Investigating Accidents | Hoot Gibson Episode 12 | P-51 Mustang Galloping Ghost And Space Shuttle

you were involved in the investigation of our friend Jim leeward's accident at Reno which made news pretty much around the world and maybe you could talk about what you learned in that investigation that was such a giant tragedy in 2011 I was racing an airplane after the the Sea Fury called riffraff I was racing an airplane that had been owned by and raced by a guy named Mike Brown and he built it up to the point where he actually won the unlimited Championship one year in it but it was also a year in which the Mustangs blew up Voodoo and Strega did not do well those years and so a Sea Fury Hawker Sea Fury was able to win the unlimited championship and I was racing another Sea Fury called race number 232 and of course that wound up being the fastest seafury ever to race Reno it had a boil-off system for the oil cooler so rather than having a big opening in the wing Leading Edge where you took in air let it blow through the oil cooler and then dump it out under the wing which creates a lot of drag that Sea Fury had a boil-off system behind the cockpit that had a water methanol bath with the oil cooler immersed in it and 50 50 mix of water and methanol that will boil at 80 degrees Centigrade well that's right where we want the engine oil 80 degrees Centigrade so it was an ideal thing no aerodynamic drag from it there was one little exhaust that would exhaust the steam that you formed from boiling that so that was a very fast airplane I had qualified in that airplane and set the qualifying record for a Sea Fury and I had qualified fourth place out of all the unlimiteds that that year 2011. Jimmy had qualified fifth place with the Galloping ghost and he had actually raced the Galloping ghost the year before 2010 and possibly could have won the gold that year because he he had a really fast airplane but he didn't get to race the final race uh Jimmy had showed up late if I remember right shown up late and so he had to start at the bottom of the bronze and then work his way through the bronze and then through the through the silver and then through the gold so he was in the gold heat for the for the final in 2010 but meanwhile we had made a crosswind rule and the cross went hoping it would never happen but the Crosswinds were over the limits that we had said we would fly in so he didn't get to race in the final race they just awarded the places based on what your qualification had been up to that point so this accident might have happened that year 2010 but in 2011 I was there with race number 232 the Sea Fury I was referring to and I qualified ahead of Jimmy and Jimmy was there and that airplane was really moving he had flown that thing at well over 500 miles an hour and he got asked well what's your strategy for winning and he had told I guess it was a reporter he had said we're going to win the unlimited Championship while using less horsepower than anybody else and that was because that airplane had been so cleaned up in terms of removing the big air scoop under the wing that we refer to as the doghouse removing that entire thing from it and having a boil off system for the radiator and also for the for the oil cooler and so it was a clean clean airplane he also had all the high speed modifications to the engine and the engines are so very important in air racing the aerodynamics is a is a is a really important thing but the horsepower of the engine seems to be the predominant factor in all of these things so he was going to win the unlimited championship in 2011. I'm convinced because he was fast enough and I didn't get to be in that fateful race because in my qualifying run I had burned a hole through the number one piston in the engine and so I was out of the race for that year and there was a funny story because the morning before the morning of the accident Jimmy had talk to me he and I had been chatting about things and he said you know I'm really sad that you're not going to be in that race today because you know what I was going to do he said I was going to stay behind you for about one or two laps and then I was gonna smoke your ass is what he told me so and you guys were good friends we were good friends I had known Jimmy for 28 years in fact two years prior to this my wife and I flew my Bonanza down to Ocala Florida to help celebrate his 50th wedding anniversary to Betty big celebration down there and so here we are Jimmy Jimmy was going to win the unlimited Championship that year in 2011. it looked like a sure thing so since I was out of the race I was standing on the wing of one of the Tiger Cats the F7 Tiger Cats in the pit area I watched the whole thing happen I watched Jimmy coming into the the home stretch past the grandstands and past where all the crowd was and I watched that airplane go into a pitch-up maneuver and a roll maneuver to the right and it rolled over the top and headed toward the grandstands and I watched it hit the ground and said oh my gosh Jimmy straight down it looked like straight down from where I was looking at it now I didn't even know that it had gone into the crowd that had gone into the pit seats the special seats out there on the ramp area so as far as I knew although immediately you started hearing calls for ambulances and lots of doctors and nurses and all of that sort of thing so figured out it had been the catastrophe that it was now it was about impossible to tell just from listening to it or looking at it to see exactly what it was and one of the lawyers that I have worked with well the one I worked with the longest the first person who first got me into this business of being an expert witness called me that day and said hoot you have got to get through to the leadership of the air Racing Organization because they need to be talking to me right away because the accident investigation starts immediately and there are certain actions that you've got to do and you've got to accomplish and and they can they can make this a a simple well it's hard to say a simple investigation it can make it easier or it can make life a whole lot more difficult and so I did put did put the the Ops boss in touch with with the lawyer that I talked with and then it was a it was a horribly sad several days the races for good reason were canceled for the year we we didn't we didn't complete the races we it turns out we had 10 dead on the ground and a lot of people with horrible injuries as well and so if this had happened on the back side of the Racecourse out in the desert out there the races would have continued because we were accustomed to losing a pilot now and then but because of the nature of the tragedy that was the end of the races that year I got a phone call from that same lawyer a couple days later saying okay you need to be the party representative for the air Racing Organization for Reno Air Races and of course that was a logical fit because I had done so much accident investigation and also uh working as an expert witness that I was the logical person to be the party representative for Reno for the Racing Organization and so one of the things that we did was we this took I'm trying to remember how much later it was it was a couple months later we went to a place north of Sacramento where the wreckage was being stored and and that was depressing as well to be looking at the wreckage because the biggest piece of that airplane might have been perhaps four feet long biggest chunk that that was left was four feet long and all of the parts of the airplane all the minuscule little things that get scooped up get put into these gigantic beanbags and what you're doing in a wreckage inspection is you're going through these bags bit by bit and they'll lift them up with a forklift because you can't lift one of these bags so lift them up with a forklift and dump the bag out on the on the floor in the hanger and you'd go through it bit by bit looking for anything that might be evidence we had a couple of specific things we were looking for and we found we found most of them but there was a device called a Bobwhite for the control stick that we were looking for that we never did find and it's uh it's about a five pound block of steel on the end of a of a lever arm we looked for that and we had when we'd finished looking through one bag would put everything back in that bag go to the next bag if I remember we had about four of these giant bags that when they were full of airplane debris these bags would stand about five and a half feet tall and and about about five feet in diameter well we went all the way through all four or five bags however many it was and we didn't find the Bob weight so we turned around and went through them all over again had had you ever flown that airplane no I had not flown Jimmy but you knew the airplane it's kind of like picking through an old friend yeah I I had known I had known the Mustang because I had found a Mustang two times prior to that and I had been at Minden Nevada hanging out with Jimmy when he was doing some of his flight testing of that airplane right before the races started in 2010. so got to talk to him and he had asked me to make him a calculation of what his stall speed would probably be that sort of thing and so I was a little bit familiar with that airplane but I had so I had I had been all over it that summer of 2010 took photos of the cockpit and all that sort of thing so had his whole instrument panel and all that in in my data but it turns out that the the the biggest clue came from the photographs and the videos that everyone took as the airplane was coming past the grandstands and in that what we saw was we saw the trim tab for the left elevator three quarters of it broke loose and fell to the ground and so that was that was certainly going to be a part of the picture for anyone that does not know what a trim tab does to a to an airplane you could help with some of that a little bit sure and I was going to go there but what what the elevator trim tab does is that an airplane based on its weight and center of gravity and the speed it's flying at will either be what's called in trim which means it'll fly straight and level you can take your hands off the control stick and it'll continue to fly straight in the level let's say it has a nose down tendency and the airplane wants to go down what we have on the elevator of the P-51 Mustang is a trim tab on the left elevator and a trim tab on the right elevator and they work together so if the airplane is tending to go down then what happens is the trim tab on the very back of the elevator would go down that drives the elevator up which holds the nose up and so that was certainly going to be something we looked at very heavily which we did and it turns out from looking at the video footage and the still photos of the Galloping ghost going around the Racecourse at 500 miles an hour it turns out that the trim tab on the left side which was the only one that was active I wish Jimmy had left the right elevator trim tab be active but he decided he wanted this to be just like an airplane called stiletto which had been very similar to The Galloping ghost in its configuration and stiletto only had the left side trim active and so Jimmy had implemented an electrical trim to it to where he could just run the motor and trim that trim tab what we saw in the photos and in the video was that that trim tab was deflected up considerably that means that it's pushing down elevator it's pushing the elevators down because at 500 plus miles an hour without that trim tab the airplane would want to pitch up rather violently and so the trim tab is holding the airplane from pitching up well what happens when the trim tab comes off 80 90 percent of the trim tab came off the airplane pitched up Jimmy had a Telemetry system in the airplane that was recording G's and it pegged at 10 G's and then it was it was above the scale for a period of time and then it came back down below 10 G's after the airplane had gone out of control so what we calculated if I remember right was that the airplane saw 17 G's well 17 G's is enough to put any pilot to sleep and when I say put them to sleep what happens is when you're pulling G's the blood in your brain tends to be pushed down into your lower body and you can gray out which is where you lose enough blood flow in your brain that your optic nerve isn't able to see and so your your vision will turn all gray that's known as graying out shortly after you gray out you blackout you physically pass out because your brain does not have enough blood well this 17.4 G's came on in about four tenths of a second so it was a rapid pitch up Jimmy was unconscious immediately so now he can't fly the airplane he's not flying the airplane in fact the photos that show the airplane heading for the ground you can't see him in the photo he has slumped down in the seat so the airplane unfortunately had a right roll tendency and it pitched up Jimmy's unconscious at this point and now the airplane starts rolling over the top in a barrel roll to the right and winds up pointing straight down and went right into the crowd and so what we found with the trim tab was that the elastic stop nuts which are there to give enough friction so that the bolts can't work their way loose the elastic stop nuts were too old and too worn and the bolts were able to back out and give some slop to the hinge points of that trim tab and at the speed he was going that airplane went fast enough that that trim tab fluttered which means it's bouncing back and forth it couldn't stand the stresses and the trim tab broke off and at that point that 17 G pitchup happened I guess I want to ask is there any kind of inspection of the aircraft program in NASA they come and look at your car before they let you race can they do that at the Reno Air Races yes in fact the airplane had passed the tech inspection and they all have to pass that the tech inspectors are very experienced and very accomplished mechanics and very experienced in in doing that particular job doing the technical inspections to verify that we have a safe airplane they miss this one but I can tell you that certainly this became an area that got thoroughly checked after that of course by now we're too late the horse is already out of the barn but there is a and learn from it we can learn from it and and sadly we did learn from it but that's another area that that really gets thoroughly check nowadays at the Reno Air Races so we learn from we learn from mistakes we learned from accidents we learned from tragedies and this is one of those [Music] and gentlemen you're new unlimited World unlimited air race champion Robert Hoot Gibson [Applause] we've talked about the dangers of the environment in space and what can go wrong earlier we talked about the fact that you felt air racing was more dangerous than space and I guess I guess the only way I can ask it is how do you process danger how do you say what what I'm going to do in the face of danger is worth it uh if that makes any sense well to answer that I guess I'll say that you know I get I get questioned all the time do you consider yourself to be a risk taker and I say no I don't consider myself to be a risk taker all of the risky things that I've done though are all in the world of aviation in the world of flying now I have a lot of experience I have more than fourteen thousand five hundred hours of flight time and so with all of that I believe that I am very much able to analyze what I'm about to do certainly the Aeronautical Engineering is a big Advantage for being able to analyze also the experience of test pilot school being able to do a risk analysis that goes along with that and so the things that I've done that are really exciting like flying in the air races uh I think are a bit of a calculated judgment that says okay I'm gonna have to be very much alert and very much cautious because air racing is probably more dangerous than the space shuttle was because we flew the space shuttle 135 times and we we lost two of those but when you look at air racing I raced at the Reno Air Races over the course of 18 years altogether and in eight of those years we had at least a pilot fatality so 44 of the years that I raced at Reno we had a pilot die and one of those years 2007 we had three Pilots die So based on a statistic like that that's probably well it is it's more dangerous than flying combat missions over Hanoi in the Vietnam War and it's more dangerous than going to space but there is a there is a huge reward for taking that risk seeing what the earth looks like from space is certainly worth at risk and our experience in the Russian experience has been that the majority of your missions fly just fine and come back safely and there's there there doesn't have to be a fatal Mission even one out of ten so certainly everything we do in life is a calculated risk and doing that was a calculated risk and as far as air racing goes I I am not brave enough to race in one of the classes out there at Reno where the airplanes are all nearly identical that being the T6 class you could offer me a whole lot of money and I wouldn't take it to racing the T6 class because those airplanes are too closely bunched up and too even whereas the classes that I've raced in the the unlimited class the jet class and the formula one class airplanes are going to space out reasonably so sure right at the start you're right next to nine other airplanes but very rapidly you are pretty much flying on your own especially if you're out in front I got to have that experience the one time and that's really great that's really great to be way out in front by yourself and sure there's there's a risk of your hitting the ground but if you hit the ground it's probably because you did it and so it's the sort of thing that are you confident that you can fly that thing and not hit a pylon not hit the ground and do you think you're capable of doing that and if well if the answer is no then you better not do it but I certainly always felt that yes I'm capable of keeping the airplane above the ground and keeping it in the air and so it's it's one of those calculated risks you know I was going to say in air racing you you have this proximity to other Pilots whose behavior and decisions you can't control but then as I thought about it when you are when you're on the shuttle you're dependent upon your crew as well and other people performing their jobs so I guess that's just a faith in human beings that you have to have yes yes and and in addition to that we are very strict in the Reno Air Races and when I first started racing the first year that I actually got to race was 1998. it was not required to have gone through training formal training there at Reno in something they call pylon racing seminar PRS now another acronym yes now it is required you don't get to race unless you have been through PRS pylon racing seminar and then you have to race uh let's see you have to have raced at least once in the previous two years so let's say you went through pylon racing seminar and now you raced in 2007 let's say you didn't race in 2008 you could still race in 2009 because you were within two years of when you went through PRS but if you didn't race in 2009 you had to repeat pilot race pylon racing seminar before you could race again so they have been very strict about qualifications and about experience and in addition to that we also had Professional Standards committee in the Professional Standards committee was made up of all very experienced race Pilots and they watched every race and they watched every racer and if there was someone that wasn't flying the way that he or she was supposed to be flying the Professional Standards committee had the power to ground them and we did I was part of it one year that we grounded a pilot and told him here's what we want you to do better at so you're through for this year why don't you go get this kind of experience and a little more time doing this and and then come back to us so it is dangerous enough without a pilot that you can't rely on and what we really need and we we need this in almost any Aviation endeavor is somebody that's predictable you need to be predictable and you need to be predictable in a good way that you're going to do the you're going to do the right things and we have over the years in the Reno Air Races grounded Pilots that were not predictable enough because they're going to wind up killing themselves and probably killing somebody else as well so these are some of the the hazard alleviation procedures that you go through to try to make it as safe as you can possibly make it you said earlier that it's fun what what you know and I guess when I think about you uh building your own Formula One airplane and seeing what you can do with it you know that's a work of your hands your mind your skill and I can see where that would be something a guy might want to do in the unlimited class you're dealing with modified World War II Pursuit planes mostly and and what what is the joy I mean it's always fun to win anything but what's the joy that you find in air racing well there's a lot of piloting that goes into it a tremendous amount of piloting that goes into it because you're going to wind up passing other airplanes because if you're one of the faster ones in a heat you're going to catch up with the tail end Charlie's and have to pass them and you're you're going to get in a duel with another airplane that's fairly closely matched and whichever one of you can be the most efficient and get the most out of the amount of horsepower you have and get the most out of the aerodynamics that you have then you're going to be the one that succeeds but there's also a whole lot of satisfaction that comes out of for example the airplane that I initially raced in the unlimited class race number 99 riffraff the first year that we raced it which was 1998 we came in in the middle of the silver category the eight fastest airplanes are the gold category the next eight are the silver and then the slower eight are the bronze category and we started out and placed in the middle of the silver in the finals and that was an accomplishment because we moved up if I remember right we moved up from the top of the bronze category into the silver and we were we were tweaking the engine we were tweaking the water injection system for the engine and all of that and on top of that your pilot your pilot has to fly the thing accurately don't use too much Rudder too much side slip don't pull on too many G's if you can help it so there's a lot of piloting that goes into it and so when you succeed at it there's a whole lot of a reward that comes to you from having done it well so that her using that airplane as an example we started out in the silver category and we raced 98 99 2000 we didn't come back in 2001 but each year modifications were made to the airplane to clean it up aerodynamically and make it possibly go a little bit faster 2002 the fourth year that we brought that airplane we made it into the gold we made it into the gold category and then wound up over the years moving up in the gold category to where I placed fourth in the gold three years in a row two thousand five six and seven placed fourth place in the gold starting out as a 388 mile an hour airplane average speed and finishing up as a 437 mile an hour airplane so there's a ton of satisfaction from from doing that and hey let's just talk about the racing itself it's fun to fly low but it's dangerous and so the only time I fly low is at the Reno Air Races watching the ground go by you at 400 and 500 miles an hour is pretty darn thrilling because it's it's really scooting on by and that's fun that's really fun which you've probably answered this question a thousand times do you have a sensation of of speed in space when you're in orbit you actually do even though you don't have a sensation of seventeen thousand five hundred miles an hour though but you're moving at five miles per second in orbit so that's really scooting and if you look at the ground you can see that the ground is definitely moving by under you but not like being in a racer at 50 feet above the ground doing 400 the ground is really speeding by I did get asked to come brief the the Cave the Columbia accident investigation board there's that NASA acronym again c-a-ib we have gotten the space without acronyms and how do you remember them all I well yeah mostly I remember them but uh no I don't think we could have done that because all of our checklists would have weighed too much but you know we can say RMS activation you know instead of remote manipulator system activation and all that but I did get asked to come brief them and and it was a little bit odd John because I I got called by uh one of the assistants to the board that said hey Admiral Gaiman has asked if you would come brief them and I said well sure I I'd be happy to what what would he like me to brief them on and the answer was well whatever you'd like and so I'm thinking well this you know this is a little bit unusual so I I did go brief the the Columbia board and I don't know that they had heard the story of my incident that occurred on sts-27 because it certainly seemed like they had never heard of it and this was almost identical to what happened to Colombia only in our case it was damaged tiles it wasn't a hole in the Leading Edge of the wing that that brought down Columbia but it was but it was so very similar in many ways during launch you get hit by something and it causes you a problem and so I went to brief them and this was somewhat earlier in the in the Columbia investigation I don't think it had been concluded yet that that what happened was foam came loose put a hole in the Leading Edge of the left wing and so I had done a point paper um way back oh golly this would have been 1989. Colombia had a really hot re-entry on sts-29 which was a classified Department of Defense mission I don't think there was a whole lot of widespread news about it because again it was a it was a classified Mission just like my sts-27 was a classified mission but they had had a really hot re-entry on I think it was the right wing I guess it doesn't matter which wing it was one of the Wings had a lot of slumped tiles which means tiles that were in the process of melting so something had happened on the right wing of Columbia during re-entry that maybe it was the left wing in fact I think it was the left wing because at the time we were questioning all these anomalies that we saw in the Columbia accident in the left wing and it turns out that I had done an assessment when I worked as the chief of the safety Branch for the astronaut Corps to look at the smoothness or lack of smoothness of the tiles on the left wing and there's a there's a very tight specification called step and GAP how big the Gap can be between the tiles and how big a step you can have from one tile to the next and it's it's it's like a tenth of an inch or less that you can have say you have a tile here that's this level you can't have more than a tenth of an inch on the next tile behind it sticking up or you will cause heating right there and so I had done a an assessment of what was the step and GAP and it was and it was a a number that got generated called K equivalent keq I don't remember how it was calculated but it took into account the Gap and also the the rise in the next tile and all those things turned out Colombia had the bumpiest wings of any Orbiter and so this was before we figured out that a foam block that hit the Leading Edge of the wing so I had done I had done an assessment of that and what they told me was that after after that sts-29 re-entry they had or no I'm sorry it was sts-28 if I said 29 earlier it was actually 28. okay it was 28. that afterwards they had smoothed out a lot of those tiles and so the topic was okay could uneven Wings have caused the Columbia accident and so I briefed them on that although although by the time I briefed them we had figured out that it was a foam impact on the Leading Edge of the wing but I also briefed them on the whole story of sts-27 and the fact that we had 770 damage tiles and I told my whole story they asked a number of questions and then and then at the end of everything just just like the Joint Chiefs in a way Admiral Gaiman said all right well do we have do we have any more questions for hoot and there weren't any more questions for me and Admiral Gaiman said well ladies and gentlemen we've been listening to the luckiest man alive meaning that we had survived the sts-27 re-entry with all that tile damage and so after the Columbia accident I'm told that there was a reinvigoration of looking at is there a way that we can make tile repairs on orbit and I think they had developed a little bit of a capability to fill gaps and to fill fill up a hole where a tile might be missing and uh at least did that for to cover us for the remainder of the space shuttle program on December the 2nd we sat on the launch pad for about four and a half hours and used up the whole entire launch window hoping for the winds to die down and right about the end when it looked like we're not going to get the launch today either the winds died down enough to where they where they concluded that we are at 100 percent design load okay we can launch so we launched and we had very little time left I want to say seconds maybe 30 seconds left in the launch window so we just barely made it into space that day unbeknownst to us during the launch the nose cap of the right hand booster rocket that's the big white rocket that's on the side of the thing the nose cap has a coating of ablative material on it and the ablative material obviously wasn't strong enough it broke loose and pieces of it showered my right wing on Atlantis so of course we couldn't see any of that but the ground always goes through all the launch footage all the movies all the Stills everything to look for this sort of thing so the next day after we had gone to orbit and on the first day we deployed a major new intelligence satellite for the United States and that's about as much as I'm allowed to say about it even to this day this was 1988. so what's that 34 years ago and we I still I'm still not allowed to say what it was we carried but I am allowed to say it was a major new intelligence satellite Mission Control called us and said hey uh who during the launch we saw something hit your right wing we want you to take the robot arm which is they call it the RMS the remote manipulator system it has a television camera on the end of it as part of the system so we want you to hang it over the right side of the Orbiter and look at your right wing and tell us what you see well I will never forget we maneuvered the arm and Mike Mullane was my arm operator so he moved the arm over there and we brought up the television image of the right wing and I looked at what I was seeing and I said to myself we are gonna die because we could see a vast amount of tile damage on the right wing so I keyed the mic and I told the Capcom if I remember right the capsule Communicator or Capcom was Dave hillmers and I called him and I said Dave we're seeing a lot of tile damage on the right wing and he said okay we'll we'll we'll get back to you so they went away for a while and it turned out Department of Defense didn't want any video coming down just in case we would have the death ray in the picture okay we didn't have a death rate just in case there would be something classified yeah yeah the flux capacitor like Yeah from Back to the Future yes so DOD didn't want anything video any kind of imagery at all coming down from the mission and in fact every photograph that we shot over the whole course of it was only four and a half days but one of the goals that you had as a shuttle crew was to shoot up every frame of film that you had on board you didn't want to come back and land with any unexposed film but DOD had to go through every single frame with a microscope and make sure there was nothing classified that accidentally showed up in any of these any of these things so for example a a shot looking out the window of the earth and a particular point on the earth if somehow the time of that frame showed up in the frame that was going to be a classified item because where we were at any particular time was going to be secret although you could pretty well tell where we were but anyway so DOD finally relented and said okay since you really need to take a look at your right wing we'll let you send down encrypted video okay well encrypted video isn't very good it doesn't have very good resolution and I guess what it does it shoots a frame and it takes about three seconds to encrypt it and record it and then another frame another three seconds so the resolution was so poor that down on the ground unbeknownst to us Mission Control looked at it and said that's not tile damage that's just lighting and shadows that these boys are looking at Hoots all screwed up well did they ever tell us that no they came back I guess after 24 hours because I think they looked at it for a full day before they came back and Dave hillmers called and said okay uh Hey hoot we've got the we've got the resolution on your tiles and I said okay yeah we're great go ahead Dave what he said it's no problem just re-enter just like we always do well I was incredulous I couldn't believe it and I keyed the mic and I said Dave what are they basing that on and he said okay we'll stand by because he had to get the rationale from the engineers and all and he came back about 10 minutes later and he said hoot they looked at it and they said it's no worse than what we've seen on other missions notice they did not say we don't think you're seeing tile damage we think you're just seeing lighting and shadowing they didn't say that so this is called a failure to communicate now I think I was communicating because I said Dave we're seeing a lot of tile damage on that right wing so they came back and said it's no worse than what we've seen before well I said well you know what I've been here since before sts-1 the first shuttle launch and I've never seen anything like this and then I did something that I shouldn't have done I kind of gave in I said okay but you guys are the experts I should have dug my heels in and said hey let's talk about this because I'm definitely seeing serious tile damage but I think the big failure to communicate was on Mission Control they never said to me you are not seeing tile damage hoot you're just messed up it's just lights and shadows because if they had done that I would have said okay I'm sending you Clear TV because I'm definitely seeing tile damage but I caved in because it was always and still is considered bad form for an astronaut to get into an argument with Mission Control in fact it's career limiting for you to get into a contest a fighting contest with mission control so I gave in and I shouldn't have I should have made them talk about it some more and so there were some well there were some funny things that came out of it the night before re-entry I remember one of the astronauts one of the astronauts was talking about how he was a little bit more than nervous about this re-entry tomorrow and and I said to him oh come on don't feel that way no use dying all tensed up and so you know this is fighter pilot humor you know or you know Gallows humor and however all the way down on re-entry I was watching the elevons I can see right where the left elevans are and where the right elevons are on my display and I knew that if we started to burn through the right wing what I would see is we would build up more drag on that right wing and to balance the amount of drag the left elevon would be going down and that creates drag that's how we create drag with an elevon at this 40 degree angle of attack that we fly re-entry at and so all the way down I have the audio that I that I made from the re-entry that we made the crew made for the re-entry and all the way down in the atmosphere about every two minutes I'd say guys the controls look good the elephants look good so we watched them all the way down because I knew what I'd see is I'd see a split the right elevance would be going up the left elevons would be going down oh and elevon is a combination aileron and elevator so that's why it's called elevon so that's what we have on the trailing edge of both wings I'd see the right elevon going up and the left elevon going down and if that happened I knew that I might have 60 seconds to tell Mission Control what I thought of their analysis but fortunately all the way down the the eleven State stayed matched so that said to me I'm pretty sure we're not burning through over on the right wing but after we landed there was amazement there was absolute amazement we had damaged 770 titles and I think 300 of them were serious damage to the tiles chunks bigger than an inch that were chopped out of the time just for perspective what what percentage of the tiles is 770. it's not a real big percentage but it was over on the right wing it's enough to destroy this shelter on the right wing oh absolutely and and even more than that John we had one tile that was entirely missing which we had not been able to see with the robot camera with the RMS camera we had not been able to see that we had one tile entirely gone and we almost burned through at that location we lucked out many many ways that we came back at all but we lucked out in that particular location where that tile had been mounted there was a thick plate under it that I had something to do with a ground plane antenna for the l-band system so there was a thicker plate there and it didn't burn through if it had just been the regular aluminum surface I suppose there's a chance that that might have burned through and if that had happened we might have been the Columbia accident on only the second launch after the Challenger accident and if we had broken up at Mach 17 which is where Columbia broke up in 2003. if we had broken up at Mach 17 where were we we were in the North Pacific just south of the Aleutian Islands we would have gone into the ocean when we broke up there wouldn't have been much to find that would have been the very end of us of course but it would have been the end of the shuttle program because the the discussion would have sounded like this we gave you guys all this money to fix your space shuttles and you lost the second launch after you started up again it's the end we can't afford to keep doing this it would have been the end of the shuttle program it would have been the end of us of course but where was the where was the big mistake the big mistake was mission control didn't tell us what they were thinking we definitely told them what we were thinking and that's a an important lesson for leadership and for communication tell what you're thinking and I gave in and I shouldn't have done that I should have said hey you know you need to talk to me a little bit more about this because I'm pretty darn sure that I've never seen anything like this before so I I guess I'm partly to blame for us entering that way without knowing um that mission control could have possibly looked at something maybe there was something we could do to fly a more General re-entry I don't know when you got down and saw that tile damage did you have to keep your hands in your pockets to keep from punching somebody in the face well no because you know we wouldn't have known who to punch uh there probably would have been too many people for us to punch but in the debrief um this you know this won't give us any any great satisfaction whatsoever I asked the lead asset and entry flight director who was responsible for mission control as the leadership and Mission Control I asked him in the debrief I said okay if you had listened to us and paid attention to what we were saying and realized that we did have serious tile damage what do you suppose we could have done and he said I don't know and that was as far as it went so what did we do after STS 27 the only thing we fixed after STS 27 was we went to a stronger ablative remember several minutes ago I mentioned the ablative on the nose cone or the right booster rocket disintegrated they went to a stronger ablative so we had no more problems with that ever again I don't know what an ablative is oh that's that's a material that will erode under real high temperature and burn off very gradually all the original Mercury Gemini and Apollo spacecraft had an ablative heat shield so it would burn and Char and then the Char would break away and then the next layer would burn and Char and break away and that was how you protected the aluminum surface of the of the vehicle so that was to protect protect the booster rocket nose caps because those could be reused so or just to protect I'm not sure those can be reused but it was to protect the the rate Gyros and things that would be up in the nose cone of the booster rocket we went to a stronger ablative [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] if you enjoyed this video please remember to like And subscribe and as always thank you for watching [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: DroneScapes

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Id: 9I6RY4yuCQ4

Length: 55min 2sec (3302 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 05 2023