school and I didn't think I was particularly smart but I outworked everybody and that that's what gave me the incentive but it gave me the marks in the background when I graduated from high school in Ontario there's a grade 13. still in high school so I had very good marks in that so then I could apply I applied and was accepted and Engineering physics which is the honor degree in engineering and I also applied to the Air Force because my family was not capable of sending me and paying for University so I got into what's equivalent to ROTC okay it's called rotp and plan that accepted me and I was accepted at rural Military College in Kingston but I wanted to be an aeronautical engineer so they didn't have that course at that time that's where Billy went and so um they allowed me to go to the University of Toronto so they paid my tuition they paid me 75 a month I think all the books and everything so that's how I got in the Air Force but at that time during the Summers they finished University we went to Pilot training after a few years they stopped that but it was great for me because I I went off to in Ontario in Centralia flying t6s every summer uh that and then at the final graduation I went to the west to Gimli near Winnipeg to check out to get my wings on t-33s there I was a very good ball player especially fast pitch softball so I was the Shortstop on the on the station team and when it came time to the university then offered me a fellowship to come back and get my masters so I went to the commander on the base because I knew him because they knew me because I played on the station team and I I got an interview with him and I said this is I've been offered this he said you got to do that you'll do that he picked up the phone called Ottawa and said I have this Cadet here I was still a Cadet so I got nine months off without pay but I got nine months to go to Toronto and get that and I came back and finished up my t-33 training but because I knew all the people on the base and when I came back they said what do you want to fly what do you want to get there are only two things you could do one was a Interceptor which I didn't like a clunk it was called cf-100 okay or f-86s so I got f86s fantastic and I went to training in uh f-86 and then I went to France and flew f-86s for two and a half years over there so all we did was there to air fight every day but it's hard on your neck yeah it's hard on my back somebody took an x-ray in my back recently and said I don't have back problems but they said you got you must have pulled a lot of G's how many hours did you end up with in the f-86 oh about 600 something like that yeah so uh that's where I well I learned to fly as a fighter pilot and I learned a lot of the lessons that you learned you know how to be aggressive and when to be patient that's tough it's a tough thing to find the happy medium there sure and so I learned a lot I learned how to be a good wingman for example I spent some time getting lectured when we go off on deployments in other countries and somebody get behind us and in no uncertain terms as a wingman I learned that it will never happen again or else so you'll hear about it but the most difficult thing I ever had was you know qualifying as a fourship lead I bet if you climb out and we had the Mark VI was the best airplane in Europe at that time had the most power and so on and it was had slats that worked and so it was very maneuverable but if you're uh leading a fourship and you see the cons we always climbed out to forty five thousand feet straight out with tanks wow and you'd see them coming with the con you go you know you gotta it's up to you now to say three do this or whatever and you think couldn't we stop this just for a minute well I I think nobody can't stop it's a thousand knots you're it's closure yeah and so I'd have some of the veterans that weren't University graduates had a bit of a chip on their shoulder and they'd say to me we're a little surprised you're not making better progress as a fourship lead I said why is that it's the hardest thing I've ever tried to do I said well with all this education you have it should be I said this has nothing to do with it so that's a tough rule that happens okay and jumping ahead a little bit in the latest movie Maverick they capture the air air seen extremely well how things happen especially in close so fast that you can't believe it and if it's in Too Close you're not going to get out of there yeah well you were as I understand in the Royal Canadian Air Force roughly between Korea and Vietnam and then you went over to was it the national research Council for a bit it is it's called the national neurological establishment okay and so make it a short story when I came back from Europe I met the the deputy of the central experimental improving establishment the test establishment in the Canadian Air Force stationed in Ottawa headquartered in Ottawa he came over and asked me what I was going to do when we're disbanding the f-86 and I said I'm gonna I guess I'm being posted to be a telecom officer and he said that's crazy with your background I'm changing that so when I finally reported at CP he had gone and I didn't realize there was a conflict between the two of them and this now Commander called me in and said basically if you're a good boy and work hard for three years or so we might send you to the Empire test pilot school and I'm going three years or so and I still had flying privileges there but so then one of my mentors one of my Idols a couple years ahead of me in the Air Force was now the chief pilot over at Nae which was taking over its own flying and getting into variable stability helicopters which they still are world leaders in variable stability helicopters so he called me and said why don't you come over and work for for us and given my recent talk with the commander I said excellent I'll do that and I did it literally walked across the street and it was a good move for me because I was a pilot engineer there where I had responsibilities in both sides but before you had gone to any kind of test pilot school correct yeah and I never did go to a test pilot school no but I taught I was an instructor at all three schools in the United States we had with Cornell air lab jumping ahead a bit they invented variable stability airplanes in the early days of flyby wire so they had a modified t-33 but they had two b-26s that were used for training they were the greatest training tool ever in a pilot school in a test pilot school because you could change the characteristics you want to see an unstable airplane in those days it was analog you had all the sensors you could feedback anglo-attack and make the airplane that he's flying you're watching them in this case side by side but you have a button that you can press at any moment and you're always attached to the main controls so he could land the airplane and every new airplane in the United States every new Fighter for years was always simulated in the nt-33 the variable stability t-33 beforehand so I did quite a F-18 I did the first John Paget was the Navy guy that first flew the F-18 he and I spent two weeks flying together at Pax River before the first flight and the same thing with the F-16 so that was the perfect place for me to want to be a test pilot and be a little more involved in the engineering side of things so you became effectively a test pilot without actually ever going to a formal test pilot school right oh wow is Cal span also where you flew the x-22 I think it's called gonna look like a 50 year ago version of what you see now in these Avatar movies with the Tilt rotor things that are running around it was it was built two of them were built by Bell in Niagara Falls one crashed on their own but one was designed to be variable stability a system in it and ultimately it was Cal span the Navy put it at Cal span so we operated as a variable stability airplane and did all the checkouts so it was four jet 4J 85 engines and four rotating props so it had 11 gear boxes it's crazy to think of even trying to fly it today but you have to remember in those days we were working for the Navy and we did a program for them where we designed and flew with two Navy two Marine pilots from Pax River descending from 1500 feet a descending decelerating to the hover IFR simulated IFR okay the Ducks were automatically moved according to the profile but that was a long time ago and those were the kinds of things we did so were the Marines thinking like taking troops ashore was the Navy thinking ship to ship type stuff yeah it was all the early days of what you know you see v-22s struggled because the Marines are persistent that they got that through a very difficult test program in fact I was watching one today very distinctive noise yeah it is so if you saw it on Coronado may have been the CMV 22 it could be but we've had conversations about that one on this show yeah all right so what happens in around 1970 when you decide to roll South of the Border there and go talk to the Air National Guard folks and your mother was an American citizen right so you were already yeah that that really happened out of Canada going to the National Guard because we were at Canada and Ottawa we were had variable stability airplanes uh helicopters so we had some association with NASA Langley on the East Coast which was mainly helicopters okay so working with them on joint programs then they asked me if I'd like to come down and work in NASA it's like being asked if you want to go to the big leagues you know so I went to the various authorities and I well I tried to get a green card I applied for a green card to work it's very very it was difficult but when they looked at the Green Card application that had my mother was born in Minnesota they said we want to hear more about that well ultimately after some paperwork I was established that she was a citizen I she moved to Canada when she was six years old okay but she was still a citizen when I was born so they said I'm a citizen as a U.S citizen as at Birth and the Canadians said you're not deciding anything you were just born so it didn't affect that so okay so I then went to Langley uh for a year moved down there and then I got off for a job in Buffalo New York which suited my personal life as well but while I was at Langley is when I got in the Marine Corps one of the pilots that I worked with was a Marine in the reserves so now I move in the story I move from Langley to uh Kyle's Cal span what's was called Cornell aeronautical laboratory at that time and that's where the same thing happened again there was they were looking for Pilots at the Air National Guard at Niagara Falls so I went up and interviewed but now I was already in the Marine Corps Reserve so I transferred from the Marine Corps Reserve to the United States Air Force but in the Air National Guard so Royal Canadian Air Force to the Marine Corps to the Air National Guard which is can we call it just Air Force all right well it is a part of the air of course it's when it's it can be activated anytime and so I flew there 24 years 24 years yeah I retired as a lieutenant colonel right I was a group Commander when I retired I was F-16 squadron commander before that and what all did you fly while you were there I thought I read t-33 or maybe that was right I started with a t-33 because they said they were still flying F-100 so I got a couple of flights and F-100 okay and of course winter was coming anyway so they didn't want to do a checkout during the winter couldn't do that I couldn't accomplish that yeah so um during that winter they switched to 101s okay so now I checked out on the voodoo I could do that locally and I flew the voodoo for a better part of 10 years and then I flew f4cs and then f4ds and then ultimately f-16s we got the Interceptor version of the F-16 wow and the first 12 years of that I was working in Buffalo and then the last half I worked in at Edwards my boss Tom McMurtry who's passed away now but was honored by the man that took all the pictures yeah for Maverick because he said when Tom retired from NASA he flew for clay Lacy the photo business okay and K2 is the man's name that runs that company still does all the photo work in Hollywood he put Tom's picture up said this man taught me how to run tasks and small teams and he was a great man not just because he hired me but he he was they were all um marvelous mentors because they had no egos but there were done great things I mean I set up Neil Armstrong's desk he was previously in that same office so hold on though so for the 24 years you were at the Buffalo Air National Guard or Niagara Falls you were able to double dip or do something else besides was it like a part-time thing or no I I worked well I could or you took a break and went over and did something else I'm just trying to understand no I worked at Cornell aerolab as a regular job and I did weekends and Etc at the guard but I also held alert overnight at the guards because we had an alert commitment so I would go to work in the five o'clock I'd start alert and get off at eight o'clock in the morning and uh so that for 12 years I did that and then it the reason I started talking about NASA was the men that hired me Tom McMurtry was now the chief pilot so he said we want you to stay in the guard so I said well that's in Niagara Falls I'll figure that out so he would often come to me and say do we have a contract right now with kelsman and I or Colonel lower lab and I said first I said no I don't think we do you sure so I would occasionally go on a guard weekend and have I get an airplane to go across country but not always but I I learned how to sleep on airplanes yeah so I had questions so I had I had help at both ends okay that wanted me to do that so I come to the guard I'd literally fly overnight uh go to Chicago I'd sleep all the time and then I'd I'd go to the Garden in the morning I'd fly twice that day and when I left but I'd get five six days at a time there and when I left I would fly twice and then go and pick like five o'clock flight back to L.A I did that for 12 years so were you married yes it's still at the end of it too still at the end yeah yeah right that's good oh my goodness wow no I had a an and pulled all those stops along the way taught me a lot of lessons I'll bet and the reason I got the job at Nasa was because of the guard flight at Edwards it's because I had you know a high speed time now lots of my my logbook looked good yeah so that allowed me to get the job and when I I was Chief pilot at Cal span Cornell air Lab at the time I told my buddies at the guard I'm going to take this job at Edwards and they said are you crazy you're going to be blue four out there the new guy listen I don't care that's my dream you get back to the beginning the dream of any test pilot is to be at Edwards not not Pax River but doing testing at Edwards with you know all that 200 000 20 000 square miles rather to fly in and sunshine most of the time lots of wind but so but nobody decided hold on this guy's never been through test pilot school I mean you were essentially just kind of because I had learned it okay in Canada at the national hierarchical establishment I I had learned testing in the variable stability airplanes and running my own projects and flying them and safety pilot and then I had I had learned a lot elsewhere so my experience then counted and now like where I've worked the last 10 years uh in the world of uavs testing at gray Butte for working for a small company for doing all the testing for the MQ-9 for the Air Force Under the auspices of of Edwards so they now have inserted because they came up with somebody had to be a test pilot graduate in order to fulfill the slot for test products so then they said or be 10 years experience 10 years a member of society of experimental test pilots well I have been 50 plus years a member of that and I was so I was allowed to be designated test positive Edwards in the 80s and 90s that must have been pretty fun impressive I don't know a lot of interesting things in pictures on the flight line no it was a great opportunity and made possible by the people that were there like Tom McMurtry and Bill Daniel have both passed on but when when I was introduced to the office I stood in a doorway with um Tom McMurtry and he pointed over to this desk and said Bill Dana who flew the last flight in the X-15 this was sitting there at the other desk that were butted together and it turns out the empty desk that I was going to have was Neil Armstrong's desk when he worked there he worked in the same office so that's the kind of people I was introduced to and I've said in every talk that I give what Bill Dana's advice to myself and another test pilot that came a year later from the Navy Ed Schneider he said I'm not going to give you a lot of advice here I'll give you just one piece of advice that you're working here always take your job seriously never take yourself seriously meaning control your ego and that's the way he conducted himself and all of them and so they're pretty serious about doing the job right if you didn't do it right you're going to hear about it and learn about it but if you took yourself self-seriously they'd fix that in a hurry yeah so we that was my luck following my dream to work with people mentors like that yeah and so I could combine the two more of the tests flying and the test piloting at Edwards a little bit of engineering you know so you mentioned top gun Maverick earlier and the movie begins after the little carrier scene ostensibly with a test piloting type scene although I think it's supposed to be China Lake but very similar and it has sort of a dare I say Cavalier of course he's Maverick right uh approach to oh well we'll just go Mark 10. I mean right Hollywood doesn't always get it right but in the 80s and 90s was it just let's take an airplane and go see what it can do or is it very much right we have something to do today how are we going to approach it and go do it it was very disciplined and that's why you take your job seriously I didn't realize how important it was until later in life that I was in an environment too where I could raise my hand and ask a question or or point out a a problem at any time anywhere not be so you just sit down and be quiet here we got to do this so I did have somebody when I got to be uh flight Ops talking to headquarters NASA and it this guy was asking me about some schedule why did we put so many weeks in it or whatever and I I said to him well that's because you know we're doing flight research and we don't know all the answers otherwise we wouldn't be doing research so he said yeah well I've heard all that yeah I've heard all that stuff before but can't you tell me next year how many discoveries you're going to make and you go I don't think you understand that flight research is a discovery process that's why we're doing it but they don't so that's why it's so important the bottom line to me at any time I get the opportunity is to be able to communicate and you need to learn as a tester not just a test pilot or anyone to be able to speak up properly not in a Cavalier fashion and not have your head chopped off because the initial reaction with the people that tend to run the money is get rid of this guy because he's hurting the schedule well another great test pilot I put these takeaways in my talk if you think safety is expensive try an accident no that's the trade-off yeah so anyway that's my theme of the moment sure yeah but historically it was not Cavalier but it it was you know we had a squash cart for the pilots we we had a great job they wanted you to be proficient I mean they would talk to me and say hey you're you need to fly more you know fly a little bit more because that's a safety issue you want to be proficient not just current so that was a great opportunity greater than I uh anticipated at the time or felt at the time but later on I realized what a marvelous opportunity it was I had a boss once tell me he thought I was flying too much yeah well that wasn't fun because we were on deployment and I'll leave it at that but I don't think I've ever had a boss tell me no need to fly more Raj can you help me with a memory I'm not sure is true or not I remember going to an air show at China Lake in the 80s and I swore I saw the F20 flying and I thought I remember hearing that Chuck Yeager was flying it would that be possible no not not likely that Chuck Yeager was flying out they have 20. but it's possible the F20 was fine right okay and then I think I remember going to an Edwards show later and I want to say maybe it was the 40th anniversary of the supersonic first flight so that would have been late 80s and you had already said something about Chuck doing that would he have flown like an F-15 over Edward's show a pie he traditionally flew after he retired he would open the show in the back seat or in the front seat as they chose but with an in a two-seater breaking the sound barrier okay yeah well I'm kind of disappointed actually to hear the first part because I'm writing my Memoirs right now because people want to know my story from this podcast and I put in there that it was Jaeger flying the F20 and then later on this other thing so I'll either have to let the story be more fun than the facts or I'll have to go back and change it you might have told you it was but I don't know I was probably 12 years old so yeah but I do remember going out to Edwards and I walked away with like these little one-pager pictures of this airplane that looked almost like an F5 but with the wings go in the wrong direction there was a picture of a 747 with a space shuttle on top I mean gosh like I said earlier I think that was just seemed to me like the Heyday of really amazing things happening out there but maybe that was the 40s and 50s I don't know well they were there were amazing things happening and those demonstrators you just talked about x29 and the x-31 all flew out of NASA didn't fly the whole flight but the majority of all the test flying was done at Nasa but it was a jointer joint Navy Air Force whatever German in the case of the x-31 so and then the the SR came back it had had been there for like 10 years right it was kind of a it was a a y of 12 actually but they they um they flew it looking at aerodynamic Heating and the beginnings of digital flyby wire eventually the SR was converted to digital the flight control system but they were clever enough not to mess with it they virtually duplicated it didn't go and have to re-test things too much so it it improved the range by about seven percent because they could control the inlets very much more accurately yeah how many came back because you sent me a PowerPoint presentation that I was able to watch before this discussion today and it's got embedded videos and I see you flying which is fun but it was the one with like the little piggyback that's yeah we got now when I was there we got three airplanes wow we got two a models and a b model and when they that's when the Air Force retired the SR the first time in the 91. they um they had decided it was a sack was running that you know that they needed yeah they needed money they wanted money for other projects I guess but okay they uh they retired but then they brought it back uh and they actually reconstituted the debt at Edwards so um we got three airplanes but the B model when the defense department agreed to give three to NASA they the B model was in pieces at in its big inspections that happened I don't know every 10 years or whatever uh at Palmdale so then I actually saw the memo written by Cheney directing them to get the the B model back together and flying to deliver to NASA but that's the B model the B model was uh cockpit that you could fly from in the back okay but the canopy was what set above they had they put an additional canopy that with the spacesuit helmet on you could fit in there you you'd look out you could fit in there but if there was an onstart which occasionally happened you'd actually bang your head against the well the wall [Music] when what was it like actually is the way I want to ask this when seemed that this aircraft was coming back and you would have a chance to fly it I mean I have to think of course you've had some amazing experiences by this point but was that a pinch me moment or was it just okay it was a an unexpected moment yeah and of course I was assigned assigned two pilots to each project so the Steve Ishmael was had been there a while long a lot longer than I had and myself were assigned as the SR Pilots that was a real plum in the office for me and I certainly appreciated that yeah and the same man that hired me was the one making those decisions so yeah it was a big deal and we had a chance we the people that were going to fly to go the simulator that was at Beale and Rod Dykeman was the squadron commander at that time at Beale they were still they were starting to wind down now while they he had now he works for American Airlines he had left when they disbanded the SR and joined America and so anyway he though is the last thing in the Air Force went to the Binghamton I think it was in New York to accept the modified Simulator the simulator was brought up to date and it was a really an excellent simulator with Visual and small motion separated cockpits in the back seat or he could fly just with an instructor behind you and so he he was there and met us and then he ultimately was working for American when we got the B model when we were ready to start flying he wrote NASA and volunteered he said I'll take time off from from American three weeks and I'll come and check out Steve the first guy okay and he did that and he annotated every page of the dash one with hand notes this is really important forget about this what is the manual the manual I'm sorry the flight manual yeah and he did all that he flew I didn't fly with him maybe I flew in the simulator with him but he flew with Steve and checked him out and then I made the first flight my first flight with Steve Ishmael which we had a a non-start right on the first flight oh gosh it's scared the crap out of us right when I don't know if this is an easy way to quantify but let's say at some point in your day at work you say okay I need to start studying to learn to fly the SR-71 so if you imagine you start the clock there how long does it take before you actually get into an SR-71 and go fly yeah I I think a month like a month yeah we had a simulator and so on so you could study the systems learn the procedures start up and shut down in emergencies get in the simulator a whole bunch and a month later you could go for that maybe two months a month or two months but of course you're not a brand new pilot no no right but they made sure that you were ready you know they but they didn't send you to class exactly the same as you might in a a new guy right yeah wow and that so how many hours or flights or what I flew um eight years wow but uh we didn't fly a lot I flew 150 hours roughly in the SRC in that time okay yeah so I we also when the Air Force reactivated the program at Edwards we Myself by this time Steve Ishmael had left that flying the SR and Ed Schneider took over and I was a prime pilot and so then we we work with the Air Force reconstitute the program but they had no instructors in 94-95 time period so they came and annotated you know annotated they they anointed you yes you're an instructor I was in it both we were official instructor Pilots for the Air Force so the first guy I flew with had 900 hours but he hadn't flown for like eight years okay so and I'd keep asking him what'd you just say because he I'd takes notes I was taking notes so we had a good relationship they they then flew the B model okay and they they they then got an A model right the the second a model that we had they started flying but right I mean all these aircraft where were they in all that time in some sort of level 1000 I think you call it preservation somewhere or yeah we had the two a models sitting in our ramp but we flew the a model and the B model right regularly but when the Air Force was getting back into it were they going to bring some out of we got we had a crew that were proficient at maintenance on the SR okay we were cleared to fly it then and we flew it to Palmdale and they they reinspected the airplane thoroughly and then turned it back to the Air Force uh the likely we flew it back yeah and landed it and they took it over yeah okay and NASA's role in this was it also partly for I think you had said you did some research it was it yeah they did a lot of research for the uh there was quite a lot of for several years uh um idea to take a vehicle take it off and fly it to space and then it sort of been practical to you could have thought about it beforehand that the amount of fuel you have to carry in the size you have to so that that was part of the doing data flights for that we did some Oddball data flights for people occurring simulating a satellite going by because our going at Mach 3.2 across you know Phoenix is like some of these satellite things it's like a satellite going by so we checked out some systems like that and then the laser was a new type of rocket engine that had never been flown if you look at pictures of space planes and see them that look at like the uh the exhaust looks like a rectangle okay it's got slices each one of those slices could be a laser a rocket engine with its the thing about a laser was it only had one side of the nozzle the other side was the error at the Mach number you're at itself compensating you're saying the word laser are we thinking like a no kidding light laser I'm sorry that's an acronym okay it's linear aerospike rocket engine okay sorry that's all right um and we flew we tried to fly for a couple of several years we had Lockheed Skunk Works make a 1500 pound canoe if you like that sat on the attached to the top of the SR blanked out the drag Chute for example but it carried the tanks for gaseous hydrogen and liquid oxygen and we had a 10th scale model of one slice of a laser mounted on a fin in the in between the two tails and the idea was we were going to do a seven second burn to demonstrate For the First Time In Flight a laser actually ignited so we had that done at the skunk works at the time the head of NASA was championing this better faster cheaper thing which you can't have all of them that's right and so um they didn't use the the valves that were the latest and most expensive ones so we had um we got the airplane and then it was leaking you can identify oxygen leaks pretty easily at least they have they have sensors that can do that hydrogen stuff because it's just a tiny Monica a tiny atom you know and so we did a lot of work trying to get the leaks down and we kind of succeeded in that in the auction side you can't do it with a hydrogen there were no sensors to do that and we went through many safety boards and we had people on the boards or not on the board but you talk to people about rockets and they're come from Huntsville and they're used to something goes wrong they blow it up or something and they I one guy said to me once when we were debating something about this and uh he said what's the big deal you know at the worst case it can be just a small hydrogen fire I don't I said I don't think those two words go together plus we're 20 feet ahead of where that fire is and you can't just press a button So It ultimately the safety board of the director retired and he might have had a different view the crew was convinced that it was the risk was not great for seven second burn and so on of having simultaneous leaks right together yeah well we never got clearance so we failed that's the only time we ever failed in a project oh wow and we failed in the laser yeah didn't fly it we had a whole a whole episode we flew it but you flew it but we never ignited it yeah we had a whole episode on the SR-71 with Brian Shaw who actually passed away recently yes and he was quick to give credit to Kelly Johnson and the team and all the folks that made that aircraft happen but he he liked to relate it as I recall to like a 57 Chevy and it's just pure and plain and not a lot of thrill or Frills maybe but I want to ask you when it was starting to come back now we are here what in the 90s I believe was there an urge or maybe there was an actual effort to well we can upgrade the cockpit or we can fill in these leaks or we can change the fuel because I think the JP was seven eight was uh a challenge so when it came back were there people that were championed in that or was it just no take it as it is because it's too much money to try to do to anything else yeah well they they did go through the business of changing the flight controls to digital okay not just the flight controls but then Inlet controls and and that was a big a big effort okay and but I'm he just recently passed away and I was they when I asked the SR people I never met him but they look at me and say it was a great storyteller uh but but you think of if if you see there's on YouTube there's um an 18 minute video uh called the insane engineering of the SR-71 it's animated it's terrific it's really well done but you think of that engine how it functions you would not think of 57 shelves yeah it is an amazing accomplishment to be a turbo Ramjet and that's the spike moved 26 inches you know and yes you had to be that's 26 inches in an environment where the temperatures were like 600 Degrees or in the inlet yeah and the impact temperatures that's what kept you know that's what limited the speed was temperature so nowadays we have new materials so when you talk about doing some things at high speed you have materials that can it's not easy but it's not outlandish with the materials we have but the SR that's why it had titanium structure right because that 3.2 Mach aluminum would melt yeah and they had to invent the tooling to make the aircraft out of all that you know they have one of those engines at the San Diego Air and Space no I think I heard that yeah it's downstairs uh our videographer Kevin over here and I got a chance to see it when we were talking to them about the episode that we did with them so it was neat it was huge yeah and I mean they're cool the fuel is a coolant it goes through the whole airplane so I I don't think that's a good description of it but it it didn't it it functioned it didn't have a lot of there were some problems we had one that that we had an emergency at Oshkosh refilling over the lake that I was involved in that the there was a the nozzles were pressure the pressure in the nozzle the medium that was in it wasn't hydraulic fluid it was fuel so what happened was one of the lines there was a small little pump that changed it to 3000 psi and one of that got it got out of balance and it cracked the small line that went to the nozzle oh gosh so then it was spewing fuel right throughout the out the nozzle and we were very close to coming back to Edwards we were over the lake and I had I had told one of our guys that was taking an F-18 there would be on static display why don't you fly with us you know give you something to do as well and it was good that he did because it was a tanker from Edwards they knew us and uh but the tanker guy kept saying you know there's some there's a lot of stuff coming out your left uh exhaust and we were getting clearances the guy in the back was talking to clearances and we were going to fly by supersonic you know high up but we were going to transition right over Oshkosh and so then I said come on why don't you come over this side and have a look tell me what you see so he got over there and he said boy there's a lot of a lot of something coming out of the left nozzle with fuel it was pouring if we let the afterburner I'm sure bed things would have happened Bob so we declared an emergency and had to dump 60 000 pounds of gas over the lake and and then we we landed you know I'm talking a backseater was going on don't shut the engine down and I'm saying well the checklist says you know I said okay we're going to shut it down at 15 000 feet coming down so we did so we're straight in shut it on one engine and then I said to the tower the chase is going to land in front of us and clear the runway you know so is this an OshKosh you're Landing there no no we're okay we're Landing in Milwaukee so we declared an emergency and we went into Milwaukee okay and so he said I don't know what you said but you're clear to do anything you want so we did that and we landed okay but uh the tanker also landed and our crew chief was in there and they after we got out of the suits they opened the panel and this line was broken at both ends now so we were lucky that but if you just land in a place that's not expecting you like Milwaukee you're dressed like an astronaut can you get yourself out of that are you just sit in it until yeah until someone comes to help you well the backseater had the pins we further we have to pin the gear before we shut the engine though oh that's just in case there's a protocol that's protocol yeah it's a checklist so he had the pins so he had to get out in the fireman had a ladder off the back end so I'm watching them but the first thing he has to do is get out of his suit then he's in his long underwear and and so they're the long underwear is like is modified so it takes care of all that you need to take with you and and that you can imagine that you have a little bottle in your leg and how it gets there but so I'm looking at him and he's getting out of the suit uh lady happened to be helping him in the garden reserves there so they were of great help so he gets his suit up now he's holding the pins in one hand he's holding his underwear across the hole in the front and and he's walking and there's a puddle of fuel around the airplane who you know so and he's in his stocking feet and I'm looking at him I wonder how he's going to do this well he went back and got his boots on but he had to Trump through this gas and put that in so that was the amusing side of what could have been a disaster well and I appreciate that you just summarized it that way because one of the things I sometimes asks ask my guests is you know this business is very serious but there's a lot of opportunity for some really great humor oh yeah it's it's I don't know paradoxical to me but I'm glad it is because well Dana knew that oh yeah yeah oh that's right never take yourself sure that's a good quote well yeah and I think I don't know if it's just a coping mechanism for the things that we do or maybe a defense mechanism in some cases but oh I think so yeah yeah like firemen so when you were flying the SR-71 was that all you were flying or are you flying almost everything no I always find other things okay and you didn't find that difficult to keep straight what you're doing today or tomorrow I mean by that point you have a lot of experience but yeah but we there was a limit to what you you didn't sure you got we had a two things we used checklist and we made our own checklist like of a big complex one to get on and off the ground maybe but we we use checklists we can depend on memory or anything otherwise which was because you can't if you're going to go fly you know three or four airplanes and you need to not miss something all right so that that was uh they've monitored that but that's that was your job yeah checklists are great because you don't skip a step like taking the gust lock off the flight controls but also I have to think right with enough experience you can sense things right I don't see to the pants sixth sense I don't know what you want to call it but right is it does the airplane talk to you a little bit too I would think when you well I think in general you look around more than you think I've been in an F-16 it has hydraulic cages here where I was flying with the Air Force and Dropped a Bomb as part of a joint program and as I turn final as I turn to come to initial I saw it I said what the hell was I looking down there for I saw the one gauge was at zero I and you look around a lot more but yeah you've got to be disciplined though yeah it probably didn't register every time you looked at it it was what you expected to see but maybe subconsciously that happens a lot yeah and all of a sudden you think you see it and it's not there yeah and vice versa wow I want to ask you about the x29 because that's just again I had a picture of it on my wall and uh it just seemed crazy but I guess what I don't know tell me what you can about why and how and well the next 29 we had there were two demonstrators built okay and there were X31 there were two demonstrators built so the x-29 um Grumman and Long Island they flew the first four flights uh and the last two of which were I think at Edwards and they're lots of then we took over as for the Earth for DARPA the defense events research project agency does all the way out stuff for the defense department and they they have agents and in this case NASA was an agent and they took on the flight safety responsibility on behalf of DARPA and ran that so we started flying the airplane so lots of amusing stories here I just digressing one the chief test pilot was flying it now the business boat controlling your ego there are a lot of cases where Chief just Pilots never figured that out and um likely that was the case here but so he I was a Chase in a 104. so I'm we chased all the data flight all the test flights so I knew he was finishing his tests so I wanted to get out of there because I didn't want to be on the runway when he was coming in or have him to delay so I leave and when the other the other Chase is coming so I get out of there and I'm I land and I'm I parked the airplane and I'm walking in and there's an Air Force Colonel that is walking towards me and greets me and uh he says did you see the role I said the what I no I didn't see anything why what happened was that the pilot the test pilot whose name I won't repeat no but he was in he did a really Flawless very efficient test points I finished those and you can imagine they're this is third airplane of this third flight of this very unusual airplane so the control room is is got 20 people in it that are all looking at screens and whatnot and he does a role okay well that's not that's not been cleared this is not in the envelope but you can imagine what the heart failure in the control room they think there's some uncommanded something is broken and there goes a roll right and so uh that's what what he did and he was removed from the program by the Earth while yeah and then the number two guy who was a close friend of mine took over and he flew there flew with us for the next couple of years but uh it it had a lot of Technologies in it it just didn't it had an aero elastically tailored Wing I mean the Germans built a forward swept Wing in the Second World War but you had to you can imagine and I'm holding my hands up on purpose that as you increase angle of attack the angle of the flow to the airplane and therefore the lift what's going to happen to the wings they're going to bend and what's happening to the angle attack locally it's getting bigger so it's going to bend more so it's there's a point you will reach where it's Divergent well you have to make you have to put a lot of extra strength in them in this structure so that that offset some advantages and so on okay so they could Arrow elastically tailor the wing that it was built and they could make make the that the the curvature of the wing such that they could delay that that Divergence so that had never been done so first of all it was a narrow elastic it was a composite wing lots of structural or manufacturing problems that hadn't been solved because this was brand new you have to always translate your back and then it had um a Canard that was it was well most importantly it was statically unstable if if the airplane didn't have the flight control system which was four channels or three and three digital and one analog four channels redundancy that airplane would at 250 knots would likely break in half because it's it is 0.12 seconds to double amplitude it would double its amplitude that's how Divergent it was every 0.12 seconds wow so that was really unusual yeah um and then it it had um Canard in front that was in a different position and so on so there are about four or five tech technologies that were new in that airplane so it was my opportunity to be involved with a brand new airplane this was like there were four flights before we got involved in it and then we were doing systematic checking and increasing the speed um and they invented in the control room uh they had all the information we could do a frequency sweep in the airplane that's moving the stick maybe plus or minus an inch let's say at really low slow and then faster and faster and faster and faster that gives a variety of frequencies in one minute the control room had the answer of what the margins in the closed loop of that system what margins remained we were allowed to operate at half the margins at a operational aircraft would but we could see as we got up near transonic speeds the the slope was going to go down to zero well we could see it before before so we stopped and they made some changes in the control system they had invented that system because before they flew the airplane they had some data from beams buckling beams not airplanes so there were a lot of technologies that had to be approached systematically and carefully and um then at the end game you asked uh before as we were talking say well why weren't there more airplanes built like that because it it it reduced the maneuvering drag that you have a consequence of getting lift as you have angle of attack as you increase it you have corresponding increases in drag so as you maneuver as you turn you're increasing the the lift you also increase the drag so the idea was that forward swept Wing at the higher speeds would be advantageous in minimizing not eliminating but minimizing that drag and I think it largely did that but we do the same things now with Leading Edge that are Leading Edge flat leading flaps trailing flaps that are controlled by a computer that is putting therefore the the camber of the wing in the proper camber so that we can get the minimum minimum drag so it you can do it other ways yeah yeah was the x29 though intended to just study that phenomena of Ford's web so they never thought we're going to build four and then maybe we'll build 400 later okay it was a technology demonstrator as was the X31 okay and there's a lot of Merit talking about Kelly Johnson and his motto was tested early and often so you need to test you don't need to test everything we've got we've got smarter every day with sure Ai and artificial intelligence and so on but we ought not to get too confident it's like Billy's paper and it won't go through at all that he gave recently Billy Flynn yeah yeah it it was a case where a tester the leader wanted test certain test points done and people were saying oh we don't need to do that we never go to that and they did it and had they had they not done it and not seen what they did on an absolutely uh three sigma day on the on the water water was absolutely without a ripple they were over an ocean that was smooth they were over the Gulf of Mexico okay absolutely smooth wow 600 knots at 100 feet the radar is an F-16 block 60. okay the radar Reflections were not there there was no there's no waves or waffles wow and so they they had basically some extraneous or didn't have it the appropriate information and had they not uh grasp that things were not right and knocked on that point they might have 100 feet got into the water wow yeah thanks so that's that's the business there's always a gray area somebody once said about unknown unknowns the the it changes in size and the confidence now is needs to be controlled yeah we have artificial intelligence it can do marvelous things but um are you absolutely sure you know we've gone up to as many test points maybe but have to do some because you're doing things that you never did before because you have new materials and so there's still testers need to be flexible they can't be bureaucratic like we always did this like in my time I spent three and a half years on the eurofighter as a consultant on flight controls where people were saying No this is this is the way we do the the Envy the verification validation yeah that's the way it did it five years ago now it's changed I'm not an expert at it and the people in charge in this case the mod in UK said no that's the way it's in the contract has to be done city of it takes nine months instead of three didn't matter well it matters yeah it doesn't matter yeah is it changing because technology is changing sure okay yeah right yeah but the people that look at cost and schedule it's important yeah absolutely it is but they tend to lean on that and say we don't have to do certain things well you have to be really careful and that's where you have to ask so your subject matter experts yeah and they didn't come from a Harvard Business School Rodge let's go to 2000 now in our little journey back in time you have retired earlier from the Air National Guard after 20 I think you said four years uh you're spending I think what 18 at Nasa and you quote unquote retire but you don't really right uh what do you do after that no after that I because of my x-31 connections I guess experience they asked me to come over to the hero fighter in Germans it's a four Nation okay I think so the Germans were responsible for flight control design so I went as a consultant to the flight joint team it was called four nations that's Britain Spain Germany and Italy which is unique all different cultures so I was allowed to go to the Ops meetings of all the pilots and so on but it it was a challenging for lots of reasons different cultures but when I first went there I flew the simulator and it was early on they hadn't finished at all but they said what do you think and I said do you want me to tell you what I actually think yeah yes can I interrupt is this a simulator like I as a regular pilot might go get in because you have fancy no no it was a it was a simulator of the Europe fighter as it stood at that time so the display wasn't but there are people wrong right fancy like engineering styles are super close they asked me and I said I think it's uh like an agile Airbus oh ouch it's not a fighter I mean it's response characteristics it was flew very well but it's not a fight it doesn't have the response rates and so on so they were like you're not too happy with that but I'm not putting myself to say that I changed it all but during the time I was there we were gradually got special teams multinational to work on on specific problems and use the airplanes as we could best use them as because I used to and Billy used it in his talk actually um I didn't somebody else said it and I remembered it but I used to tell them come on we can go we can put those Phillips on the Leading Edge of the Wings here or on a real airplane on the Prototype we have seven of them and we can fly it up to the conditions in the restricted airspace in already cleared airspace now we can do the tests in God's wind tunnel we should probably mean God's window wind tunnel well it's got a perfect visibility it's got perfect feelings all the g-forces all the all the rates they're all right yeah there's no question about that um but they too much stuck they were stuck in their ways they wanted to go to the wind tunnel would take six months to go to the wind tunnel oh my gosh they could use a real airplane as a wind tunnel so so some enlightened people Kelly Johnson is way way ahead of his time was aware that a small small group of talented people that were somewhat relieved of all the bureaucratic structure of the big company could do great things rapidly when you think of it 59 the design of the a11 and a12 whatever you want the first version three years later it flew three years nowadays you might be talking about 10 times that yeah no it's more complicated more but but still he tested one to test early enough and and that's the basis of doing developments rapidly you have to be able to do that do you take more risk well you shouldn't take ridiculous risks but you'd you like to do what you're taking it incrementally and uh so that's ask me what I do now that's what I preach yeah you used your expertise to uh probably mentor and counsel or talk or you've gone on the circuit a little bit yeah I try to do that I did for example with Billy is affiliated with part of his vice president he says he isn't but he said technical development head of technical development for international test pilot school in Canada in London Ontario right so they they had a major meeting for the Society of flight test engineers uh in January so he said he arranged it for me but no that's all right I was the luncheon speaker and the theme was what's the future of testing well that's a very broad thing but I fundamentally it would be that technology is changing more rapidly than we can imagine but the people now they're somewhat replaced with AI in some situations but the people and how they how they lead or how they work together as teams is still there all they still have to work together and be effective so they have they have to learn how to do that yeah or at least control their ego and build Bridges that's the bottom line there you go yes good well and you also did a stint as the President right of the Society of experimental testimonies yeah 96 long time ago okay I was the president yeah we still go Billy was the president so Canada's uh people from Canada are have been presidents of that Society way out of proportion to the oh yeah this the the populations So speaking of Canada aren't you also a member of the Canadian Aviation Hall of Fame I am yes yeah 2017. wow that's fantastic so uh man that we knew that was a Canadian test pilot who's now like 94 I guess lives in Vancouver he's the one that spearheaded that and he's spearheaded trying to get Billy in previously the Hall of Fame was in Northern Saskatchewan somewhere way up North typically you had it was only what you did in Canada so it was all like Bush pilots and so on he got it extended to include whatever you've done internationally so yes Rogers I have some questions here I want to ask you from our listeners but before we do I just had a Epiphany I want to see how many fighters I can get through at least in America and it's going to be a lightning round you just tell me yes or no when I say it are you ready okay so I don't think there's an F1 two or three although we could debate maybe f1s but so you said F4 so we're going to say yes F5 yes and talking now actually piloting the aircraft you don't have to be alone but you did have to like control the aircraft all right uh f8 yes yeah uh by myself yeah really no digital first airplane to fly with a digital flight control system oh wow it was an f8 okay digital flyby wire at Nasa when I first got to NASA it was on its last project and uh I got to be the one of the pilots on it wow so just a quick one I went with my chief pilot before my first flight it had to be a loan and he said I want you to look at the tail here to see the ventral fin there do you see how far it is from the ground it's about this far from the ground I said don't ever forget that picture and don't ever flare this airplane so that's why they had the wing that went up yeah the angle of incidence changed as I understand yes one of the only all right let's see Where'd I leave off fa I can't think of anything between that and the F-14 F14 I flew by myself yeah well with the Rio I'm guessing nobody in the back seat no no it's because we had the test airplane from grumman's tester came out to NASA uh came out to Dryden when they needed to do a special Specialists and they had one one with digital flight digital flyby wire the first version of that they also they had some problem with the wing sweep they had one that was asymmetric so they so they would bring them out and usually they'd operate out of Dryden so now they had this special test airplane I've got the number of it but it's the one they use all the time but the back seat was full of instrumentation wow so so I'd ask my guys that flew it all the time out there when it was out there and uh I'd say what when we climb out at 250 knots we can pull full pack stick how fast can you pull it back they always did that as a routine you pull a full back stick the airplane this huge airplane goes like this and then it goes back down so they would say oh fast as you want how long can I keep it there as long as you want no they're all sort of casual about it but anyway I did by myself okay yeah uh so I know you flew the F-15 and we didn't barely even get to scratch the surface on that definitely the 16 I guess probably not though while you tell me why of 17. uh not I did the the simulations yeah okay yeah F-18 and F-18 as I have like 1100 hours f18. and let's so now I'm going to sidebar the conversation at the moment you talked earlier about thrust factoring and there was some aircraft F-18 F-16 that had some thrust factoring right test and I guess I want to ask the rookie question which is why can't I just for example now with a Super Hornet you know if I'm the Navy why can't I just come to you or Boeing hey I want thrust Factory well theoretically it could because people solved various ways of doing it um in the x-31 was with external paddles but later on they did the whole nozzle right so you could do the nozzle round so Pratt and Whitney had that so that the technology is and on the F-16 that's what they put on so they they could do that really does it just come down to money and oh sure well it's a lot of development yeah no the F-22 has right pitch that's why the F-22 can go to a really large angles of attack yeah because the aerodynamics have gone when you're that slow you don't have enough aerodynamic control but with thrust factoring that's why the SR-71 could fly stabilized at 70 degrees angle of attack wow so and you know from the fighter pilot point of view we did all the the x-31 the graduation exercise for the X31 first of all there were only two people that flew the x-31 in um with us and we had a Chase we had we flew 1v1 with an F-18 with a Centerline tank that was a standard that we flew against we only had two people because this is air-to-air inside like 500 foot bubbles okay so inside um we had only a couple of people could fly the F-18 they were all checked out in the F-18 but that wasn't a thing you came in the morning and said I want to all take that seat so we only have we restricted that Ed Schneider and and one other person was and the the um Freddie Knox from the other from the contractor was could fly the x-31 but we flew against every fighter F-14 F-15 F-16 1v1 with orchestrated to the extent we started one at 250 knots line of rest and the other one was 350 knots liner Bros so I just regressed to say I can I can tell you the story of one day that I died but I didn't but I know how many of my friends died so I'm with my buddy who's in the F-18 I'm in the x-31 so we're it doesn't matter what speed we were at that particular time but our job was to air to air to see who's got the advantage so thrust factoring is a great Advantage at low speed but it goes back to the basics that I said aggression and patience it's a different equation with thrust factoring so you can do some phenomenal maneuvers with thrust factoring you could go up and and turn around and so on but your opponent is going to be watching you do this and clapping but yours you're up there as a constant Target and he's shooting you down so just like any air-to-air thing you have to drive the fight and so he he has to be responding to you you do some fancy maneuvering with thrust factoring you're going to die but if you use it to drive the fight and I had to tell my a very talented young German guy who came to be the pilot from the German side and after he lost which I enjoyed because I beat him in the F-18 I told him the secret do not make independent thrust factoring moves because you're you're huge drag penalties but we would always have the fight at the end when we'd win we'd always win with these guys but you'd be in the center going down like a rock both of you but he is going around in a circle and you're in the center of the circle now just yawing around with them with a pepper on them just pointing at them because you can do it with thrust factoring so we've had you know Admirals and so watch that what the hell is the matter with that guy why doesn't he take it up he has no energy left he's just pulling around the corner and he's dead so that when I died though was I was a lot of time in air-to-air Ed not so much but you never thought of this situation quite but we went I want to win you know so I'm so we take it up I don't know 45 degrees or something initially right away but I take it up and into him because I'm going to roll across him and I say is because I'm anticipating that I have the high I'm high right I'm high I got it you can't come high so I got it and I started rolling knowing I've got the high and I've got them because now he's got a he can't keep coming but he did when I said because a little confusing when you think of that change the whole perspective to here 45 degrees up what's high it could be a little confusing wasn't to me in in there but I'm now I'm crossing I've got a Crossing angle because I want it but he's still coming now if I was really calculating I'd say I need to push we both need to push but that's totally an unnatural action so I now the crossing angles are such that the closure rate is enormous suddenly and you can't do anything about it you're you're saying holy we're gonna hit and so I'm upside down and I actually crunch down in the cockpit and said here it comes yeah this is this is it and so he went by and we went by close enough that I could feel the bump of him of his airflow he could feel mine but we went with me having the advantage a little bit so our Tails were not Crossing anyway about we took we had an ACMI range there effectively with our radar so we the data went back to Germany and it was digested there and so about three weeks later one of the Germans we they were with us all the time came to me and said do you know and we we acknowledge that we screwed up you know and we talked about it on the ground we didn't hide it or anything and you reviewed the the calls we're going to make and so on and he said do you know how how closer it came on that said no 25 feet so that's that's what's happened to a lot of my friends especially in f-86 days they had mid-airs and you go how the hell did that happen well once you once you get inside that's why Maverick captures The Wraith you know they're all f-18s really but captures the rates and if they get Beyond a certain point it's too fast you can't do anything about it so we didn't broadcast that story but it didn't hide it either but that was a lucky day for me that sounds like it golly yeah anyway all right uh let's see we were F-18 for sure you said 1100 hours how about F20 no okay F22 no but I knew about it I was on it was earlier okay I was much later all right let's see I gotta jump way up into the numbers what comes uh f-86 clearly yeah uh F-100 you said yes yes 101 yes 102. no 104 yes a lot of time okay and you got it on your hat there I think yeah okay uh 105. no but I first saw 105 in um bitburg Germany when I was in the Canadian Air Force okay I took a fourship in the the leader was like 19 years old at that time so we're we're had these sometimes the paint jobs that camouflage got a little raggedy so we came in and anyway I shorten it up I'm talking to the Air Force people I was a 105 on the ramp around the corner and I said come on can I go down and see the 105. and he finally says sure yeah I can arrange that we can do that what the hell do you want to see it for you're flying the last of the sports cars and that's not a sports car so but it's a huge airplane yeah no but I never flew it no no okay uh 106. yes 117. no okay uh let's see is that it for the F's how about A's for fun A4 yes A6 no A7 I think um I think they had a two-seat uh A7 once yeah or ta-7 uh I don't know maybe I did once but it's like check the log book uh how about a 10. no okay uh let's see what else is there in the A's but you've definitely flown a lot have you ever like tried to count how many different aircraft no yeah well I have I sort of estimate 80 types that I've flown but at Nasa we had a a great rule that if we assign two people a project like the 106 was there because we towed it from a c141 on a big tow line an f-106 a 106. toad yeah but we're demonstrating the concept because people were talking about Towing Rock Towing Rockets up a rocket and lighting them up you know okay and saving the gas because they told them and but when they're finished the program then all the people in the office if it's possible that's how the 114 happened they get a flight and that so that's how I got the 106 and the one oh okay f14. all right because we had the early model the earliest F-14 and starting it was some sort of magic process and I remember uh not something didn't work and I'm saying it it doesn't it's not engaging or whatever and then a voice came over you know push on something else that seemingly had nothing to do with the starting push on that one and I did and it worked yeah I know we talked about the x29x31 any other X jets that we didn't cover the 22 is an xx-22 yeah okay so the interesting thing for me to go not to philosophize too much here I would say as you get older you you start to be a husband so the line you want to draw the line so you're not always telling people what you've done and that's not my purpose okay but quite often in conversations they come along and say something about an airplane or whatever they don't even know that I was involved in it and I'll say well you know I did that or we did that and this was learned not trying to tell them what I did but you have to be careful of that and so now you want to still be relevant that's the key word as you get older to be relevant not our artificially relevant but doing consulting like I mentioned you know doing that as a luncheon talk I never done a luncheon talk so I put in a few more videos and so on that but I went to MIT four months five months ago I guess they have a flight tests operation at handsome field they do really advanced technology Electronics now they tell me that Eisenhower started that we have companies we have corporate well organizations that do work like Hanscom field like MIT that are funded through the dod in some way they don't have to follow the dod bureaucracy or the the policies and so on but they they are a special not-for-profit group that means people that really care about the technology and not the stock options that's not their driving force have a place to work where they can do their skills so I went there because they one of their departments is the flight test for the other departments sometimes they want to take things into flight and I was trying to figure out I go there and do it I just talk to people one-on-one just a reporter if you like and I was asking I'm trying to get an idea what they do you mostly carry things on board but you think you need to get airborne yeah but but it learns how it turns out that they have large antennas that they put on the sides of airplanes you know 19 feet long it's pretty big so that gets into all sorts of like flutter and all manner of stuff so they have the full gamut of it and they they do and I was not privy to exactly what they do but they do the the farthest out development that you can imagine that people get the benefit of yeah so it's nice to talk to that kind of yeah that and it's nice of the other very good organization so Rogers I want to Pivot to this segment where the folks that support the show financially on a service called patreon they get to know that I'm sitting down with you and I say check out his bio he's all over the web you can learn what he's done and what he's flown and we just took a journey through that and so they pose these questions that I propose them to you the first is from Joe kunzler it's regarding the x-29 why do you think Ford swept wings are more popular yeah we kind of touched on that it because they can do it other ways now with um not on that but we did a mission adaptive Wing they actually flexed the composite surface with the appropriate structures inside to change the camber uh so they can do it quite effectively with trailing and Leading Edge devices okay yeah speaking of that we typically stick with military Aviation but as an airline pilot I always wondered why someone hasn't come up with winglets which they all love now that can go down when they don't benefit anymore and I think I'm starting to see that I forget What airplane it was might be a new Airbus or something but anyway you know put the winglet up I think it's what best for climbs in a sense and not when you're cruising or so there's a certain time it's not yeah anyway moving on Mike soldau who's right here in San Diego says were you the lucky pilot that flew the last ever SR-71 flight that Saturday in 1999 at the Edwards open house yes yes and I wasn't expected to be the last flight we hadn't flown it for a while the SR for a month or so or a couple of months and so uh myself in the back one of our back seaters uh got to fly on Saturday so we went overhead at 3.2 Mach and you can let people see you by dumping fuel now some of my Air Force buddies would tell me that when they but when they went by in the early days they went by murmanskin up obviously they never went closer than 12 miles yeah of course they the the fields up there the airfields are only operational in the summer time so in the springtime they they'd start flying and anyway they they would sometimes um dump fuel to just please let them know where they're there they wanted us they could see us and say you can't touch us the reason it was the last flight was because the the SR and it's it doesn't have fuel bladders in it it has fuel cavities that they seal in the wing in the fuselage so when they when they heat up you know they heat the structure up and they cool it off heat it up cooled off they eventually they get more brittle and they get more cracks and the first time I flew out of Palmdale I can see it now the crew chief came in by the way you had a raincoat on because the the airplane leaks on the ground because of all these cracks it's very not very volatile it could have collector on the ground you throw a match you can't wear white um so he said it's pretty good you know and I went out to the when I went out to the airplane I'm looking there was one stream that went from the airplane almost a steady stream to the ground not drops wow but so it leaks all the time it leaks in Flight if you see the famous one that we gave to the public uh over the the Sierras you can see all the lines but it's fuel there are fuel lines yeah so anyway we we hadn't flown for a while and the next day the other crew were going to fly and they were already out in the trailer getting suited up they got suited up and I went out with one of the engineers in a truck and we stopped somebody stopped us and said they got a really bad leak and uh it was a real gusher they were having and but in the Air Show schedule they couldn't get to it panels if they could have they couldn't get to it in time so we lost the slot then it couldn't do it but if they could have seen if only if they could assure themselves that it was just coming from a crack we would have gone okay and they because it leaks all the time I think they were going to be the last yeah okay well I don't know that we knew it was going to be the last flight but yeah it's for me then I worried for a day and a half because at the end of it we did three flybys that's not our habit pattern and if you were lighter lighter on fuel now because we've been up to 75 80 000 feet and you come by and now you got I used to tell people in the various guard organizations we do flybys do not hear the Roar of the crowd because they're like three hundred thousand three hundred fifty thousand people there wow so you come by in an Sr now and you light the burners at those weights first of all when you light the burners the low fuel pressure light comes on because it's can't handle the Surge and the acceleration you realize the SR is 500 knots max speed 500 Keys up there it's going like 450 keys equivalent airspeed to equivalent on sea level but that's not very fast by our standards so but you go from like 250 knots or 275 to 450 just like you can't get it back fast enough and then I want to also pull up to slow down right and I I'm worried that I pulled up because it's also not the G levels that are allowable at at speed is 1.75 G's that's not much but down low it gets up more like two and a half maybe three at special conditions okay so I worried that I had overheated you know and but it turns out I didn't uh it was just that unfortunate leak that caused the problem and then they shot the program down yeah because we couldn't get that clearance to follow the laser here's a fun one from Niels Hansen are you more proud of what we have achieved in aviation over your lifetime or more excited about what lies ahead yeah that's kind of tough I'm I'll tell you one thing that I use all the time in talks okay I would say to especially in schools we did that now so I'd say anybody here know the first line of David Copperfield and of course I didn't think it was maybe one person in my lifetime knew that the first line of David Copperfield applies in that the first line is I know not whether I shall be the hero of my own life or whether that station will be held by someone else the point being to be a hero of your own life is not telling other people what you've done it's nothing about boasting it's about inside you have you maybe haven't done everything but have you worked so back to your original question what did I want to be I wanted to be a test pilot I wanted to be a pilot and an engineer in the pilot side of course a test pilot why why because I love my uncle not because I'd ever had an experience in flying so I can honestly say inside here I'm really happy outside I still want to participate I'm I'm excited by things that I hear and see and I want not to be somebody that's up there boasting about what they do the good old days the good old days so that's a long-winded answer to that well I wish I had saved that one for last that was a good one John Clark what message would you give Kelly Johnson and other aircraft designers to make their products better and safer did you ever meet Kelly Johnson I never met Kelly Johnson I met Ben Rich a couple of times in fact one time I thought he was the Entertainer at the hotel where the sctp was because he I was in a group and he came along and he was in a they have a president's dinner for sponsors and a select few from satp their own tuxedos and I was with fairly new at Nasa and I was with guys that had flown the Sr on the previous time at NASA so he leaves and and I go who was that you didn't know that was Ben rich and can you tell me who Ben rich is because I should know but don't I only he's a slight in stature but he's really really um someone you listen to and he's also he's got a several jokes he told there that but was he involved in the development or oh yeah he was he's given oh I'm sorry yeah sir he is always referred to being the inlet man okay that he was no Pratt and Whitney and others don't get me wrong I was not lucky but that that was a real breakthrough the inlet okay for everybody including Russians I've been I obviously the two pull off or Anatole anatoff uh and we didn't talk about I got to fly seven flights in Russia that question's coming up next oh okay so anyway I was there when I think it was to pull off or it could have been in a talk after the the wall had come down they were cleared at Edwards and he's walking around the SR this is a designer and he's looking if you look at the Leading Edge of an Sr it's sort of ethereal it's it's a shape shapely thing it's not expected to be you know hewed out of stainless steel or something so he was jabbering non-stop to his interpreter but I think the gist of it was he couldn't believe this the shape of this airplane and so on but he'd you know he'd obviously heard a lot about it yeah so but I would not give any advice to Kelly Johnson slash the skunk work of his days okay I would advise all the other people to go study how he did it he ran the place but he realized that to do development rapidly uh you need to test early and often but you need a select group freed up from if there is a bureaucracy and a structure that you have to follow lateral duties or the HR department the first thing I would do if you ever put me in charge of a large corporation I would talk and say HR you need to understand one thing you work for all these other people here you are not uh they don't own an equal for you they do not work for you you you follow what go get them what they need but too often it gets around the other way yeah anyway nobody's asked me to do that well not too late uh let's see that was John Clark jevin says when you flew Russian aircraft and we didn't cover that in the uh but when you did and you can talk about this in what ways did you get to push the envelope in them and what did you learn in doing so so give us a little background first you had a chance to go over four months so what what people at Nasa had wanted to do is first of all the Wall came down and there was some interchange between the Air Force and other military people possibly and so Edwards was clear to have people fly uh certain things but NASA wanted to have an exchange they wanted to particularly understand how do you do high angle high angle of attack testing what methods do you use because we had both to some extent the x-29 but largely the x-31 how do you do that so NASA headquarters tried for some time to set up some kind of Exchange and it never evolved in my director Ken Saleh is a great man great leader I was fortunate to work with for him for most of the time I was there he retired from NASA and went to work for um started a company with a lady that was very very work with Armand Hammer in importing lots of raw materials maybe like the titanium that's used in the SR-71 came from Russia yeah so he talked to her he got in this company they're making ejection seats because the Russians when we talked to them and told them when they came the other part of the exchange and said you know they're going to fly enough 16 the seat is only good up to whatever it is some number not the full envelope of the airplane and he said wait that's a number one rule in our seats all have to cover the total envelope of the airplane so anyway he talked to this lady and uh she took about two weeks to set up this exchange because she knows everybody in Russia and when later on they took the t-144 and putting different engines on it put newer engines she was involved in setting that up well one of the things she did was took all the money that was to exchange she took it and wrapped in newspaper with her to give directly to somebody because if they sent it over there it would never get uh well it wouldn't find its way to the right place so then the the funny part of the story is we had selected one of our Pilots that was going to go on this or waiting for to see what's going to happen it comes the date we're going to leave in two weeks or something like that and he meantime has had an operation on his foot for a wart or something and it got infected so he's limping around the office and I said oh you can't go and this thing with limping you can hardly walk so we needed to live so I passed that on we needed a delay three weeks net can't be done got to be done well I don't and so then I looked around the office nobody ever believes there was no one else that could go except me truly and and then I said well I don't have a Visa she came back and said you okay you're not going Friday you're going to fly on Saturday you'll have the visa on your desk on Friday afternoon which guy came and gave me my Visa so I went over there and uh we flew I flew the su-27 like twice the um uh MiG 29 maybe three times maybe 25 months and um l-39 once yeah and so that was we asked we want to look at high angle attack and we've wanted airplanes to be recently inspected the big inspections finished and there wasn't in the time I flew I flew seven flights in 10 days and never saw light and I flew in the front seat in every airplane never saw light on the warning light nothing went wrong all right in the whole time um but you have to understand you could talk forever about this one the the place groom off we worked out of Groom off gromof is a research institute okay it's right next to Sagi which is where all the wind tunnels have a huge wind tunnel complex okay and it's out at Ramen scoia just outside Moscow and so they they have so that I'm trying to get my train of thought here they that's where they developed all the Megan Sukhoi they all have um places there so the The gromof Institute is like NASA though the toilets didn't work the lights were half of them worked it was a shambles the floors hadn't been cleaned and looked like three years or whatever so but the airplanes and the mig-25 I flew was the same one that chased the Buren it had been outside I think every day since then and so it it was looking like just an airplane had been outside for patina months years um and also you sit in a different car they have another cockpit put on so you're separated from the his cockpit you're up in the front you're not so it's even more tricky to to be in that um so we and we I work with a man that um Anatoly quacher his name was if you've ever seen the picture of I got I think a MiG-29 crashing at the Paris Air Show so he Departed the airplane and you see the airplane just entering the mud as he's Landing not very far away yeah that's Anatoly he's a great pilot and so you could talk forever about it but we wanted to see high angle attack so they modified the MiG-29 back to the original state that um that you could do flat flat spins get I'm sorry get out of flat spins okay otherwise they have an angle of tech limiter and the grow moth people were very disparaging of the Russian Air Force that one had 26 degrees and 129 I forget which was which but they were just saying we didn't need a limiter and you didn't because you could see everything that was happening in little Eli you can put on a little Rudder so they they had written out exactly what we could see and um and showed us everything so we would like make 29 you'd say um let's assume that the sun is a target over there okay now I'm doing the flying I had to ask him we did it like eight spins in one flight and I had to say wait can we stop for a minute and but look at a high angle attack the limiters are off and we can fly with no limiters because we're flying at Chrome off and we say we're going to just look over at the Sun and pull turn roll and pull as hard as you can we're going up to I don't know 60s five degrees angle attack yeah and there's a little maybe a little yelling in the nose but nothing no departure so that's the kind of flying we were doing yeah su-27 is I think F-14 huge airplane yeah and when we first uh took off first day wow many stories but it was about 1500 feet overcast first day where we're going to fly I got suited up I had partial pressure suit you know Russian the lady that was giving me gave me a Russian jacket looked at my U.S winter jacket said yet yet take it off I didn't wasn't good enough for the cold we were anyway he asked me can his son was about 13 was there and they didn't fly very much this time they were previously you know in the years before they flew hundred thousands of hours in year a month anyway can can I take it for a minute because he did air shows to make money they they made money at air shows they got only one quarter of their budget that they traditionally got they they flew transports in with uh for money um and I said sure you can have the airplane so we did an air show and a in the Su right at 300 feet or so really impressive and afterwards the chief engineer said is that okay with with you I said sure I'm not going to be doing that but it was very impressive yeah so the airplanes were all impressive and the Su was it's a huge airplane so it does everything slowly so you can really see what's and counter it and the mig-25 we I think before is I went to 68 000 feet 68 in a zoom so I I'm going well what's the Min speed we can go to um oh you got to tell me I'm in speed that we're gonna go on the zoom and we did we zoomed up in a 250 knots maybe or 220 or something with some end speed and pushed over the next I didn't fly with Anatolia in the Mig I flew with a young man this perfect English his father had been a test pilot and died in a crash but the next morning I came in and this young fellow says I made a mistake he made a mistake I made a mistake I'm sorry I don't remember when I I'm going what was a good flight it was a very interesting flight because we came down and did a loop at a 10 000 foot Loop in the mig-25 with two hands you have two hands on a stick the forces are so heavy so what he said was this isn't he asked me how did it go and how impressed I was with romoff and the people he said we had permission to spin down from 50 000 feet to roll out a you know 10 or above and then do the loop thanks I said are you kidding me we're going to spin the mig-25 I said yeah we had permission to do it and I forgot it that's a quick way to get down and so anyway they uh they treated us very well and they were they I said at the end of my talk once on the Russian experience if I was going to war I would like them on my side because they know the fundamentals if we ask anybody to write out the equations of motion of an airplane just give them a sheet of paper one of those Engineers could write it out didn't look in a book write it out because they didn't have computers now when they came to our place that's what they marveled at you have so much and we even had instruments that measure angular acceleration they said they've been working for five years on that but he said something at the end he said maybe we can learn from it maybe sometimes you can have too much and you forget the that you need to know the basics yeah or at least be familiar with them yeah anyway all right last question is from Jim gundog what are the benefits of unmanned or remote piloted aircraft in the test Arena now before we get to that though everything we've talked about so far was you in the cockpit generally speaking a lot of different aircraft in your quote unquote retirement have you been dabbling in unmanned or no I was a test I was the test pilot at gray Butte for the MQ-9 oh for the last 11 years I'm not flying anymore there that's a whole other story but no it's time that I didn't fly anyway but um because we're working for the Air Force okay and so yes I was a line pilot and then well a test pilot and the contract I'm sorry contract director for that work because it's still going on I was there yesterday yeah because I go there every once in a while I still get the safety thing I still get some hours to do some safety Consulting with them but the answer is yes and I have experience with Joby for example they can that's they they could fly their airplane remotely first uh easily without all the paperwork of putting a man in it and people can when you have that flexibility it's pretty um it's very worthwhile it's very worthwhile when I first went to the MQ-9 I said why don't you put a you know there's room you don't need the the KU antenna in the front you could put a not not for public use but you could put a pilot in there and that means you could make some changes and fly you don't have to because it's hard to fly in a national airspace it's much more paper heavy to fly in the National airspace remotely now we at graveyard we fly to Edwards restricted area to do all the testing but and there is a special notem permanent note them about the track we're gonna fly up there sure so you can take advantage of of flying remotely in some cases yeah so Jim's question it's nice that you on these risky maybe first flights can do them without a pilot is that that's possible where we've much more experience in in building autopilots and so on yeah and you you know the airlines being a a case in point you know how many decades we could take off from some airport you could actually take off maybe put it at the end of the runway I don't know but to fly the whole flight and land um not today I mean you can do much more than that but so yeah it but there's a lot of ego gets into the business of certainly with the test pilot Society even with whether people that are doing testing uh like structural testing or or flight control testing or any kind of testing in a remotely piloted vehicle are not you know they're somehow not qualified now I think they should be qualified Pilots but people that do that uh Pilots that do that work should get credit when they do the testing because they're following the same principles in fact the MQ-9 tests under the authority of Edwards so when we have a test plan it has to be approved by Edwards but that's that's happening more and more that people sometimes people want to take advantage of those things to do it uh better faster cheaper sure so for good reasons when you have good reasons you can be flexible that way and use technology appropriately yeah yeah well and Jim's question is a good segue into sort of tying this all up which is you've seen over your Decades of experience a lot of changes I presume in the way things are tested what do you see and you're still involved right so what what do you see the future for the testing of whether it's aircraft manned unmanned or maybe even NASA based on your experiences there but with what you've done what do you see the future for those different parts well I think I believe the the challenges for leadership I mean it's a Challenger for everybody that's working everybody can be a leader at some time every day right but the challenges for upper management leadership is greater than it has ever been and that's because yeah we have new technology but it's some of it's more complicated if you think about the F-35 I won't share any credit for that although I was involved when they first were doing the proposals and I was stunned for the Air Force on a panel that visited when they said they were going to have an active stick an active throttle I go are you are you serious you're going to build a new airplane and you're going to active stick means you can change the force displacement relationship or the Dynamics of the field system online according to the configuration according to the the um where you are in the flight envelope and an act as a throttle the same way you can but it is it has to be sufficiently redundant to be reliable and and they said no that's what we're putting in we're going to go for that well they also now because of Technology they can use a scheme that they do use called Dynamic inversion basically it means you you have a pretty good idea from various new technologies of what the characteristics of this vehicle will look like what the equations of motion will be for the airplane itself and you also have some desire what it should be for various things you think of the the B model has got to land vertically for example and so how can we do that well Dynamic conversion requires you to know the the model for the airplane the matrices that describe the the control system and the model and then you cancel it out internally in the system and you put in the matrices that you want so you couldn't do that you didn't have the capacity you can do that on the airplane now I don't really do it every instant of time I don't know the specifics I do know one of the short courses that I was teaching part foot at the national test pilot school and I'm proud to report is that one of the men that was involved at the Skunk Works was for some reason in this course I don't know why but he was he's a great tall fellow and um and I I was standing on the stage and he came in and sat down and he said are you are you you're Roger Smith are you we have a Criterion that we developed at Cal span Cornell lower lab called The Neil Smith Criterion in the early days of flyby wire it was how you could look at somebody designs an airplane you can look at it and see whether it would be from a fighter point of view a good airplane or not that was pretty important because there were in those days very complex so anyway he he asked me that and I said yes he said let me shake your hand so I presume that maybe they it's digitally it's digitized now you can run a digital computer they might have used that I'm just saying might so anyway go ahead sorry no that's okay we're just talking about the future of all this future for you are you still gonna be keeping at it you've been at it for a long time I'm not trying to call you old no no don't do that but uh no I am old but um I'm my wife worries about me being old but most other people don't know how old I am but um Billy does he can tell you okay so I'm older than Billy I'm 20. 22 years older than Billy yeah so anyway that's why I was referred to him as my I'm I'm the mentor I started when he was young but no I'd like to be involved because um uh because of the same reasons before I have a passion for it okay not and it's not ego driven essentially but what I talk about now are are the intangibles more than the the details like we can do you know fly by wire Dynamic conversion we were going to put that on the F-18 it had never flown just about the time I was leaving NASA we were going to put it on an F-18 because we had an F-18 we had access to a computer but it now flies in an operational aircraft so that's just the beginning um but I'd like to um be involved with trying to teach about teamwork and Leadership okay and it's it's few leaders that ask for that kind of feedback some people do um I work with Boeing in 2011 12 Dennis O'Donoghue he hired me to maybe three or four days a month I or a week a month I worked for a couple of years I went to six or seven of their detachments or like Pax River I went to Pax River I went to Seattle twice where I did did my what I learned how to do what I do which is just talk to if you bring me into the organization I want to I'll list the people I want to talk to if I know them or that what they do and I and I said at bullying I want to talk to a mechanic like the 787 was in test they said why do you want to do that I want to understand how you work so I ended up talking to the head of the Union and I learned a lot I said if you believe that that um what you write down that this company believes safety is number one they don't believe it so that's important yeah got to get them to believe it yeah by demonstrating it has nothing to do with the this was 2011. sure yeah you still fly no no [Music] desire no urge no anything but no I don't I would certainly fly with anybody but I truly believe in being proficient you need to be proficient so if you're with somebody if you're not then when the unexpected happens or you're going to have excess workload capacity not likely yeah so lots of stories about that but sure lots of examples in airplanes with that when people jump on the stick and do something like driving a stewardess up over the end of the ceiling and you know they killed a couple of people over the Pacific and they could have just put their hands on their head for a while like the A330 the pants Crest in the Atlantic yeah if they put their hands on their head for a minute looked around they wouldn't have hit the Atlantic at a thousand feet a minute yeah instead of 40 degrees the whole time yeah practically speaking full off the whole time well I talked to the a350 now has alternate AirSpeed I I'm not taking credit for that but I talked to the at one right after that happened at a at a meeting that I was talking at in the chief pilot for Boeing said I think you're telling us would we didn't design the autopilot ride we didn't have to turn off the autopilot why did you you know they did in the A330 right as soon as they got the miscompare and AirSpeed right he didn't have to do that I said that's right didn't have to and why would you ever take out the angle attack limiter which they did because it dropped it down one level in the autopilot so but I still like to preach as you can see yeah um so answer is yes I like to be involved but I have a choice now you know I can work where I if I want to okay so we'll have a scenario and it's going to take some build up so bear with me so you say you don't fly because you're not able to maintain the proficiency so I want you to imagine Rogers that you can either flip a switch or take a couple weeks whatever magic you know a little check mark but then you walk out let's say here at Gillespie Field where we're using the studio at the Circle Air Group FBO and there's bear with me every aircraft you've ever flown oh all right and you can like I said you can flip a switch in your mind and you can say all right I'm going to get in that one because I just want to go goof around and Cloud surf for an hour What airplane are you walking towards well it's either the F-16 or the F-18 really you know that the F-16 because of the cockpit and the visibility you have you're really out on the end of an arm oh yeah and you're you don't have anything in front of you uh the airplane's really part of you the F-18 because it's to me and what I've flown is a very honest airplane that can do most everything and um I have a lot of time in it yeah yeah so great well we always finish with call Signs Now you allowed me to just call you Raj I think we can figure it out where that came from was there anything else ever that uh people I only had one in the guard I look at my I had a guard Commander is still a good friend of mine that a very great leader but he had a nickname for everybody and he used to call me nipple Nick because I had a mole protruding mole on my neck which immediately had removed after he coined that yes sorry phrase on you so that went away so they called me Rouge because I'm from Canada they claimed that that's an extension of Raj I see I didn't have some of the nicknames people have are amazingly you'd like to hear the stories of how they got them well we had an episode dedicated to call signs but according to the guest who was on that show it's gotten a bit more political now you have to like get approved to have call signs because it gets you know it's well they have some of them there yeah they're a little childish yeah yeah salacious but when I was in the guard you know the Air Force was not allowed to have call signs really you know Navy had call signs but the Air Force couldn't hmm all right yeah we wanted to call we wanted to have even the call signs for the airplane they wouldn't you know you go down to Tyndall and we'd have our own Rhino one two three four or something yeah I can't do that you've got to wear you gotta wear your scarf while you're flying you know ask her ask and so my squadron commander cut up you know the uh colored paper you put on four parties on the table top one morning you cut all that up in strips and we all came into the briefing with our our little aspects they didn't appreciate the humor well like I said earlier humor is a big part of this career I feel like you got to do it well Rogers you've been a good sport I've been chasing you for a while to get an interview thank you very much thank you you're all over Europe and you got a place up in Mammoth right so yes yes we've been there a lot you ever get up there uh my family was just up there for Memorial Day there was still snow I was not able to go I was flying but I love it up there I like to take my fly rod up and come visit yeah you Smith you know that name so I think it's in the phone book well you got my cell phone that's right so yeah please please give a call awesome well thanks it's been a lot of fun I definitely learned a lot and I stick to what I started with at the beginning which is your name belongs up there with all those other guys and you've certainly seen and done a lot so on behalf of the listeners and the viewers thank you oh thank you hey thanks for watching this episode of the fighter pilot podcast I hope you enjoyed it and learned something new I still do every episode now as a quick reminder we try to explain all the jargon but in case you missed something head on over to fighterpilotpodcast.com where we have a glossary of all the different terms we use and while you're there check out some of the cool merchandise that we offer for additional content and to help support the show please go check out our patreon page we'll see you next week

Channel: Fighter Pilot Podcast

Views: 96,804

Keywords: Military Aviation, Air Combat, Fighter Pilot, Air Force, Naval Aviation, TOPGUN, RCAF, test pilot, NASA, X-29, x-31, SR-71

Id: mxXWMg5fi5k

Length: 123min 55sec (7435 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 21 2023