Gen. Chuck Yeager, Academy Class of 1974, Full Interview

[Music] the x1 was that to me you know sort of fly twice a week airplane it took two or three days to reduce the data from your flight his complex airplane to get serviced with liquid oxygen and alcohol night come and gaseous nitrogen and in the meantime I'm flying about fifteen different other airplanes every day on different test programs so it was a hard grind the x1 was a that to me was a pleasure to fly because you know you weren't crammed or really crowded in doing test work and you took the whole day to do it and just so happens that particular flight I think was on a Tuesday on the weekends there it had me rock it was called then we used to go out to Pancho Barnes or sort of a she had a rodeo grounds and a swimming pool and motel and a good restaurant and go out there and you know unwind and I took Glennis out there I think on a on a Saturday night and we loved to ride horses so we went out after dinner and riding horses and chasing each other and coming back somebody closed the gate and it was dark I didn't see it so my horse hit the fence and flipped me and I broke a couple ribs and that was on a Saturday night Sunday I mope around and then Monday I had to go into the basin and I went to a local doctor there and he said we've got to crack two busted ribs I'll tape you up and and it really didn't make that much difference in flying the airplane because it's not strenuous other than handling it with your your hands and feet on the rudder pedals and control surfaces and loading pressure domes and turning switches on things like that so my only problem was he was painful to get into the airplane because you had to come down the ladder and go through a little hole on the right side but then the hard part was closing the door once the old Jack Ridley came down the ladder and held the door against the right side had a lever it was really tough - it took both hands all you could do and I couldn't handle it with my right side because handling so he made me about a 10 inch long broom stick and I could stick in the end the door handle gave me that mechanical advantage and that's way we saw the problem and said but really didn't didn't make much difference the x1 was fun to fly that's the way we looked at it cuz very interesting see you're doing research flying you're you're doing things that and solving problems that no one else has ever been able to solve so it's interesting see all these things come along they're running out of elevator I don't knew you know all the engineers at Jesus what's going on you know and and then flying with the flying tail there was something new and it it turned out pretty good really and actually you really don't think about the outcome of any kind of a flight whether it's combat or or any other kinds of flights because you really have no control over it and that's where I looked at the x1 you don't worry about the outcome obviously you concentrate on what you're doing to do the best job you can to stay out of out of a serious situation and that's the way the x1 was when we got it above Mach 1 without a flying apart you know you can laughingly say now we'll I was just supported cause it didn't blow up but that's not not true you you're a little bit surprised that things didn't fly apart because it's what the way you've been sort of thinking but when it didn't it you're relieved we didn't even know that we would ever break Mach 1 and we forced knowing when we had no idea when because we didn't know what was going on and it just worked out that way the next one was you know a specialized airplane was the liquid rocket powered airplane you said against a liquid oxygen tank about 290 below zero is cold you had a lot of windshield frosting sometimes especially when you you're your breath condensed on the windshield of course you had an oxygen mask on you were in a hundred percent nitrogen gas atmosphere and all of the landings and the x1 were tricky I mean that's the reason we've used Rogers dry lake there at me rock now Edwards Air Force that the shuttle lands on because it was a easy Lake to land on it and the x1 was tricky to land because the land that's so fast you know about pushing 200 miles an hour and all your landings were dead stick meaning you flew until you exhausted all of your liquid oxygen and alcohol so you were a glider but a very fast glider and it took you know it was not difficult because I was used to it you don't feel anything you're too busy you're going through your checklist you know loading the pressure regulators the domes and checking all the instrumentation and and that's about the way of it and you listen to the between iron crew he was hauling you up and he would start diving to pick up speed so that he drops you out at a speed above your stall speed which the stalling speed on the x1 fully loaded was 240 miles an hour indicated which is pretty fast and you're heavy and it's a compact little airplane and you come out of a dark place in the bright sunlight it you know for a second you're kind of blinded but didn't take you long for your pupils strength down and that's you really don't give much thought to the drop you're too busy they drop you within gliding distance of Rogers dry lake anyway and if if you don't get an e mission or can't get your rocket engine running which we did a couple times then you jettison the fuel and go ahead and dead stick the airplane in there again is a you know you always try to leave yourself a way out and we fortunately had put some small H to bail out bottles with nitrogen gas in them and tied them to the jettison valve so if we lost all of our electrical systems I still had a manual system of opening that valve and letting gaseous nitrogen open up a jettison valve and get rid of the liquid oxygen alcohol because the airplane just wasn't designed to land with that kind of weight aboard and it worked we'd tried it out on the ground and forcing it worked in the air in World War two in combat in p-51s during dogfights with 109 one 90s for the first time we became exposed to the effects of the the sound of the speed of sound on our airplanes and what happened the airplane diving through the air as the fastest a Mustang or a p-47 or any other fighters that we're using World War 2 the fastest they would go is about 80% of the speed of sound but going through the air at 80 percent of the speed of sound they had very thick wings and the canopies and that additional distance that the air had to travel to go around that wing that's going through it at about 80% of the speed of sound that additional distance that air had to move to go around it brought its relative velocity to the skin of the wing up to the speed of sound and when this happened the shock wave formed on the thickest part of the wings in the canopy and behind these shock waves were turbulent air and your airplane was shake and Buffett and it was a it wasn't a hazard it was just a nuisance if you're trying to track some guy at high speed so we knew a problem that existed because of the relationship of the speed of sound of the airplane so in 1944 the Air Force or then Army Air Corps led a contract with Bell Aircraft Company to build a little research rocket that would fly in the region the speed of sound or faster to find out what was causing this buffeting phenomena or compressibility that was affecting our airplanes like the p-51s World War two and immediately after World War Two and in 46 we developed jets that would fly after about 80 percent of the speed of sound straight level they ran into the same problem because they had thick wings and fortunately we knew that we had a so-called sound barrier there that we had to solve the problem or we would never go any faster than we were doing at that time and that's the reason the x1 was made was to solve those problems or at least find out what was causing those the compressibility or buffeting on the airplanes well number one the belt airplane was the very thin wings so that the airplane could go faster before it ran into the toughening problem it was rocket-powered which meant that you had full thrust that altitude with jet engines you know decreasing thrust the higher you go and there's also built about two and a half times stronger than airplanes that we were flying at that time the airplanes that we use from world war ii and the ones that were built immediately after World War two were stressed for 7.33 G's or 7.3 three times the pull of gravity and if you overstressed them they would break obviously the wings to break off and the like but the x1 was stressed for 18 G's positive or negative and so it would stay together in case you run into a problem and also it had a movable horizontal stabilizer the tail plane on all airplane just stabilizes and you have elevators on the back to make the airplane go up and down well they did build the capability in the x1 to move the whole angle of the horizontal stabilizer change angle of attack and that that really was the big secret on how we got the airplane through the speed of sound it's not a matter of thinking it's possible its duty it's just like flying combat you know you go on a combat mission somebody's gonna get killed you just hope it in you but if it is that's that's where it goes the same way with flying the x1 it's it didn't make any difference to me whether I thought the airplane would go fast and sound I was a signed as a test pilot on it and it was my duty to fly it and that's that's where most military posture look at it huh we just didn't know what was happening at the reason the speed of sound because we didn't have any wind tunnel data we could put a win we could put a model in the wind tunnel and blow air by it at supersonic speeds but what happened a shock wave would form on that model at about 0.9 Mach or 90% of the speed of sound and that shock wave then would bounce off the wall of the of the tunnel and then choke up the tunnel we didn't have any data from about point 9 Mach 2 1.1 and people really just didn't know his Ignis they thought an airplane would never go faster than sound because and the shock waves built up on it but that as I say that really didn't make any difference to me I could care less it's your job to try it and that's the way it worked out we just ran out of the ability to control the airplane because of the shockwave which had formed on the thickest part of the horizontal stabilizer a tail plane of the airplane as we this formed at about point eight eight marking the emergence we increased our Mach number this shockwave moved back and laid down and at point nine four month number that shockwave was on the tail at the hinge point of the elevator and we lost their elevator effectiveness and had been predicted that the x1 would either pitch up or pitch down in the region the speed of sound and obviously this word is a little bit they would you know we have no way out now and so we got to take hard look at this and we looked and we had never tried to fly the airplane with the horizontal stabilizer we always used the elevators now we've lost their elevators so we just that obviously the next thing to do is go up and see if we can fly it with the horizontal stabilizer and it the way we did it was we took the airplane out there were 0.9 for Mach number where we lost our elevator effectiveness and we could change the angle of attack of the horizontal stabilizer through a compressed nitrogen jackscrew air motor system it gets pretty complex but I took the airplane out to 0.94 Mach number where I'd lost the elevator effectiveness and change the angle of attack of the horizontal stabilizer down about one degree and the old airplane pull about three GS and a turn we trimmed it back and say that that's neat and we came down after flying it two or three times with horses on stabilized we came down said it you know we we now have control of this thing with the horizontal stabilizer I know it took us a couple more flights that the controlling the airplane when it started nosing up a little bit with the horizontal stabilizers keeping those down and as we went through Mach 1 and those start dropping so we just cranked it horizontal stabilizer down to keep the nose up and we got it above Mach 1 and once we got it above the speed of sound then you have supersonic flow over the whole airplane so you know have no more shock waves on it that are causing buffeting and it's smoothed out and and that was the big thing that came out of the whole x1 program was finding out that you needed a horizontal stabilizer to operate in the region the speed of sound or above the speed of sound and it's a reason on every fighter that you see today you just see a slab table back there and no elevators hhor-- duty to fly the airplane and that's if you get killed in it you don't know anything about it anyway so why worry about it that's that's the way you looked at it and and actually do to use paramount that's it's it's that simple when you're a military guy and so you don't say well you know I'm not gonna do that that's a danger say if you if it's your duty to do it that's that's that's the way it is the Air Force or military pilots had never been allowed to do research flying research flying was always done by civilian pilot who worked as test pilots for the company that built the airplane and the x1 was the same way when the x1 was finished in 1946 Bell company test pilots who were civilians did the initial 20-some flights on the airplane that you know for tremendous amounts of bonus money and that's the way the Air Force got its hands on the x1 that put a military pilot such as myself in the cockpit was that the the civilian pilot wanted an exorbitant amount of money to take the airplane supersonic or to try to take a supersonic and when Bell Aircraft Company had had a contract with him and he had there was bonus money at a contract in for bonus money but he wanted to paid over a five-year period and I see all this money comes out of the Air Force's pocket as to support the test program they pay for everything and so when he started delaying the program in the spring of 1947 because he wasn't getting the kind of money that he wanted out of Bell Aircraft Company well the Air Force saw a marvelous opportunity in fact colonel al boyd saw marvelous that opportunity said man i'll get my hands on that airplane and we'll let an Air Force pilot who is much better qualified because the Air Force test pilots fly every airplane that every company builds a civilian test pilot only flies that airplane which his company built and we were all combat veteran not all of us but most of the guys that came back especially myself with wear combat veterans we've been combat with we could fly airplanes obviously and so I that was the reason that we finally got an Air Force pilot in the x1 now 1953 here Bell was right back into the same old routine they had a civilian test pilot hard to fly the x1 aid and the x1 a different from the x1 it was a airplane about oh seven feet longer it carried almost twice as much fuel it had the same wing in the same tail in the same engine and it was predicted that the airplane would go more than twice the speed of sound whereas the x1 the fastest we could ever get it to go was about 1.5 Mach number and you run out of fuel so this Bell test pilot he flew the the x1 some 6x1 a some six flights he never did get it even above the speed of sound because he had no experience in that kind of flying and I used to chase him in f-86d on his wing you see the shock waves on the airplane and the buffeting which was normal because we'd gone through that sequence with the x1 but the guy because lack of experience and knowledge never took the airplane above the speed of sound and finally he killed himself in annex 2 back of Bell Aircraft Company they were had it under a b50 mothership and they're running some liquid oxygen top off tests on the airplane and it exploded and blew the airplane and him out of the aircraft and then killed him so there set the x1 a with Bell Aircraft Company with no pilot and so they came to the Air Force said okay here's your airplane it's yours and so they put me in the airplane to fly it and as I recall since I've been chasing him I knew intimately that airplane the systems and is basically the same as the old x1 except we didn't use high-pressure nitrogen gas to do the work we use hydrogen peroxide generators and turbine pumps and things like that and and so on the first flight that I flew the excellente we're coming up on the 50th anniversary of the Wright brothers flight December the 17th 1953 and this was in October November when the x1a became my program and the Jack Ridley and I sat down since we wanted to get the airplane out beyond Mach 2 by the December the 17th we worked out a profile on how we can get the airplane as fast as it's possibly would go and we worked out this profile of dropping out of the be 50th 30,000 feet and firing off three of the four chambers on the rocket motor accelerating out 2.8 Mach and then climb up to 45,000 feet and level out fire off the fourth chamber so you got full power take it out to about one point one through the speed of sound and climb at supersonic speeds in about a 45 degree climb angle and then 60,000 feet you start leveling out and you become level at about 72,000 feet and you hold it there at seventy-two thousand feet it accelerates like mad until you run out of fuel and we looked at our figures Jack and I working up this profile and we knew we could get quite a bit above Mach 2 but we didn't think we would get out to two and a half times the speed of sound in fact the Bell engineers said you know you got it you but you better be careful above about two point two Mach number because we really don't know what we're getting into out here and no one else does either we haven't got any wind tunnel data and nothing's ever been out there before and so the first flight that flew on the airplane I was just practicing his profile and also wanted to take it out to supersonic speed so I just just prank you know three chambers ran it up leveled out and let it run out to about one point three Mach number and it flew just like the x1 did we lost the elevator effectiveness I had to use the stabilizer to fly through Mach one so then jettison the rest of fuel and came on down landed and in the second flight three or four days later I took the airplane on up to about 50,000 feet and kept a level out that 1.5 which was the fastest we'd ever had the old x1 number one airplane and then the third flight a few days later I took it on on up to one point nine Mach just under Mach 2 at about 65,000 feet and it was really flying nice and and I had a pressure suit on that in case you know if you lose your canopy or lose your cockpit pressurization you stay alive with a pressure suit above 50,000 feet and on the fourth flight things on December the 12th everything went beautiful well the drop was right on speed and the chambers ignited when you flip switch and everything what you know profile was beautiful the only thing it happened on the climb out on all four chambers running and you're really accelerating I the you fly off of a little eight ball flight indicator for attitude reference and you have a pressure shoot and you know you got filament wires in the visor of your suit and you have to keep those hot to keep your visor from fogging up and I let the airplane get up a little bit steep as busy regulating the pressures and the chamber to get maximum thrust out of the engine I got the airplane just a little bit steep pushing sixty five degrees angle of attack rather than forty five and as I went through seventy went through sixty thousand feet begin to push the airplane over see there's a lot of things that happen to an airplane mechanic the upper you you have liquid oxygen in a tank well if you go to zero-g you know flying a parabolic curve does e ro G that oxygen cavitate scuzz there's nothing to hold it down in the bottom of the thing and so you have to hold about a tenth of a G on the way over well yeah I floated right on through seventy thousand feet up to eighty thousand feet which was about ten thousand feet higher and so I hung on and that's sitting there looking at the Mach meter went up to Mach three and as I went through something like two point three Mach number man we're really smoking we're picking up about 31 miles per hour per second and I watch this thing as we went through about two point three Mach number the airplane begin to y'all that's it man that's not something's not right I pushed on rudder to try to get the nose back and nothing happened here please kept y'all and you said man and then the outside wing because of dihedral effect begins coming up and man next time I'm cranking in full aileron full rudder and nothing happens the airplane rolled inverted and pitched up and when that happened the canopy busted on it and when that happened the suit inflated but then the airplane got really wound up in some snap rolls and and the data shows that we had a rotational rate of about five hundred eighty degrees per second which is twice per second going around and and you get exposed to a lot of a lot of high G's like we're getting nine G's positive 2g sideload three negative to sideload and nine five and you go through two cycles of these per second and you really don't know what you know what's going on other than I figured that either the tail had come off the airplane or something happened so I just rode just pretty well wrote it you know you'd see sky and ground flashing and in you get rattled but you never become unconscious and so I just just hung on to the airplane pretty well and the first thing that I recognized was that I came out with a tremendous inverted you know negative G flat spin well we spin airplanes all the time so that you'd recognize a characteristic each airplane flat spinning inverted and you can get it out by putting the eller on with the spin direction and using your rudder to stop it and make it fall through and it did and then the airplane flipped into a normal spin which is an upright spin I say normal because that's when normally an airplane spins is upright flipped into normal spin and I just use pop the nose out with the elevator and officer rudder to stop it and recovered and when this happened that was down I was about 50 miles from Rogers dry lake at 25,000 feet and sitting there looking at any and the the pressurization was going out of the cockpit part of the canopy was going and my suit was inflated it kept me alive and I looked around finally spotted lakebed and turned toward you and from a time the airplane yard and ran out of fuel up there at 2.5 Mach number I popped it out of a span of 25,000 feet was on 51 seconds but 51 seconds if you will look at your clock is a long time and in that and so I just glided on back to the base and landed and that's the last slide I made in the airplane and we never did take it above about Mach 2 and it yet anymore we didn't say anything obviously because you're wasting your time if you talk objects to try to survive and basically I think the tape started it covers the whole flight until I get all four chambers on and then smoke out and then we didn't say anything until the end of the tumble when I called Jack Ridley and told him that I'd had a problem and didn't know whether I'd get to be airplane back to the base or not and then it was a big job for them to find me because you're being way high and they're chasing me in in and f-86s and but it's you know that's just brought the airplane down the landing on the lake bed and and they changed the canopy and the airplane is ready to fly again but we never did take it out to that speed because what happened the airplane had a very small tail on it horizontal stabilizer and vertical stabilizer with the rudder and elevators and when we went through about 2.2 Mach gnam number the conical shock wave that forms on the nose of the airplane you know as you go faster this shock wave comes down what's not flat its conical in shape and when we got out to about 2.3 or 2.4 Mach number this shock wave is as down to where it's almost at the tip of the horizontal stabilizer in the vertical stabilizer and when that thing cone coned in like that we lost stability on all three axis the airplane it just you know just flew apart and fortunately the airplane was stressed for 18 G's positive or negative so we didn't break it up and then just through pure instinct you you sort of recover from an inverted spin and a normal spin and bring it back and land itself you're relieved that the thing didn't kill you that's about what it turned out to be in and what and the funny thing about it you know I was a full day for me because I I got about four o'clock I was hunting ducks in the morning early you know daylight and then came over and briefed on the flight and then looked over the airplane and then flew it I think I got home about 4:30 and the Glennis was all dressed up because I had to give a talk to the Navy League in Los Angeles that night and I drove all the way down there some about two and a half hours and gave a talk we got home about 2:30 next morning when I was coming out of the cold astronaut school was we had to train the guys in a simulated space environment and what we did we took three f-104 a's which is a mach 2 airplane and we put a hydrogen peroxide rocket engine in the tail above the normal jet engine gave us an additional six thousand pounds of thrust and with this air we also added 24 inches to the wingtip additional wing on it with hydrogen peroxide thrusters two thrusters one out at top of each wingtip and one out at the bottom that's for roll of control above the atmosphere and in the nose of the airplane we standed the nose out we put hydrogen peroxide thrusters in the top and bottom and each side for pitch control and y'all control over the airplane and basically a typical mission that we flew with that airplane and I flew it 40 sometimes working out a profile for the students to fly as a test pilot on the airplane and basically what we were doing we were climbing we're taking off with the afterburner on the engine and getting airborne cleaning the gear up on the airplane and the flaps then accelerated out to climb speed with four or five hundred miles an hour and climb up to about 36,000 feet and then go into afterburner which accelerates the airplane out to about twice the speed of sound and sort of ease it up to about 45,000 feet and then fire off the hydrogen peroxide rocket and accelerate it out to about 2.4 Mach number and then pull four G's or the airplane up into about a 70 degree climb angle and it's just the characteristics of the j79 engine which is in the 104 is that as you go through about 55,000 feet the afterburner blows out because of lack of oxygen when this happens you've got to come out I have to burn a position in with the throttle in the mill power to make the eyelids closed to get more thrust out of the turbine engine and then it just so happens you've got to keep one eyeball on the tailpipe temperature because that engines going to over tamp it about 70,000 feet because it's not designed to run any higher when it does you have to shut it down we shut it down in now how do proc side rocket takes you on over the top it takes you up we got the air cleaning up to old roughly 118 thousand feet max altitude but see then you're above the atmosphere there are 90 percent of the atmosphere so you have to use these hydrogen peroxide Rockets to change the attitude of the airplane to follow its flight path because if you don't when the airplane leaves say a hundred thousand feet going up like this if you don't do anything it's going to come back in that way and so you have to rotate it to make it come back in those first and we knew that 104 had a pitch up problem meaning when the airplane stalls it pitched up see I was the first military pilot fly the airplane the 104 on August the 3rd 1954 I was the test pilot on that airplane so I knew it intimately and I knew I spun the airplane a lot installing a new had this problem and what we were trying to establish was and what altitude are we going to run in to enough aerodynamic force to say when this airplane comes back into the atmosphere at a little higher angle of attack then we want that at what altitude will this aerodynamic force which causes a nose to pitch up on the airplane is more than the thrust of that hydrogen peroxide thruster in the nose which is pushing the nose down and what we did we ran a series of flights I was a pilot on it to start at 118 thousand feet 116 and 1412 coming into the atmosphere at about a 50 degree angle of attack and opened up the thrusters on the top and push the nose down and then measure the rate and you can plot at each altitude what rate the airplane recovers and we noticed here we're starting to run into resistance at about a hundred eight thousand feet 106 down and feets a little slower 104 and if you take the curve and extrapolate you say well it looks to me like we're going to run out of thrust and it's how does outside rocket here the aerodynamic pitch up will be more than the thruster at about 92 thousand feet and we thought we were in pretty good shape so we thought we'd run one more I flew a flight in the morning with a pressure suit on and thinking a hundred and eight thousand feet and we measured the rotation and then I landed and wanted to make another flight after lunch I didn't get out of my pressure suit because if you get out of it it's wet and you can't get back in and made another flight at about 1:30 in the afternoon at a hundred and four thousand feet and it and for some reason we had dual thrusters on the bottom of the nose and dual thrusters on the top now we don't know we may have had one thruster failed but at a hundred and four thousand feet when I came into the atmosphere at 50 degrees angle of attack I couldn't get the nose down on the airplane and see you fari shut your engine down we're down here but the engine still windmilling as it goes across the top and that's where you get the hydraulic pressure that runs the flight control systems your horizontal stabilizer the ailerons and the rudder when you come over the top obviously the engine is wind milling and it's gradually slowing down but engine is still turning over giving you hydraulic pressure which runs a horizontal stabilizer and for pitch control and the ailerons and the rudder and basically what happened on previous flights when you reenter it and force the nose down with hiders and proc side thrusters attitude controllers then you come back into the atmosphere nose first then you start getting air through the intake ducts of your airplane and that keeps the engine wind milling and you bring the airplane on down to about 40,000 feet and level out and hit the igniter and then come out of out of idle with you're out of stopcock with your throttle in the idle and that gives you fuel and igniter work and then it starts your engine up again but if it doesn't work then you're going down dead stick into Rogers dry lake which I did three or four times but on what happens on that what happened on this flight was that when the airplane came into the atmosphere at about a 50 degree angle of attack and I couldn't get the nose down the airplane pitched up and went into a flat spin and what you realized now is the airplanes in a flat spin and the engine rpm because there's no air going through the intake ducts the engine stops and when that stopped then you no longer have hydraulic pressure to run the horizontal stabilizer or the aileron a rudder so there's no you're in a no-win situation that's exactly what it is you sit there and you get but you have one other alternative that's eject well I also had a drag chute on the airplane that we use for landing and when I went to the airplane was in a very flat slow spin and I am a pressure suit on it was inflated and I was sat there and watch and and I was talking to bud Anderson was chasing me in the tt-33 he was down way down a little looking at me coming and I was talking to the space position branch guys are recording data I said I you know I got a I got a real problem there's just no way of getting this thing out of a spin and so was I went through 30,000 feet I went I deployed the drag chute which you normally deploy for lay well when I did the drag chute comes out and it popped the nose down on the airplane but there's a link that the drag chutes hooked to the airplane with that designed a shear at 180 miles an hour that's in case the drag chute comes out accidentally while you're flying it won't stop the airplane well it just so happened when a nose went down you know when as I went through 180 miles an hour the drag chute sheared and parachute released and the airplane pitched back flat because there's you know 180 mile an hour going through the intake ducts no gonna give you engine rpm takes about 300 mile an hour when this happened the airplane flipped back flat and I don't think it turned it just fell at a hundred miles an hour now you've got you've got the egress systems you know you know them intimately and a lot and it pays off but a lot of times you have to use them in a Simha just ate and I knew my rocket seat that I was riding on newest capability so I wrote it down to about 6,000 feet which is not low and went ahead and ejected well the rocket seat blows you out of the airplane and gives you about a hundred mile an hour velocity away from the airplane well it's just so happened that the airplane is falling at about a hundred miles an hour so when I use the seat the airplane just fell away from the seat obviously the obvious the seat set there and then two seconds after you leave the airplane the lap belt blows open on the seat which is what holds you industry you've got leg restrainer cables that hold your heels into the seat for flailing when you come out at high speed and yeah a lot of things happen so when this I set and watch the seat go through a sequencing you know knowing when it was going to happen and finally the lap belt popped open and and there's a butt kicker that kicks you out of the seat I felt that going and also my cable cutters cut my leg restraint or cables and as I fell through and this happened then your f5 release on your parachute is armed and if as you fall through 14,000 feet the chute will open well I was below 14,000 feet obviously so the chute opened the minute that the the f5 release said to open and it did but the problem was I didn't have enough velocity through the air see I was just starting to fall again to pull that quarter bag which is on the canopy of your parachute and the reason that bag is on the canopy is that when you eject at high speeds four or five miles an hour it keeps your canopy on the parachute from popping immediately it pulls off and lets it reef slowly well that little pilot chute on that quarter bag needs about sixty mile an hour to pull it off the quarterback and this is you know I don't know anything thing like this is going all I know is it that I'm free find my chute has released but I haven't got a canopy slowing me down kind I can feel it flopping in the breeze well by the time at about this time the seat you know which kicked me out of here it also was falling and it became entangled in the shroud lines of the parachute I don't know this either but this is the way it happened and when finally I picked up enough speed 60 or 70 miles an hour falling with the canopy up air following that that quarter bag came off the canopy popped and when it popped damn seat that's entangled in the strat lines I'm falling about like this and it flopped me up like this will a seat hit me in the face piece of my pressure suit and what hit me was the rocket the butt end of the rocket on the seat which still had glowing propellant burning and when this happened it popped glowing propellant onto the rubber seals in my pressure suit and you're in a hundred percent oxygen and when it did it ignited and then you're feeding one hundred percent oxygen and it's like a blowtorch and unfortunately when this happened the the visor on my pressure suit was busted and frag didn't cut my eye down and my socket filled with blood so didn't hurt my ball the flame but I got burned pretty bad on my neck and shoulder and in these very difficult to breathe the only thing that I knew I was stunned from the blow I knew I had to get the visor up on my pressure suit how much weighs a button on the right you push it and then you raise the visor in certain way to get your visor up on most pressure suits I knew I had to get it up off get that visor up to shut the oxygen flow from my kit that was in the back of my pressure suit to get all this fire out and so I did that when this happened then I swung a couple times and I hit the ground when it happened I couldn't see too much and it was I was having trouble breathing because a lot of smoking fire but as it worked out when I was you know didn't look either do or you don't I don't didn't get killed in the flap so I stood up and and II buzzed me but a helicopter since I've been talking to him on the way down took four minutes from the first spin to impact and they had a helicopter off the ground with the flight surgeon aboard dr. at Edwards and he got out there will probably thin 5 minutes of my time I landed and picked me up and and gave me a shot of morphine and took me back to hospital and worked on me and cut my pressure suit off there's a that's about it well you're too busy you don't think about anything like that it you're too busy trying to survive and and obviously had I not knowing intimately my egress systems meaning my pressure suit in the Jackson Seaton and parachute I probably wouldn't have survived but I just make it a point to to to know it and it pays off a lot we trained in the United States for we went to England we trained in p39 little bel-air kober's and it was all dogfighting air-to-ground gunnery die bomb me skip bombing buzzing and you know really learning to fly a fighter we're training to go overseas and and being the maintenance officer I also had a lot of fun you know just running test stops on the airplanes when he came out of the maintenance yes I was I was no better than the rest of the fighter pilots I had very good eyes as a lot of guys did and also good dogfight it's a matter of experience and and then when we went to England in November 43 and we got the first p-51 s in 8th Air Force it's as I recall us we picked up a p-51 I've never been in one before and flew it from this assembly base down to our base in license and the next day we're sitting over the middle of Germany fighting in them you have to learn real quick and that's the way our pilots were and as I recall I I on my 7th mission I shot down to 109 was my first airplane that I shot down we're on a raid two over Berlin the first daylight bombing raid over Berlin and I came home and I saw 109 and and I nailed him and to me it was a lot easier than I thought it would be because you know we were a little bit apprehensive about dog fighting the Germans and their fighters and they had a lot of experience dog fighting him we didn't and so I nailed a guy but the next day I got shot out I was in a dog fight with the three 190s and I got hit head-on with 20 millimeter cannon and the prop came off the airplane part of the wing the canopy and it caught on fire so me and the airplane party companies that's what happens you bail out you get you freefall in your parachute and then when you get down to within three or four thousand feet of the ground you pull the ripcord and the parachute pops and you land and that's that's about the way it happens I picked up a few wounds I had a couple of slugs at one of my leg and I had some about 20 millimeter fragments in my my hands and and a couple cuts on my head but that's it they were minor so it didn't make much difference when I landed in my parachute we were in occupied France and they were quite a few Germans around Aki obviously you've got to hide or they'll pick you up and as I recall I did I got into the woods as deep as I could and and hid and and they never caught me and I hung around or laid out there for a day and tell things quieten down and then contacted a French farmer or woodcutter and I couldn't speak French but he could see I was an American flower cause I had my flying flying gear on leather jacket and flying suit and and and he knew that I needed some kind of help and he fortunately he went to the right people instead of turning me in and got me with the the defense or the resistance forces the Maquis who in turn took me in and under the wing for the next month and I worked my way through on down through France and finally went through the Pyrenees and went into Spain in a neutral country so i was interned in a town of lira de and the american council that came up and and talked to us and made sure we were heard american and and then put us up in a hotel gave us a money and and we just bummed around there for about a month and finally during that period of time of May 1944 the we were beginning to help Spain who was running out of gasoline because they didn't have any petroleum products and we were then begin trading gasoline for American pilots that were in Spain you know there was something like 2,600 Airmen interned in Spain who either you know had made it through the Pyrenees or took their airplanes there and jumped out of them and the way we got out was that Spanish took us down to Gibraltar and turned us over the British on the island of Gibraltar and then finally the British were you know flying airplanes from Gibraltar rounded over around the tip of Spain and Portugal up to England and and I bummed a ride up on one of the airplanes and then went back to my squadron well basically they didn't want you to compromise the French underground system and fortunately when I I didn't go straight back to my squadron when I got to Spain I was held in sort of a secure house where he couldn't get out until they interrogated you and make sure you an American Flyer you know and and they won your whole story where he gotten shot down you're the outfit suits you were with and then they brought a pilot down from my squadron to identify me and to make sure that I was who I said I was and then and then obviously they started publishing orders on me to go back to the United States and that's when I sort of backed off said I don't want to go home I want to go back to my squadron and fight and I said we you can't because the rules prohibited and fortunately the invasion we're just coming along and when the invasion occurred the resistance forces surfaced and and general eisenhower whom I'd worked my way all all the way up to see said okay go back I was leading the whole fighter group which means three squadrons and we only had we had two boxes of bombers to escort our fighter group did so what I did I stuck the other two squadrons one on each box of bombers and took my squadron and ranged about 80 miles out in front of the bomber stream and I spotted 22 me-109 s in a formation climbing up out in front of the Bombers out hey 80 to 100 miles to make a don't pass and I stayed up son where they couldn't see us but just they were in little specks I had excellent eyes like I could watch things without them seeing me and I kept up son from the from them with my squadron of 16 p-51 and finally when they leveled out and headed over towards the bar I just moved in behind them down son and I got within 200 yards behind them stood and I wouldn't even let my pilots you know they kind of spread out we still had a drop tanks on because we want to keep as much fuel as we could and I shot down the first two without even dropping my tanks and when of course the explosions when the airplane looked then they all broke and at that point we punched their tanks off and if the whole squadron broke up into you know in the elements you know wing wing man and his leader to support each other and we got in a big old hairy dogfight and I shot down I don't know another guy I was hammered him and a guy his wingman cut the power and dropped behind me and this one blew up and I broke into him pulled out at about looked like about 50 feet before I hit him and and then another guy I followed him that that can got him down low and then it's all over with you know he you've left the fight following the guy down and he come back and you look around and my wingman was still with me and then I picked up a couple more guys you know flying out try to orient yourself and kind of fly around and pick up the Bombers again and stay with them so it's if that's the way combat is you know there's a lot of lot of shooting a lot of high G's a lot of turns you got to watch what you're doing it's it's exciting probably that recruiter was better than the Navy or the or anyone else and also I think there was a guy when the guys who went through pilot training about the year that I graduated from high school when he came home he was a pretty neat guy he said it was a fun job but flying to me I never associated myself with it and when I enlisted in the army it was just to be a mechanic and there was no intention to be a pilot or anything like that in fact when I got in in September in 1941 I was trained as a mechanic which was easy I already had so much experience in in mechanical things like engines and and things that dad exposed us to all the time that I was just trained and and began working on airplanes as crew chief serviced them overhaul the engines and things like that and then finally in the other call sometime around oh the latter part of November 1941 I remember reading a notice on the bulletin board that if you were wear a high school graduate and 18 years of age and could pass a fiscal then you could apply for pilot training under the flying sergeant program you wouldn't be a cadet or make lieutenant or be an officer when you graduated from high school you'd be a sergeant pilot and it looked like pretty neat dealings and I just did it just to be doing something so I put in my application and I recall taking my physical on December the 4th 1941 and passing it and then just sweating it out for six months finally they called me up for pilot training but that's you know it's just a matter of being at the right place the right time my first ride in an airplane wasn't any fun as I recall the spring of 42 and I was in Victorville and a crew chief on the 8011 which was a twin-engine twin-engine bomber deer training airplane and I had overhaul one of the engines and the engineering office ready to take the airplane up and check it out and asked me if I wanted to go along and I'd never been in an airplane before and I said yeah I'd like to so I got in and sat down the seating fashion to safety bill and he took off and he went over to one of the dry lakes down are very near Edwards between Edwards and Victorville and starts shooting touch-and-go landings and it was a rough and turbulent pretty soon I got sick and threw up on my airplane it and to me it was a very uncomfortable situation so I didn't take the care for it but I'd already applied for pilot training so yeah I went up I think that's the only time I went up in airplane and that was it till they called me up for pilot training I was born in Myra West Virginia which was a just a a actually a post office on mud river for near very near Hamlin West Virginian my first recollection was when we moved to Hamlin when I was about I don't know four or five years old and that's where I spent my life until I was 18 years old and to me it was a rural town of about six hundred population that it's in the middle of the hills and primarily was agricultural timber coal mine and some natural gas and my father was a natural gas drillers and then I attended grad school and the I recall going through the first grade and I did very well in the first grade and skipped the second grade and went to the third grade and by the time I got to the fifth grade I spent two years there he got kind of tough and then grade school was something that you know it's the only thing to me it was just nine months out of the year that I enjoyed either running the hills or fishing and and things like that and then in high school things got a little more serious as far as my education was concerned and and also there were sports football and basketball which I played both and I also played a trombone in a high school band and chase gal so I'm pretty busy pretty busy kid and the subjects that I liked very much in school were mathematics and algebra and typing I could type 60 words a minute easy anything it took hand-eye coordination I had a good time at it history my teachers had trouble passing me I would say in English literature and things like that I probably more so than the other kids took up with elderly people because they were interesting people in that there's one in particular who would have been a state senator and he was a lawyer old Jacob D Smith and I hung around him a lot because after I got to be a teenager because he was interesting to hit a lot of tails to tail and and he's pretty pretty a nice guy and see my dad was gone all week normally he'd leave on on Sunday afternoon and then come home Friday night and so you didn't have anybody like he wasn't around at that time so you just took up with older people just just for company he had a string of tools meaning cable tools that had drilled holes in the ground for natural gas and he would go down some 3,000 feet into the ground that and he would know it was an interesting piece of machinery and and I was exposed to machinery at a very young age and and I liked it I got the overhaul engines and and run big gasoline pumps and and water pumps and and watch him dressed bits you mean heating him until they were red-hot and resharpening the bits that cut the hole in the ground it was it was interesting to me as a kid but I really wasn't as big as my big brother who turned out to be about 6 4 and weighed about 240 Hanul 16 pound sledge hammers and carry pipes I couldn't do that I was just an average size kids it was taught mainly the pretty well a family discipline your father taught you to finish anything you started and I think that that carries throughout your adult life most people I would say their personalities and and morality and and their personalities are formed when they're rather young and that characteristic will carry out throughout their lifetime and that's that's the way we were disciplined as kids quite severely if you if you didn't finish your jobs and I think that's what brought about a desire to finish what you started you know and do the best job he could and that that's probably the reason that characteristic occurred out throughout my life he was a very honest guy and he word was law and but he was he was adamant about you know he was a Republican and and he believed in him and he didn't particularly care for Democrats although they're the Democrats in West Virginia we're in the majority but he was that way he was a sort of a Dutch German guy and he worked very hard and he was serious about everything he did he didn't have to sign a piece of paper his word was his bond you know after I've broken the sound barrier went up to White House to get to Collier trophy from President Truman and I remember my dad wouldn't shake hands with he a senior year of my high school in 1941 the war broke out in Europe in 39 and 40 and it was a Tennessee since we were sort of mobilizing a lot of our forces here in America it just seemed a natural thing for most all the kids in high school especially the boys they entered the service and I think we all did know as and and actually you know when people tell you that you know I had my mind made up when I was 2 years old to do this you know I think take that with a grain of salt because it's very difficult for a kid who's going through an educational process and being exposed to the world to decide what he wants to do because he's really hadn't been exposed to that that kind of a life yet and I had no idea what I wanted to do except exist and that was about it I had no interest in airplanes we didn't even know what an airplane was we didn't even see him except flying in the air and so obviously there was no no instant no interest in them at all well I came home and yeah in February and got married February 26 I got married I recall I got home about the 1st of February and then went down to Texas to be a basic instructor and then that's when I got out of there in the right field in July 1945 and got into maintenance I was flying when I met her obviously but the point is being an Air Force wife is not an easy life and and it was tough because you travel around a lot and there's a high risk factor obviously especially so in in research flying and it she she you know bowed her back and did it and it worked out pretty good after the war - and I came home I didn't go to right field in 1945 to be a test pilot what happened I came back I went overseas and November 43 and I fought in the war got shot down and came home and that one no thing that I had gotten shot down in March 1944 and evaded capture and went through the Pyrenees in the Spain and it was in turn when I returned to the United States they made me a basic instructor in Texas then the war ended in Europe and they freed all of the prisoners of war well the air force came out with the policy or the Army Air Corps back then the that those Airmen both pilots and navigators ramadhir's and gunners who had gotten shot down could select any base in the United States they wanted to well that policy covered me because I'd been shot down and evaded and was known as an as an evade II and so Avedis and prisoners of war could select any base they wanted so I looked at the map at my hometown in West Virginia and right field was the closest air base to my hometown and I picked right field and when I reported in the right field in the in the summer 1945 the personnel types looked at my records nasaw as a fighter pilot but the one thing it caught their eye I was a maintenance officer meaning I'd been trained as a crew chief and made aviation maintenance and then when I served in my Fighter Squadron in combat I served as a maintenance officer you know running the crew chiefs and maintenance guys and when I got back they saw this and there was a vacancy in a fighter Test section there and the flight test division that needed a maintenance officer and they assigned me there and I'd you know use the hangars full of every kind of airplane that we were flying and it was interesting to me because I got to fly every airplane after they were worked on then the maintenance officer had to take them up and check all the systems out and sign them off and then you turn them over the test to do their test work in them and that's that's how I got the right feel now over the next year or six months I put on many air shows and jets all over the United States and Colonel Boyd who was the chief of the flight test evasion watched a few of those air shows and he was impressed and he noticed also that me being a maintenance officer I never had any trouble with my airplanes you know if something happened to them I could fix them and eyewash brought them home and so that's when he approached me in the spring well actually is in December 1945 said would you like to go to the test pilot school I said well I only have a high school education and it might be kind of tough for me the academic requires said nah you can you can make out and so I went into the test ba school and that's what got me started in test programs and then later of course when the x1 came along in 1947 he selected me for the test program and the reason he did was that I understood machinery and obviously that could fly an airplane personality to him didn't mean a heck of a lot ages it's your ability to perform in an airplane and that caught his eye and and also he knew that the x1 was a very dangerous program and he knew that I could take care of myself well x5 the first wet wing variable swept wing airplane at we abilities just one of the family of ax airplanes meaning research like the x1 X x1 is supersonic x2 is hypersonic x3 was supersonic intake ducts x4 was a cimmyt a last airplane and the x5 was a variable swept wing airplane and it was designed to sweep its wings from 20 degrees back to 60 and they see what mach drag did on variable swept wings and we built two of them got him array pops and got killed in one and a span and we finished the other one up and its back in the Air Force Museum or I feel now just like a lot at this we built two x 4's and I flew all of them and ones at the Air Force Academy ones in the museum the x3 there's one stiletto I think back in the Air Force meaning the x2 we lost them I left Edwards in 54 after nine years there's a test pile and went to Europe and became a squadron commander in an f-86 squatter and got back into into running a fighter fighter outfit and then when I came home to George I had an f100 squadron and and I was back in tactical flying you know test work is it's it's a very demanding type flying the morn you fly a dozen different airplanes every week and you really don't feel comfortable in them but you know the systems but also it's there's a lot of competition in test work when you get into tactical flying back in the fighter squadron you know you fly only one airplane and you stay combat ready and you know your guys and it's a pretty nice way of life and so I came back and I was a George when the space program started in in 59 and the requirement to get into the space program was to have a degree preferably an engineering or math or one the sciences well I only had a high school education I didn't give it a thought and I could care less about it because to me it wasn't flying it was just riding in and something that you had no control over and I didn't number one I I wasn't eligible number two I could care less interesting I'm sure that the view was pretty but that's about the only thing safe for it I didn't pay an awful lot of attention to the whole space program until old 1960 oh it through the War College and was promoted to full colonel and when he when I got out of the war college they assigned me back to Edwards Air Force Base and put me in charge of then the test pilot school and when I moved into the test pilot school they were a couple programs coming within the Air Force the x20 dinosaur program and the MOL program manned orbital laboratory and both of those were space space weapons systems and the Air Force was very much involved in space in fact it was responsible for space NACA you know the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics was basically that's what I said it was Aeronautics and when we started and I took over the school what I did was we started a space course in the test pilot school we changed the name of the school to the aerospace research pilot school and we started training guys for potential astronaut duty and those astronauts were selected for the manned orbital laboratory and the x20 dinosaur the x20 dinosaur was very similar to the Space Shuttle except it's only probably 1/3 as large it was strapped on a titan 3c liquid rocket with two strapless eyelid booster just like the shuttle and it would go into orbit and orbit and then reenter and land the same way that shuttle does stead of a wheels it had skids laying on and like the x2 had and we trained in fact we bought a whole space mission simulator from for something like six million bucks and we had it set up in the school and we could give simulation on a whole space mission including rendezvous and docking in space and we had the astronauts training in the mold program and the x20 program was going along and finally in 1960 late 6566 the administration made a decision that space would be for peaceful purposes and they canceled the X 20 and the manned orbital laboratory and then formed NASA the National Space Administration and when this happened the Soviet military moved right into the void in developing space weapon systems then NASA got started as you as you know we'd already been through you know the mercury Jimny Apollo then they got started in reusable space weapons for not space weapons but space systems for peaceful purposes and we Castle then the x20 and the mold program and we did away with our whole space mission simulator went right back to test pilot training at the school and I left and went to Vietnam I was really really disappointed that our government the White House or the administration had done this because it was a we had a tremendous ability in the Air Force for for space and we were we would have been 15 years ahead of where we are today with NASA running the space program and that's that's a still story of my six years at Edwards at in astronaut training in fact it was amusing we ran a class to have roughly 11 pilots per year 38 of the guys that graduated from the school while I was confident I went to NASA as astronauts in fact dick truly who's now that Colonel he was one of my students Bob Crippen Frank with Tom Stafford Frank Borman the whole bunch they're a good bunch of good bunch of guys and we had an excellent facility there but it was wiped out a very poor decision because basically we we have gone ahead and and developed we had to because of the the Cold War with the Soviet Union situation developed a lot of space weapons system just like the Strategic Defense Initiative or Star Wars defensive concept which incidentally a lot of that technology that was developed to support the SDI program or Star Wars is the reason that the Patriot missile is so successful today against good Scud missiles that's technology and that's associated with space weapons I think one of the big problems that the astronauts are faced with is that they were not exposed to their hardware enough they were being used running around the country on PR jobs instead of getting involved in the in the design and manufacture of the hardware that they were going to be riding in and and have more to say about some of the characteristics of it and that's you know I think that was obvious during during the shuttle accident accident the guys really didn't know a damn thing about what the hell was going on around him and you leave it up to some a bunch of engineers both civilians and NASA and and that's what bit him so after the accident in the long period of time because there was a lot of recommendations from the accident board which I was a member of the accident board of the shuttle accident that that that the astronauts get more involved in hardware so they understood the systems and had more of a say about whether they flew it or not then yes that's taken care there's been a lot of changes in NASA a lot a lot of changes still need to be made but there have been left made the guys who are selected for astronauts have good technical background they have capability to absorb technology and then they do but they're crowded a little bit with PR works it's a civil service organization it's difficult to get Deadwood out of it it has a tendency not to let loose of operational programs and keep on doing research and development in the shuttle is a good example we could probably run the shuttle program for about one tenth of what it's costing today with a good civilian organization that's in it to make a profit the x-15 which Neal was flying is about six other pilots we're flying at the same time like Pete Knight and Bob white and Bob Rushworth and and Joe Engle and the like well when the x-15 flies it's just like the old x1 flies the x-15 is launched from a mother aircraft within gliding distance of a dry lakebed well since the x-15 was getting up to speeds of four and five times the speed of sound you obviously couldn't launch it over Rogers dry lake it had to be backed up and lost over a dry lakebed like mud lake I'm a Tonopah Nevada or Smith's Ranch Lake east of Fallon Nevada or some of the Panamint lakes in Nevada and then make its run and then recover it Rogers dry lake well if the dry lakes are wet obviously you can't land safely an airplane that comes in you know a couple hundred miles an hour you you can tear off the gear or skids and end up tumbling and so I was running the aerospace research pilot school at that time sometime around 65 when NASA or Paul beckel who was the administrator of NASA there Edward called me and said what do you think about Smith's ranch Lake no that was just up there yesterday and a b57 looking at it and it's wet well he said my guys say it isn't wet I said we'll be my guest and that's exactly what I said he said how about would you go up there and and land on I said no I won't it's wet and he said well would you ride with Neil in one of our airplanes I said yet long as I'm not responsible for anything that happens and so he's I went over to went over to NASA and they had a t-33 and Neil was flying it so I took my shoot over in my helmet and and we had just worth like flying suit and gloves and and I got in the back seat and sat there and Neil taxes out and takes off on the dry lake bed and we fly up there Smith's ranch the lake and he backs off comes in he's gonna touch down said Neil you know there the lake is wet and he said no I think it looks dry enough for me to just touch down and let it roll in out add power and come back off and I said hey you get on that Lake surface in a t-33 and it starts sinking in you're never gonna overcome the drag with the power appear at about 5,000 feet elevation where the lake bed is and that's exactly what happened he came in touchdown man the airplane starts slowing down he puts the full power on it and it's keep slowing down finally it just stops and sinks in the mud and we're sitting there you know shut it off and I said you know now what you were 30 miles marooned it's about 3:30 in the afternoon and it's cold you got 30 miles to walk with in flying suit on fortunately Paul Bickle senousy goony bird of c-47 it and that's that dinner up to follow us because he suspected something might happen he's just good insurance and and we sat there for about a half an hour and you know sitting on the wing of the airplane and you could walk on this the lakebed lead leave footprints but pretty soon the old goony bird hold in the sight and so I got back an airplane got the battery switch on turn the radio on and told a guy said hey you know don't we only got one choice if you land over next to the edge of the lake and keep the airplane rolling you probably will won't sink and then we can get back off the ground I said give us time to walk over to the edge of the lake and and don't slow the airplane down you just keep the door we'll jump aboard and and that he did he landed and slowed it down and he was leaving a pretty good rut in the lake but he kept power on as he came by we ran along and jumped in the back end of the airplane and we count them back to Edwards it was after dark and the t-33 set up here and the Navy went out and recovered it I don't know a week later it was just the experience that you know you know things because you live on those lake beds like I had since 1945 and guys you know they don't use their head it's a good example Neil is a pretty good engineer he wasn't too good a airplane driver I think basically we're stuck with the shuttle that's that simple we've just because of narrow mindedness and you know not looking at what's available in the world NASA doesn't have any choice it's pretty well hamstrung as to what its goals are in the future what they can accomplish and the thing is since since it's the only kid we've got we've got to support it and basically if we look at the you know the laboratories that we're building space vehicles out in permanent orbit and also the moon as a possible launching site for deep space exploration manned and unmanned the you know they should be supported about the same amount for as I'm concerned and the the year that I spent on the president's space Commission developing a master plan for what the United States should do in space for the next 50 years was very interesting in it you went through all of these things that that was the year prior to the shuttle accident and we went to our industry to get answers what do you think we can do in space we went to the academic world and we went to NASA who is supposed to be our expert space and the one thing that we noticed when we started going to the difference NASA centers like JPL and Marshall and and others here these people don't even talk to each other man that they don't even know what each division is doing and the different levels of supervision in NASA we notice they don't even communicate and for a whole year we set and looked at this and then bang the shuttle accident happens and just because of those characteristics and it was unfortunate and but now today nASA has cleaned up its act quite a bit they're being a little overcautious which is costing them you know and payload with the shuttle and also they are over budget and not they don't get in to more money than they need they're just a heck of a lot more than they need to and that's it's unfortunate but that's the only space program we have except the air force has been quietly over the last ten years fifteen years developing space weapon systems just for its own defense and that that has paid off now and things like the Patriot missiles there's a lot of things that entered into the shuttle accident one and and one was the PR pressure of getting that launch off on schedule because the press is there you know and and that plus lack of communications and not paying attention to to red flags and a lot of this is Monday morning quarterbacking obviously but it did happen and it shouldn't have happened it was built by Rockwell and to specifications and simulators and and and the guys fluid but obviously you know a lot of people raised their eyebrows when this when the Soviets flew a similar space vehicle from launch to touchdown without a crew aboard the shuttle can do that but it just so happens the guys take over on base leg and touchdown on Rogers dry lake they don't have to we ran into a problem back in the 60s well in fact in the 50s when we were able to fly airplanes at supersonic speeds see all a fighter aircraft that we have designed even from World War 1 to World War 2 a fighter has to be very maneuverable but it has a it has to have a little bit of stability you know so that you can that the pilot can handling it handle it so what happened you know the fighters that we design in World War 1 and World War 2 and even in Korea those fighters had a limited stability capability and made them very maneuverable now when we were able to smoke these airplanes out beyond the speed of sound and get supersonic flow over the whole airplane they became very stable and what we found ourselves in a position in the 50s and early 60s that these airplanes when they're flying at supersonic speeds although they were very maneuverable under the speed of sound when you got them above the speed is out they were too stable to maneuver so then we had to back off and make fighters like the f-104 and the f4 phantom 2 very unstable down it's at slow speeds so that they would be maneuverable above the speed of sound and what this meant was that we had to then when we designed airplanes like the 104 and 105 and the f4 phantom 2 they were so unstable at low speeds you had to put stability augmentation systems and like pitch dampeners yaw dampeners and roll dam nursed that sort of stabilized these airplanes so the pilot wouldn't have too much turbo fire flying them and consequently that's where we found ourselves in the 60 time period with airplanes and it would it was a problem really because if if these airplanes like an f4 phantom ii when you turn the airplane if you exceed the maximum angle of attack it'll snap and span out and if it gets into a spin it's so unstable you can't get it out of the spin so then in the spring of 1970 a new technology came along computer technology and what it made it possible was for the Air Force then to design a flight control system to fly the airplane that the computer used and and the reason it was so good we could then design this fighter to be extremely unstable so that was very maneuverable at supersonic speeds and then programmed that computer that was flying the airplane to never let that airplane exceed the maximum angle of attack or yaw angle regardless of what the pilot called for because when you're dogfighting you don't pay an awful lot of attention you're in the high g-load the angles of attacking things like that well this really paid off then the f-16 came along some 18 years ago in the 70s with a computer flight control system in it that was programmed never to exceed the maximum angle attack and they gave us a very maneuverable airplane at supersonic speeds and I was a fallout from this computer what was happening also that all of our fighters like f4 phantom two were carrying 26 28 different kinds of weapons and to manage each of those weapons requires a checklist Christ looks like Sears nurullah catalog and what happened because of these computer the computer capacity in these computer flight control systems we could then program all of the data necessary to manage all these weapons that you can carry and that brought about a requirement for the cathode ray tube in the cockpit and just like a tabletop computer all airplanes like the f-16 first f-16 didn't have them the f-18 which used digital computer flight control systems and had cathode ray tubes so that we could program all the data into that computer to manage these weapons system and the cathode ray tube was put in there so that the computer could communicate with the pilot and give him the data necessary to manage a weapon and that's where we are today everything's computer computer enhance we've gone to tremendous infrared like the films you see with the laser spot guided bombs or optically got it that's all infrared that you're looking at that the pilot can work at night or daytime as well as he can work at night as well as the Canon daytime and that's the way things are progress and a lot of new technology is coming about now especially stealth and you preach it you know stealth it's a secret to survival today because every country in the world has radar in as used in air defense systems and if we can neutralize that fifty years of research and radar with stealth technology that pretty well neutralized all of the air defenses that you're exposed to and like the f-117 which would built some ten years ago and it's not a good flying airplane it's not even supersonic but it does have stealth technology it can go in and drop laser-guided bombs very accurately now today with airplanes like the f2 Advanced Tactical Fighter family like the f-22 and the yf-23 these are a new advanced family of stealth fighters which fly at Mach 2 and the super cruise means you don't use afterburner in them more they super cruise out at very fast speeds and they have stealth technology so you can evade any radar and that's that's what's happening today know this that's it's your job it's just like driving the car and talking over a cellular phone where you're driving it's real easy with because you're raised with it and it's that computer technology is something that makes you a lot more effective in your airplane it's like a pilot today flying something like an f-18 or F 20 or F 22 or 23 is probably 10 times more effective in that fighter than he was you know just three or four years ago and the new technology that's going into smart bombs and weapons and missiles is really making a fighter very effective but the one thing you have to also realize that the defensive missiles air-to-air missiles that some guys shooting at you is also going up that technology line and it's they're becoming very lethal basically technology laser-guided bombs optically guided bombs the initial stealth capability with the 117 s going in and neutralizing a lot of the command and control Network and radar Network and and it puts them in a very bad place also is AWACS the airborne warning radar airplanes that are setting up they're looking at everything that's going on over the whole country of the Iraq and on the ground as well as in the air and also tied into the communication system of your rock and it's that's the reason they know the guys that are going in know exactly what they are faced with also that AWACS airplane uses electronic countermeasure systems against radar and other weapons detection systems the airplanes are carrying you know electronic countermeasure pods on them and they're very effective remote control you'll see maybe in the future six or eight years down the road ten percent of your fighter force will probably be remote control stuff you know control from AWACS airplanes small miniature fighters with no crew launch from c-130s or other or ground launch that have missed air-to-air missiles and sensors and you can set there and look you know out of a video camera all the knows and in your AWACS airplane and a nice soft chair drinking coffee and shooting guys down it's pretty neat pretty neat setup he's still exposed to high g-loads and also you're in a hostile environment anytime you're smoking along at Mach 2 in an airplane depending on a piece of mechanical equipment to keep your life it's still the stress of still air the especially high g-loads airplanes like we flew like in World War two or or Vietnam we're stressed for 7.33 G's airplanes like today 16 18 20 22 23 stress for 9 G's the right stuff was not a documentary it was entertainment the way the air force came out we came out smell like a rose but a lot of things that were depicted in the right stuff movies you know pretty fictional you might see the physicals the guys went through and some of the some of the special effects on you know going Mach 1 this blue sky turning with Christ you don't even look out the window people don't realize when I came back from the war I was West Virginia's leading ace a lot of publicity put on air shows you get a lot of publicity the x1 you get a lot of publicity and after we broke Mach 1 in 47 I'd say never a month went by some major magazine didn't publish an article on me then what happened everybody knew my name who I was but then I think one of the big thing was ACDelco commercials put the face with the name and that's when people started really and also my autobiography but what what you don't realize probably in the 1960s when I was running the school I remember one year I gave a hundred and sixty-three talks to different professional groups you know Rotary Clubs Kiwanis you know dining out to Fighter Wing's and things like that and you get a lot of exposure to a few million people and so they know who you are and when I started doing the ACDelco commercial that in turn with the talks started tying a face with the name and people then recognize you in airports and everywhere else but I'm there it doesn't bother me I never paid attention to it really don't be too narrow and your your goals that's the one thing you know so well I'm going to be an astronaut when I grew up and crises sets air and watches all kinds of he doesn't see all kinds of good opportunities go by him that he could latch on to it but the main thing you try to tell the kid said hey do something that you like you know and forget about them pay for Christ's sakes you know regulate your style of living your lifestyle to fit your income and just but have fun in your job that's the main thing too many people time well I've got to make so much money I've got to get this kind of a paying job and it it's a it's a it's a strain to make ends meet and if you everybody that I've ever seen it enjoyed their job we're very good at it that included flying airplanes too taker in 1516 and I've been working on the F 23 for about four and a half years from its inception that still fly F fors t-38 I will have a job since I retired in 75 I've had a job at Edwards as a consultant test pilot it's a civil service job and the only reason I got it so that they wouldn't lose my expertise or long experience and and it's interesting because if if you lay off a year you'll never catch up if things are happening very fast today and I've been lucky beings having my 68th birthday here in a couple weeks I still have the same eyes I had as a kid and stay in pretty good shape you cannot get into pilot training unless you have xx xx uncorrect at vision after you get your wings you can have corrected meaning wear glasses I've always had 20 tenths in each eye that's twice as good as normal from 8 inches to infinity and I'm 68 on February 13th I still have that sight I'm very lucky

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Id: NqLOBPl_zLc

Length: 95min 24sec (5724 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 28 2018