[Music] welcome to Peninsula seniors out and about we're at the Western Museum of Flight in Torrance let's go see what cindy has for us today welcome everyone to the Western Museum of Flight I'm Cindy maka the director there's an old saying that if you want to soar with the Eagles by day you can't hoot with the owls by night that might be true for some folks but today we have a highly accomplished Eagle who has also been well known to do more than his share of night owl hooting ladies and gentlemen it is my pleasure and privilege to present the illustrious hoot Gibson [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] well Cindy thank you very much and I don't know how she knew about all the hooting with the owls well anyway it is a real pleasure for me to get to be here to address all of you and after all the build-up this is a receive this had better be good hoot so thank you so much and Bob Johnson and I owe the world to him he helped get me into test pilot school and I never would have been able to do all these things that I got to do without test pilot school because we did not pick astronauts unless they were graduates of test pilot school so I owe an awful lot to you Bob and thank you so much for getting me here well I got to do what's on the screen right now I'm docked in the space shuttle Atlantis to the Russian space station Mir in this picture and we're over the Black Sea the Crimean Peninsula is visible in the lower right part of the picture that's been very much in the news lately of course and this was a really exciting mission but how did I get how did I get here well the way I got here was I was really fortunate to grow up in a flying family and in this picture this is mom and dad and ladies what's kind of interesting here is this is not dad's airplane this is mom's airplane my mother and two of her girlfriends from college decided they were going to learn how to fly so the three of them bought a j2 tailor cub and that's how she met my dad so that was my start growing up in a flying family so of course I have lots of photos like this of my older brother John and I playing on an airport this happened to be Cooperstown New York where my dad was managing the airport so I was born there in Cooperstown New York and I know we have a lot of North American people here and I got to fly a number of North American airplanes and I didn't get to fly this one but I worked out at Edwards Air Force Base the summer of 1968 my last summer for my senior year of college and I got to watch the xb-70 fly of number of times and what an incredibly impressive airplane that was okay maybe not quite as impressive but the first North American airplane I got to fly was in pilot training and this was a shot of my first solo in a jet in the very modest t2a buckeye had a single j34 in it so you know it wouldn't go ground-level to 30,000 feet in 30 seconds but that was my first jet airplane my second chair plane I got to fly this was my first carrier landing and it's in the t2b Buckeye aboard the USS Lexington and then at test pilot school under Bob Johnson I as my co I got to fly the T to Charlie so those were cool airplanes they were really neat airplanes a couple of fun North American airplanes maybe not as fancy and famous as this one but a friend of mine owned an f-86 emod 'el Sabre jet and he let me fly it a bunch of times which was really great I don't think I could have afforded the fuel that that's anchored but he let me fly it a number of times and what a great flying airplane the f-86 is I would say was but it still is just just a real pilots airplane really a lot of fun to fly well I got to fly this airplane operationally the f4 phantom and actually this particular airplane I'm gonna have another slide up here in just a second but this was my first combat mission in this particular airplane it had been our mid killer the airplane that Gary wagon flew site number 201 when he shot down a MIG in March of 1972 and I joined that squadron halfway through the cruise and so my first sortie and the squadron was a was a combat mission and so flew that airplane flying from an aircraft carrier was really cool because you went from this position to this position in three seconds and you're going 175 miles an hour when you get to here there's not a Corvette on earth that'll touch it so really exciting to fly from from a carrier and this was that airplane side number 201 Bureau number one five three zero one nine and like I say my first combat mission was was in this particular airplane it's now on a pole down at Key West na s Key West Florida and my wife tells me that when you take a jet and you put it on a pole like that it's called a jet sickle is what that's called well right after I came back from that first cruise in 1972 I got to go through the course at Top Gun and my first dogfight in Top Gun was against the Navy's MIG ace Randy Cunningham and I was nervous I was 25 years old I was a lieutenant junior grade first lieutenant equivalent in the Air Force and I didn't shoot him down but he didn't shoot me down either and I considered that quite a victory against the Navy's may case so I got to go through Top Gun I know we've all seen the movie Top Gun let me tell you when I was there there wasn't anybody that looked like kelly mcgillis there okay but I think that's fair none of us were as good-looking as Tom Cruise either but Tom Cruise eat your heart out I actually got to go through Top Gun and not only that but Tom Cruise eat your heart out again because I got to fly the f-14 Tomcat I made two cruises in the Phantom and then I joined the Navy's very first operational squadron actually there were two squadrons aboard the Enterprise Fighter Squadron 1 and Fighter Squadron 2 and you can maybe just barely make out on the front canopy it says lieutenant Bob Gibson they wouldn't let me put hoot on the canopy they said no nicknames and I said well what's Bob they said it doesn't matter you're not putting hoot on it so just just shut up and go away so anyway this was my Tomcat and what a great airplane the Tomcat was everything the Phantom could do we did about 15-20 percent better out accelerated the Phantom out turned it by a mile out climbed it much more sophisticated radar and weapon system and it was good around the ship and speaking of the ship when it was time to come back to that great big giant aircraft carrier this is what that giant big aircraft carrier looks like from up in the air it doesn't look quite as big from up here and then you got down low like this and in close and you know the first time you ever went out there you said I'm gonna stop in that short a distance yeah well you'd better and you'll notice in this picture there's not a whole lot of room on the left side there's not a whole lot of room on the right side if you land long you miss the for arresting wires that you can see in the picture if you land short its fatal so you really had to be pretty accurate coming back to the carrier now the Tomcat was really a good airplane aboard the carrier because we could come in at a hundred and twenty-five knots with that great big wing which as you can see in this picture full span leading edge slats full span trailing edge flaps one hundred and twenty-five knots was our approach speed the Phantom was about a hundred and forty eight knots so just a whole lot better now the eighth a five vigilante that commander Johnson flew was about a hundred and seventy knots if I remember right so they used to say those guys are crazy anyway he was my skipper a test pilot school so I never said he was crazy he was my boss and then I got to fly this North American Rockwell airplane and this was my first launch this was the space shuttle Challenger and I got to be the copilot on the 10th launch of a space shuttle way back in 1984 and what a ride that was the launch and the trip to orbit reminded me of a catapult shot that last eight and a half minutes because you'd go from standing still on the launch pad to cut off in orbit in 8 and 1/2 minutes and it cut off you're going 17,500 miles an hour so if you calculate that out that's more than 2,000 miles an hour per minute average getting to space once again no Corvette on earth can touch it and on my first mission we did lots of exciting things but we did this really exciting thing and that was the world's first untethered spacewalks now no doubt you've seen this photo before and you've wondered who was the gifted photographer that took this photo well I'm the one that shot these photos and the reason was because during the spacewalk I was the only person on the crew they could work a camera I was the only person on the crew they had absolutely nothing to do so I was parked at the window and I got this photo of Bruce McCandless just on his way out making the world's first untethered spacewalk you notice there's no cables there's no tethers no ropes tying him to us he's flying the rocket backpack and they used it to fly pretty far away and equally is important to them back to the space shuttle as well although if they had I get the question all the time what if they ran out of fuel what if they had an electrical malfunction well we could fly challenger over to him because we had rocket thrusters pointing every direction so we could fly over to him and rescue them if he promises us enough money for it and nothing like that ever happened it all just went off perfectly and it was a flawless first test of what we called the manned maneuvering unit now I'm really glad I got to be a pilot astronaut oh and the other question I get all the time too is who did you ever get to do any spacewalks and the way I like to answer it is know as a pilot astronaut I am far too valuable to risk me outside but we've got lots of mission specialists so for example my wife was a mission specialist on the space shuttle we never flew together but you know we could send them all out and if they didn't all come back no big deal okay I'm just kidding the reason that the pilots didn't get to do any spacewalks was the amount of training time involved we spent so much time training on launch reentry landing rendezvous docking malfunction procedures vehicle systems to even out the training time the mission specialists get to do all the spacewalks I looked out the window and saw this though and I was jealous I was really jealous he's a human satellite the earth is going by under his feet a hundred and eighty-five miles away at five miles per second that's how fast you're moving in orbit so I was jealous when I saw that well we came back and made the very first landing at Cape Canaveral and again this was the 10th launch of a shuttle we had been trying since the seventh launch to get a shuttle back into the Cape and the weather was always no-go so we got to make the very first landing back at Cape Canaveral well gee less than two years later it's my turn to be mission commander on my second launch aboard Columbia now in this picture there are some really distinguished people in this photo not me but in the background on the left side United States congressman bill Nelson who finished up his career as the United States Senator Bill Nelson he was on my crew this was a little bit of a challenge to have a politician no offense Mike but to have a politician on your crew although I'll tell you what he was a real blessing to us he has just been such a staunch supporter of NASA over the years and it was really an experience for him because he had never been on a team before nowhere in his career it he ever really been part of a team you can't say the Congress as a team anyway can we cut that part out of the video anyway bill really enjoyed the experience with us and we have had a number of crew reunions over the years because we also dearly enjoyed our time together in the front left of the picture is Major General Charlie Bolden he flew as my co-pilot on that mission and then he went on to fly for missions aboard the shuttle and finished up his career as the administrator of NASA and a Major General in the Marine Corps so we had some really distinguished people on that crew not me mind you but we lift it off January the 12th 1986 we went to space and this is where you are at the end of two minutes and it looks like in this picture that we're going down we are not we're following the curvature of the earth we're high enough and fast enough at two minutes that we can start accelerating across the earth and where are we at two minutes were 30 miles up 30 miles out over the Atlantic Ocean and going 3,000 miles an hour in two minutes no Corvette on earth will touch it so really an exciting ride my wife was watching and she said the colors of the rainbow were in our smoke trail the camera just couldn't really catch them but she said it was just beautiful and of course this is what's happening at booster separation we have burned out the fuel in the booster rockets explosive bolts cut them loose from us and then rocket thrusters as you can see push them away from us because they weigh 88,000 pounds empty you don't want to recontact it so they get pushed away from us and then come down in the ocean under parachutes we tried to land at Cape Canaveral three days in a row and the weather was no-go all three days and finally on the third day Mission Control said guys we give up take it one more orbit and land it at Edwards Air Force Base so my first landing as a mission commander was an unplanned night landing and this was only the second time that we have landed a space shuttle at night and fortunately it came off very well because I could see this be a possibility so charlie bolden and i had done most of our landing training at night because if he can land it at night you can certainly land it in the daytime so really it wasn't a big problem ten days after this photo was taken we lost the space shuttle Challenger and her crew so we were the only mission of 1986 that survived and it took us nearly three years to redesign retest recertify and rebuild the booster rockets which of course had been the cause of the accident I was the lead astronaut on the investigation team and then also on the on the redesign team so the chief astronaut said okay you think they're ready to fly again you go fly him so I got to command the second launch after the Challenger accident this took nearly three years this wasn't until December of 88 and I went to space aboard Atlantis and we had a top secret classified payload on board and if I tell you what it was none of us can ever leave this room so so I'm not gonna do that but I will say that we got to fly over some really interesting places it just coincidentally took us way up north over the Soviet Union and so we were able to get this photograph of the world's largest lake this is Lake Baikal in Russia which is a bit of a sacred Lake to the Russians it's the world's biggest lake from one end of it to the other is 400 miles now it's also a mile deep because it's at the junction of two of the Earth's tectonic plates 20% of all the fresh water on Earth is in Lake Baikal one-fifth of all the fresh water on Earth is in that lake so coincidentally since we were up that way we got to get this photo now to this day I am NOT allowed to say what we did except for this much we launched a major new and I have to be careful the way I say it as well or I could be in jail we launched a major new intelligence satellite for the United States we separate it away from it and there was a problem with it we had to do an unplanned re-rendezvous and help fix it and then we separate it away and it went on to a completely successful career and to this day that was 1988 that's all I'm allowed to say about it hopefully someday I can tell my wife what we did but to this point she doesn't know she does not know other than what I just said we were up this was my shortest mission because after the Challenger accident we realized you know what there are a lot of things we thought we knew and we thought we were so smart about a lot of things and we were not so we went back into flight test mode so after only four and a half days I brought Atlantis back and landed it on the lakebed because we had a lot of touchdown braking steering rollout tests that we needed to do because we had not done them adequately prior to the Challenger accident so that was my shortest flight well this is getting boring isn't it just a couple years later I got to launch as the commander of Endeavour and endeavour was the shuttle that we built to replace challenger and this was a science mission we had the Space Lab laboratory back in the cargo bay and we were working around the clock so half of the crew was the red crew and the other half was the blue crew so every 12 hours we'd have a shift change and this is what we're doing in this picture now you'll notice the high-tech method that we use to hold ourselves in one spot those little foot loops on the floor that's all you need you just need to be able to slip one foot into one of those foot loops and then you have both hands-free to work with or to write with and you'll notice in this picture I'm taking notes in a in a notebook well what's so handy about being weightless is that when I'd finish a page I'd parked my pen right here flip the page grab the pen and continue to write well that's really handy and but you get in the habit of doing that and you can see this coming can't you we had a crew come back for more of it and there was always a big crowd of people waiting to meet us back in Houston and one of the astronauts named Dale was signing an autograph book and nice lady said hey would you sign the next page to any park to pen and it's things like that but make people say jeez these poor guys it must be lack of oxygen or radiation up there in space that fries their brains when they're up in orbit but nevertheless it's really handy to work in weightlessness because you can do a lot of things that we can't do down here on the earth oh I was gonna say as well you notice nobody's wearing shoes we have no use for shoes you don't walk anywhere you fly everywhere you go so everybody just wears socks when we're up in orbit well we spent eight days on that mission and then landed back at Cape Canaveral this was the 50th the launch of a space shuttle and one of the really exciting things about being in space is that gorgeous view of the earth so just a couple pictures of the earth also on my top-secret mission we were up north far enough to get this pretty picture of Greenland the world's largest island is what Greenland is and on my fourth mission we got this photo of the Delta of the Nile River now under the tail of the orbiter you can see the Suez Canal and on the right side of the picture that's the Mediterranean Sea so that's north and the Suez Canal flows from the Mediterranean into the Red Sea to the left of the picture and I don't know if you can really make it out right at the tip of the Delta is the city of Cairo Egypt and the bright spot the white spots in the sand right there at the tip of the Delta those are the pyramids so you can see them from orbit if you know right where to look now what do you suppose this might look like at night looks pretty spectacular at night so not only do we get to enjoy this beautiful view of the earth in the daytime we get to see it at night as well and in this picture you can see there's a lot of civilization along the Nile River and in the Delta because we humans need water very badly you move off the Nile River a little bit and there isn't much out there and if you look way off to the left in the photo there's a bunch of lights over there I have no clue who that is out there but you guys sure are out there by yourselves there must be an oasis or something out there either that or they truck in all the water they need so I'm not sure what it is now the next slide I'm going to show you though by far the prettiest thing we get to see from space and I was talking to a bunch of fifth grade classes one day and I said okay the next slide is the prettiest thing we see from orbit and one of the kids shouted Las Vegas no not Las Vegas the Aurora and not only do we get to see the one we're most familiar with the Northern Lights the aurora borealis there's also the Southern Lights the Aurora Australis and these are both rings of light around the poles of the earth now you can see in this picture we're up above it because the aurora is an upper atmosphere effect and we're up above the atmosphere so we wind up looking down at the Aurora from space but it is just fascinating to get to watch it so again a really intriguing view of the earth that we get to have from orbit well for my final mission we got to Train over here my crew and I five of us trained in Russia twice because we're going to do the very first docking with the Russians that was ever done by a space shuttle in fact it was the very first docking ever done by a space shuttle I had been the chief astronaut at the time and I wasn't about to assign myself to do that mission because it was such a plum mission but the higher-ups at NASA said okay the Russians are nervous and so we've got to calm their fears and so you the chief astronaut have got to go command this mission so I'm glad I got to do it although although I fought it because your job as a leader is not to skim off the good deals for yourself it's to share them with your boys and girls but I got forced to go do it and I'm glad I got to do it because it was really an exciting mission even though I fought it for quite a while well in this photo this is the 10 of us that would be involved three of them with launch aboard a Russian rocket in March of 1995 and then the seven of us five Americans and two Russians would launch aboard Atlantis in June of 1995 now in this photo after all those years of being an American fighter pilot training to shoot down Russian fighter pilots I'm sitting in between two Russian MIG pilots who had been training to shoot down and kill me all those years and now I have to pretend like I like these godless communists well I do like them we got to know them we got to work with them we got to fly in space with them and they're just like us they love flying they love Space Flight they're really good guys I'm not sure all their managers are the same but the cosmonauts themselves were just great guys to work with so here we are launching now when we launched I had two Russians on board with me Anatoly Solovyev and Nikolai blue Darwin and they couldn't speak English so my crew and I had to attempt to underline the word attempt to learn to speak Russian and the reason I say that is that I are an engineer engineers ain't talked good in English let alone in Russian and so anytime I'm going to talk to somebody in Russian I will start off by telling them this yaagh over you Peru ski ocean poha Ipanema Oh neato I speak Russian very badly and understand nothing but as I mentioned during the launch I have two Russians on board with me and if I need to tell them something like is Phoenicia Foggia lista unas yes my Yankee PO Sharna bore to pre almost HS excuse me please we have a small fire onboard right now so we we really needed to be able to speak Russian and I am not fluent in Russian but I remember just enough probably to get in trouble trying to trying to speak Russian well here's the Russian space station Mir Mir is a Russian word that has two meanings it means world and it also means peace and where I docked Atlantis was the upper right corner to a module called crystal and it had a docking port that the Russians had intended for their space shuttle to go to and dock with but it never went there they launched their space shuttle one time completely unmanned it flew around the earth twice and landed never flew again the Soviet Union fell apart shortly after that and they didn't have the blank check to fly the their shuttle so it never flew again so we bought the portion of the docking mechanism which you can just make out in the forward part of the cargo bay it's about a four foot diameter ring and what I had to do this is all flown manually by the commander so at about we're flying on on c'mon computer-generated burns into about three miles to go and then that three miles to go the commander will get out of his seat and he'll move back to let's see the commander he will did we have women commanders on the space shuttle yes of course we did yes of course we did so about three miles to go he or she would get out of their seat and moved to the aft windows and fly the approach manually so docking rendezvous and docking in our program was always done manually by the commander in the Russian program it was automated so this was one of those really exciting challenges because I had to line the Centers of the two rings up within three inches they said who you can be sloppy he just got to line them up within three inches and the contact velocity had to be one-tenth of a foot per second 1/10 of a foot per second let's see that's 1.2 inches per second and they said if you hit them at 2/10 of an inch per second you'll break the mechanism and the day before launch we had a telecon with the NASA Administrator and at the end of the telecon he said ok whoo no pressure now but I want you to know that while you're ducking there will be 5 billion people watching you on television so no pressure okay I've given it all this build-up because this makes me sound really good well it came off flawlessly because we had done probably a hundred dockings in training in the in the simulators and so it just came off flawlessly now the plan was once we got there the two mission commanders are to shake hands so in this photo I'm shaking hands with Russian mig-29 pilot Colonel Vladimir desura who was one of those Russian MIG pilots and the president of the United States announced this day that this handshake marks the end of the Cold War so now you all realize I ended the Cold War [Applause] [Music] it makes a funny story well we got to spend five days aboard the MIR Space Station we could go anywhere on Mir the Russians could go anywhere in the shuttle because we had trained on each other's systems so they knew which door not to open we knew which windows not to open and five days later when it was time to leave the way we got this photograph Anatoly and Nicolai who are staying behind for five months climbed into Soyuz which is their little Apollo capsule if you will three-person capsule and undocked and moved out to the side sixty meters away or 200 feet away so they could take photos of us leaving I thought it was crazy because we had two vehicles in orbit that need to not run together let's throw another one into the mix too so I thought it was it was kind of a wacky idea but anyway NASA said okay sure so we did it and we got away with it it worked out okay and that's the picture right before undocking and here we are on our way out and we stayed in orbit after we undocked from the station for 2 more days getting ready to come back in the land and during reentry i'm sure many of you know this is what the shuttle would look like this is a wind tunnel model simulating a Mach 25 reentry and you can see we create this enormous shockwave around the orbiter and the temperature in that shock wave is about 9,000 degrees and from inside the shuttle this is what it looks like during reentry it looks like you're flying into a blowtorch only it's twice as hot as an oxy-acetylene blowtorch and it lasts for 15 minutes during reentry so launches exciting reentry is exciting as well because like I say you fly all the way down to Mach 10 surrounded by fire once we're slow Mach 10 and below then then we don't have we don't have all the heating and so as you know we landed like an airplane on the runway only you're too and 30,000 pound glider and you have exactly 1.0 opportunities to land it so we trained our pilots and our commanders very very extensively to make the landing as you couldn't go into holding you couldn't make a touch-and-go you couldn't back up and do it over again so we trained very very extensively for the landing and then if you've done everything right and you survived it you get to have cool hero photos taken like this one out in front of the orbiter well all those years that I was an astronaut I'd be interviewed by a television or radio show or whatever and they'd say hey is there anything in the world of aviation that you haven't done that you want to do the answer was always yes I would dearly love to race the unlimited class at Reno and the unlimited class in the Reno Air Races is just what the name says it's unlimited any piston engine airplane you could race a dc-7 if you wanted to it got done years ago when it was a long-distance race but around the pylons at Reno I don't think a dc-7 would do well but it's any piston engine and so in 1998 I got asked by a friend would you like to race my Hawker Sea Fury at Reno and this was an airplane that had on our 3350 in it so 3,000 horsepower 18 cylinder twin row right cyclone engine and I said how much do I have to pay you and he said no I just want you to race it he was gonna race it himself but his wife said oh no you're not that's too dangerous and so he regrouped and he said how about if we find somebody expendable somebody somebody we could never possibly get attached to and we'll have him race it for us so that's where I came in so I got to race that airplane called riffraff for 10 years from 1998 through 2009 raced it and air racing is not the most sane thing in the world to be doing this is how we'd start a race we line up on a pace plane and you can see to the very bright side of the image the pace plane is a t-33 jet because these are the world's fastest piston-engined airplanes and we would race as many as nine airplanes at one time and the pace plane would lead us down to the race course and about two miles prior to the guide pylon he'd call out and say okay the guide Pilon is at my 12 o'clock gentlemen you look good gentlemen you have a race and then he pitches up and he's out of there because he's not crazy he's not going down there well here's where we race it's down close to the ground now in this picture Jimmy leeward and I are having a knock-down drag-out battle and I'm trying to pass him and I'm climbing all over him Jimmy by the way was the pilot that was killed in that tragedy in 2011 when his Mustang went out of control and he wound up crashing into the crowd but this is where we fly and it in this photo we had just finished what's called the valley of speed which is a little bit of a straightaway you still never quite go wings level because you're going so fast Jimmy and I on this picture are probably doing about 460 miles an hour now the rule for minimum altitude is my helmet must not be below the top of that pylon which I see is a reasonable rule I don't think I need to be any lower than Jimmy and I are in this photo but that's the rule for minimum altitude race that airplane for ten years and managed we started out in the middle of the pack and then wound up finishing up in the gold final fourth place finishes three years in a row and then that inconsiderate owner sold it and so then I had to find another C fury well I got approached by another guy that owned a Sea Fury and asked if I would race his airplane and this was race number 232 and I race that airplane for four years and it blew up its engine three out of the four years that I erased it so I'm really good at dead stick landings I have 15 of them all together not counting the space shuttles all due to air racing really and so three of the four years that I raced this airplane I blew up the engine the one year I didn't blow it up I got second place overall in the unlimited championship so that had been my best finish okay all of our North American guys you've been waiting all day for me to shut up and talk about a Mustang after I blew that airplane up the third time the owner said you know I'm tired of buying new motors for you so I'm selling the airplane and at that point billed to Stephanie who on this airplane called Strega which means which in Italian had been bugging me for three years when are you going to come race Drago well I knew I could win the championship because that is the hot airplane out there but I was tied to the other team and I wasn't gonna bail out on my team there's a thing called loyalty out there well once I blew up the motor the third time he called me the very next day and said okay now there's nothing keeping you from racing Strega right and I said yes and I'm really glad I got to race a Mustang you can see in this picture the wings have been clipped so it has a smaller wingspan than a stock Mustang and I went out to fly it the first time and I said okay I need to know what the no flap stall speed of this thing is I was really surprised it was 90 miles per hour even with a clipped wing well and the reason is everything that weighs anything in that airplane has been stripped out so it's greatly reduced in weight over a stock Mustang so 90 miles an hour was the clean stall speed of that airplane surprised the daylights out of me now this is a picture taken of the sea fury 232 and you can just barely see the engines turning in this one can you see what I can see out of this cockpit you can't see squat out of this cockpit it is just a real bear to taxi this airplane around and you can't see anything out of it and on takeoff at full throttle I can't see the runway ahead of me until I get the tail up and that doesn't happen till about 70 knots so you're making a blind takeoff in that I can just barely see the two edges of the runway out the sides and so that was exciting compare that to this you can actually see out of a Mustang so it was just a pleasure to fly just a really neat airplane to fly so what do you have to do to make a Mustang fast enough to win in the unlimited class a lot there's a lot that gets done to it in this picture you can see there's a little tiny bubble canopy on it because the great big p-51d canopy is a lot of drag and you don't need to be able to see behind you you don't really need to see a whole lot so little tiny bubble canopy you can see the air scoop underneath the wing as well is greatly reduced in size and I'm going to show another picture of that air scoop in just a second but the next picture okay this isn't just a cool photo to show me in my racing suit but look at the surface finish on the airplane the wings and the fuselage and everything has been putted up and sanded and polished to a mirror finish because at five hundred miles an hour aerodynamic drag is huge and so you've got to really do a lot of stuff to it you can just barely see the fairing behind me towards the bottom of the picture that's been added on to streamline the flow coming off the bottom of the wing as well I mentioned the air scoop underneath you can see how tiny that thing is so it's been shrunk way down because every bit of air as you all know every bit of air that you take in and own for a while and then get rid of it it's called drag so you want to take in as little air as you possibly can well then the engine would overheat okay so what did the airplane employed was a water a water spray system that sprays water on the radiator which is for the oil cooler and the coolant for the for the liquid cooled merlin rolls-royce merlin now that presents an interesting challenge as well you can see the little trail of spray steam and water that the airplane leaves behind it and in this picture you can see if it's a humid the canopy fogs up and when I was making my mic wall run around the pylon cockpit totally fogged up hope nobody from the FAA is here totally fogged up and I'm wiping the windscreen with my hands so that I can see the ground so as not to hit it making my qual run and it fogged up like this in the Saturday heat race although not my windscreen so I was able to see ok on the Saturday heat race now air racing is also described as uncooperative formation flying and when we first got to Reno it had a brand new racing motor in the Mustang and it had not seated itself yet so it wasn't protein out full power so I qualified second behind rear bear which I'm chasing in this photo and I couldn't get past him in the Friday heat race but on the Saturday heat race thank goodness that engine finally seated in and I passed him to win the Saturday race which put me on the pole for the final race on Sunday which is the championship the gold the gold championship race now these airplanes these engines are kind of like a dragster motor you make one hard run on that engine and they're going to tear into it and take a good solid look at it the valve covers are going to come off they're going to go all through the valve train make sure nothing is broken make sure you haven't broken any of the head bolts that fasten the heads to the engine and there have been I don't know if it's aluminum angle iron or what welded to the sides of the case because at the power rating that we're running these things at Eastwood tend to flex too much and it would cause the engine to come apart and so there's a lot of modifications it turns out that the rolls-royce connecting rods are not strong enough you have to put out lesan connecting rods in the engine because they'll tolerate the power setting that we're going to fly these things at in World War two the Mustang at full throttle would pull sixty inches of manifold pressure if you broke through the copper wire guard you went into war emergency and that was 67 inches of manifold pressure I was running a hundred and twenty eight inches of manifold pressure so the engine was putting out probably 3,000 horsepower when it was originally designed for 1900 so if it'll hold together for eight laps you're probably gonna win and if it doesn't you're gonna make another dead stick lending well in my case it all held together so this was the lineup for the championship race you can see the pilots are in the airplane getting ready getting ready to get started I was on the pole in Strega voodoo was number two and then rare bear then a bunch of sea furies after that to make out the final race this was the start and Voodoo is all over me because these are almost identical airplanes same clipped wing same shrunk down air scoop on the bottom same totally souped up rolls-royce merlin engine that was the start of the race this was the end of the first lap and you can see he's hanging all over me and this was as close as he ever got to me though from that point on I gradually started to pull away from them and by the fourth lap I was far enough out in front that the crew chief called up and said ok first power reduction come back to 125 inches all the way back to 125 inches and then a lap later he called up and said ok 120 inches and then the next lap he said ok come back to 110 inches and you can open the coolant door a little wider and you don't need to hug the pylons quite as tight at that point I can tell I'm way out in front in fact I lapped everybody in the field except for the second-place airplane and this photo is just a brilliant photo Anthony Taylor is the photographer that took this picture and you'll notice the airplane is in razor-sharp focus the pylon is blurred once again top of that pylons 30 feet so I'm I don't know what 60 feet in this picture I like to get close to the pylons because that way you can really tell I am outside the pylon because if so much is your wingtip crosses the top of that pylon that's a pylon cut and a pylon cut will cost you four seconds times the number of laps and the championship race was eight laps so that's 32 seconds for one pylon cut that'll move you from first place to last place so you don't want any cuts okay the next picture is a real happy photo because even though I took the checkered flag and came back and landed you don't know that you've necessarily won until you hear from the contest committee and I had just climbed out of the airplane onto the wing when the announcer came up on the on the PA for the grandstand and announced okay the contest committee said we had a clean race so we have a new national and world champion hoot Gibson and so everybody started applaud it but just like now [Applause] you given me goosebumps anyway this was when I first was sure okay I I really did win the championship and this was also the first time in seven years that voodoo had not won or I should say that Stephen hidden had not won the championship I climbed down off the wing and the first thing they do is they put the gold jacket on you which the winner of the gold class in each of the different division so the Formula One's the biplanes the t-6s and the Unlimited's the winner of the gold championship race gets a gold jacket and they handed me the permanent trophy I didn't get to keep this one but they handed me the permanent trophy and shot just what is a real happy photo as well now my last slide finally he's going to shut up my last slide the final picture is a poster that one of my buddies made up for me and sent it to me and it's kind of funny and and and what that's what this reflecting is the fact that the first lap I averaged 503 miles an hour in the first lap and that photo that I just showed coming by the pylon which was such a sharp crisp photo of the airplane and a blurred pylon I averaged 498 in that lab so I actually set a speed record for the 8 lap final race four hundred and eighty eight point nine miles an hour was my average and halfway through the race I had started throttling back so it's too bad voodoo wasn't all over me the whole race I could have had maybe closer to 500 miles an hour okay don't whine hoot I guess it was okay as it was anyway to this day I hold the speed record for the course and this was back in 2015 and I called Bill to Stephanie several months later I was whining to this earlier two feet law that I called I called build Assefa knee because he was all excited the day after we won because the prize money was really big and I don't take any of that I'm doing this for the fun of it anyway he was all excited and he said Hudur we're gonna be back next year we're gonna have a brand new racing motor we're gonna have a spare racing motor we're gonna be even faster and then I called him two months later to double-check and he said Hudur I'm too old and you're too old I'm gonna have a younger pilot from now on well I've been told that I'm the oldest person that ever won the unlimited championship probably true Pete yeah I'm the oldest person that ever won the unlimited championship but I still hold the speed record for the course but I'm too old go figure so but it's his airplane and I guess he gets to pick who gets to race it and apparently it's not me and one of my buddies well the guy that owned riff raff the first see fury that I raced when I was whining to him about this said well you know what he might have just saved your life because 44 percent of those 18 years I raced at Reno we killed a pilot so it isn't the safest thing in the world to be doing but you know what hey if you've got to replace a rocket for excitement what are you gonna do it's gonna take it's going to take something like the Reno Air Races so with that can we do questions [Music] the question was how old was I when I won the championship okay it was four years ago and I was 69 years old when I won the championship so [Applause] now everybody knows that later this month I'm going to be 73 god I never wanted to be this old but I guess that's okay question from my test pilot school commanding officer Bob Johnson is how old could you fly with Southwest I got to fly after I was an astronaut I went to work for Southwest as a pilot because I wasn't tired of flying yet and I flew for flew for 10 years with Southwest and then I got gobbled up by age 60 so when I turned 60 is when I had to stop flying now I had been advocating for the age limit to be raised to 65 the rest of the world was 65 but we in the US were 60 they raised it to 65 but 13 months after it was too late for me but that's okay going into it I said okay I probably have 10 years to do this and that's what I had was 10 years to get to be an airline pilot and I really enjoyed the flying you know after flying jet fighters you wouldn't think that flying a big trash hauler like that would be fun but it was and you're one of your big challenges was you were gonna make people feel like they're sitting in their living room is what you were gonna do you were gonna fly it as smoothly and as precisely as you possibly could and I found that an exciting challenge so I really enjoyed my time with Southwest Airlines good question Darren whose Mustang we have here asked when you're going around those pylons are you on the verge of a high-speed stall going around going around the racecourse answer is no the airplane had plenty of lift and in any event is you know from the Mustang you'd be able to feel the buffett and so you'd know that you were approaching the stall but no even at the G level that I was pulling now I don't wear a g-suit because there isn't a system in the airplane to to pump the G suit and I don't look at the G meter going around the racecourse because there's much more important things for you to be looking at like the ground the pylon other airplanes but the G meter in Strega whenever I finished one of the heat races would be six to six and a half GS but as the chute as the fighter pilots that are here know once you build up a tolerance to pull in G's like that you don't you don't so much notice it so I was never close to graying out or blacking out certainly in it and you were never close to stall even at six six and a half G's great question great question when did I go to test pilot school that was from June of 1976 to June of 1977 and my my test pilot school class two years ago had a 40 year reunion forty years oh my gosh we had a forty year reunion and that was that was the hardest I honest it was skipper that was the hardest I ever worked in my entire life going through college and aeronautical engineering was not as challenging astronaut training was not nearly as challenging training in the Phantom and the Tomcat was not as challenging test pilot school was the most challenging year but it was also the most productive and the huge huge big payback from getting that experience and that in that degree when did I go to Pensacola was the next question I went there I went there on June the 24th 1969 was the day I reported to aviation Officer Candidate School I was commissioned 50 years ago two days ago October the 17th was when I got through thank you and then and then I got my wings January the 29th of 71 and then went to the f4 phantom there was another question over here somewhat yes sir well okay the question was after I was informed that I'm too old to race the airplane didn't race the next year as it needed some engine repairs from what I had done to it and let the record show that after you finished racing it for a whole week in Reno you're gonna fly it across the Sierras back to California to get it back to Bakersfield so I flew it across the Sierras the way that it was needing repair which was I had cracked the accessory case and the the pan the engine pan and two of the cylinder sleeves were correct and that's how I flew at home but it worked it worked just fine worked just fine getting at home and let's see what was your question now that I babbled about that yes how well did the replacement pilot do well he he won the championship two years later in 2017 he actually won the championship he he made a move or he didn't make a move that cost him the lead in the gold final race right at the very start which I wouldn't have made and so he wound up playing catch-up but luckily Strega is the fastest airplane out there and by the finish line he caught up and passed him just barely passed him at the finish so he wound up winning so see Tiger was right he needed a younger pilot question is how how close am I to the pylons when you're going around well you want to be as close to them as you can possibly manage because if you're far enough outside you're flying a greater distance around the course and the course is 88.1 miles around and in Strega I was doing that in 55 seconds so yeah just over 500 miles an hour now I like to be down low because picture this if I'm if up high and I'm looking down at the pylon okay am I really outside the pylon or am I just barely over the pylon or even worse am i inside the pylon if I'm down low I can really gauge I can really gauge where that pylon is and I can insure that I am not that I am not cutting the pylon and so in the Unlimited's in all those years of racing I never had a pylon cut and so part of it is I like to get down where I can just see it and know for sure that I'm not cutting that pylon how close are you to another airplane was the next question well you saw that one photo of me climbing all over rare bear and I've had a number of races like that and the pilot of that airplane is Stu Dawson who's a dear friend of mine that I've raced against for a great many years and maybe to put in context how close you are to it his wife after the race said to me you make me nervous but then she said but I'm really glad that it's you flying so close to my husband so that was a bit of a compliment so yeah you will be if you're trying to pass somebody you've got to be as close as you can get to him because if you're outside you're flying a longer course around the racecourse and you're not gonna pass him so so you've got to be close to him way back in the back the question had to do with the atmosphere control system on the shuttle which we called ekeus environmental control life support system is what it was called we stayed at sea-level pressure so unlike an airliner where your ears pop when you go up in altitude we stay right at sea level so your ears never pop so it's really easy on you the only time you don't stay at sea-level pressure is if you're gonna send some of your mission specialists outside for a spacewalk to make tolerance to the bends easier we'll take the cabin down to 10.2 psi stead of 14.7 so there's an automatic system that flows nitrogen or oxygen once we put it in automatic mode it will look at what's the cabin pressure okay it's 14.5 so I need to flow something am i light on oxygen or am i light on nitrogen and it'll flow whichever one it needs to so it keeps it right at that 14.7 and then we have we have water a water loop set of water loops that circulate water around in the cabin and the cabin fan is cooled by the water so we can set the temperature to anything we want to set it to in the cabin so the environmental system works works beautifully in the shuttle yeah the question is can I talk about the tile damage that I saw on sts-27 now this this never made the news very much I think because we were a top-secret classified mission but on the second day of the flight after we had dropped off our major new intelligence satellite Mission Control called us and said hey guys we saw something hit your right wing during launch does this sound like Columbia yeah it sounds just like what happened to Columbia we saw something hit your right wing and we want you to take a look with the robot arm that has a TV camera on the end of it take a look at your right wing and tell us what you see and I'll never forget when we position the arm and brought up the view on the camera to myself I said we are gonna die turned out we had 707 damaged tiles on the right wing we couldn't see it from the angle that we were but we had lost one tile entirely on the underside and so we asked what we told Mission Control well hey Houston we're seeing a lot of damage on the right wing well Department of Defense because this was such a highly classified mission didn't want any television coming down at all and they finally relented and said ok we'll let them say encrypted television down so we sent encrypted TV down will encrypted TV it shoots a frame takes about three seconds to encrypt it and send it another frame three seconds another frame so the resolution that they saw on the ground was so poor that they looked at it and they said well hoots a dummy that's not tile damage these are just lights and shadows that he's seeing what are they forgetting they're forgetting that on board I am NOT looking at encrypted TV I'm looking at clear TV on board so we had a magnificent failure to communicate on the part of Mission Control they never came back and said to me we don't think you're seeing tile damage we think you're just seeing lights and shadows because at that point I would have said okay I'm sending you clear TV they never came back and said that what they came back with was after about a day of analyzing it they came back and they said okay who'd it's no problem just reenter like usual and I keep the mic and I said Dave Dave humours was the Capcom and I said Dave what are they basing this on and he said Stan bike so as he had to get the answer to that question and he came back and he said who it's no worse than what we've seen on any other mission and I'm sitting there going so I keyed the mic and I said well Dave you know I've been here since before sts-1 and I have never seen anything like this before and then I acquiesced which I shouldn't have done I said okay but you guys are the experts so okay but I didn't believe it and I guess one of the reasons that I did that which was dumb was that there had been crews in the past that got into a big fight with Mission Control and I didn't want to come across as fighting with Mission Control and so I shut up where I probably should not have shut up so all the way down during reentry I'm watching the flight controls because I knew what I'd see which was what we saw in the case of Columbia if we started to burn through on the right wing then we would see the left on going down to create more drag on that side to make up for it the right oh of on going up and if I saw that during the re-entry I figured I probably have 30 seconds to tell Mission Control what I think and so in the audiotape that I have of our reentry about every two minutes i would announce to the crew okay the controls look good all the way down all the way down i was i was reading off what the flight controls were we got on the ground and they looked at it and they went holy smokes why don't you guys tell us about this and so i I asked the well I asked the lead flight director the asset and entry flight director in our debrief I said well Gary what if you guys had believed us what could we have done about it and he said I don't know so anyway that's the way it stood all the way up to Columbia and of course we lost Columbia for just about exactly the same thing we way back in the back yes sir okay the question was how important was model aviation in my aviation career it was I think very instrumental in my aviation and career and I'll give you one example I had I had built a big glider one time and and it always annoyed me to have to put noes weight on it to get the CG in the right place but as we know senator gravity has got to be in the right place or you have an unstable airplane an unstable model and so there was one time I said you know what I'm gonna do I'm just gonna make the nose really long out of the same wood that the bodies made out of and that way I won't have to add any weight to it it flew horribly and the reason was it had so much inertia in the pitch axis that it would get into a fuga oscillation and it wouldn't fly and I figured out oh you know what the dynamics are important as well the aerodynamics are important but also the flight dynamics of it are import so I learned a lot from doing model airplanes and I'm still doing them I'm still doing model airplanes and radio-controlled Jets electric Jets I'm too lazy to do the turbines and the electric ducted fans sound just like a jet jet engine and they fly great I have an f4 phantom painted up just like my f4 phantom that I showed you the picture of I have an f-14 Tomcat painted up just like my Tomcat and I made a model that's really ambitious the conver xfy one pogo that stands about all he stands about this tall so stands about three and a half four feet tall I have flown it on a tether hovered it on about a six inch tether so I've got enough power I'm just not convinced I have enough flight control so I'm still involved in in radio-controlled modeling and it's it's been a lot of fun and it's been very instructive if I could do anything again what would it be I would love to go back to space again I wasn't tired of it my wife was ready to move back to Houston after my fourth mission but right after my fourth mission they promoted me to chief astronaut and so I wasn't gonna walk away from that job so we stayed thinking ok we'll be here for another year or two and then they made me go do the MIR ducking and so we wound up staying for another year or two and so she was ready to go back to her hometown of Murfreesboro Tennessee she made three missions aboard the space shuttles as a mission specialist and so I would love to go back to space again I'd love to go to the moon but you know what they're gonna say they're gonna say hoot you're too old so and and also haven't you had your turn didn't you already get to go five times haven't you been greedy enough and the answer is yes but I'd still love to go again okay the question was when I was a Southwest Airlines pilot how many of the passengers figured out that their copilot or their captain was a was an astronaut most of the time they wouldn't figure it out and of course when I've met a new crew you know that wasn't that wasn't something that I'd say to the flight attendants or to the captain I was fine with but I was rather well known at Southwest so they pretty well knew who I was and sometimes the flight attendants would get on the PA system once we were up in the air and say I'll bet you didn't know that our captain was a space shuttle mission commander and people would get a big kick out of that and and it would it would clutter up us on boarding the aircraft because frequently I got to sign autographs and things like that so but it was really fun and as I mentioned earlier I really enjoyed the time I did with Southwest Airlines what did I fly all the models of the Boeing 737 that 737 - 200 300 500 and 700 and this was before the eight hundreds and before the max eight so I had not had not flown either of those question was having raced both the the C fury and the Mustang which one did I like the flight characteristics of better and which one was more enjoyable to race the C fury was a big strong powerful airplane and very very robust but also very very heavy and I showed the photo earlier of the field of view that I don't have out of the cockpit and so the Mustang was a lot more pleasant to fly it was a lot easier to fly it was also a lot faster but the engine was really being stressed in the Mustang and I think I mentioned earlier if the engine will hold together for eight laps you're probably going to win well many many times the Merlin doesn't hold together for eight laps and some of those years that I got fourth place in the earlier Sea Fury happened because all the Mustangs blew up and I watched Tiger our build - Stefanie I watched him blow up three years in a row went back when he was flying Strega so you know there's there's pluses and minuses about both of them the flying qualities of the Mustang were easier to manage because it's a much smaller lighter airplane and the Sea Fury had a lot of momentum a lot of inertia one thing you didn't want to do was get the sea fury taxiing fast and have to stop suddenly because you could put it on its nose you could very easily put it on its nose question was were all the Mustangs Merlin engines I believe the answer to that is yes I don't think anyone ever tried to race one with the Allison because they didn't have quite as much power and if you were really serious about racing you you did all the things that I mentioned to the Merlin to put out 3,000 horsepower instead in 1900 question was how did I happen to choose the college that I graduated from California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo California well I moved around a lot because my dad was an FAA test pilot and when I was in my second year of Community College on Long Island New York on a snowy icy winter day I was looking for a place to transfer to on my third year and I was in the library and I found a brochure for California Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and I looked through it and they had aeronautical engineering and I saw that we had our own runway there and I was thinking okay snow and ice California that's it and Cal Poly just has an excellent reputation for engineering and agriculture and architecture and it was just an excellent excellent school to go to the comment was it's a party school well my comment to that is when you're majoring in aeronautical engineering you don't have no time for party and you know on the weekends you didn't have time for fraternities on the weekends you were writing lab reports for your stress analysis lab and things of that nature so I didn't get to do that much part honestly okay what plane have I not flown that I would love to fly anybody that's got any connections out there I would love to get to fly an f-16 never got to fly one but I would just dearly love to get to fly an f-16 I've flown let's see they have 14 the f-18 two models of the f-18 the f4 phantom the f-101 voodoo f-86 is obviously all together my airplane list I didn't know how many airplanes I had flown but about five years ago Air and Space Smithsonian magazine put me on their cover and they said hey on our website we want to put down how many airplanes you've flown we want to make a list and I said I don't know how many I've fallen they said we'll make us a list so I made a list back then and since then I've kept it up and so now it's a hundred and fifty nine different airplanes so so yeah I've been I've been really lucky and really spoiled all the way in the back the question is would I like to get behind the controls of an f-22 Raptor of course I would yeah of course I would I don't think they have a two-seater so they're probably not going to invite me because what are they gonna tell me - you're too old yeah they're gonna tell me I'm too old so I probably won't get to do that yes sir how many missions did I fly in Vietnam and I ever get into any air-to-air combat answer is I flew a total of 56 combat missions most of them in 1972 I had one mission that was titled a combat mission although it really wasn't in the Tomcats in 1975 we covered the evacuation of Saigon so I flew combat air patrol over Saigon the day that Saigon fell April the 30th 1975 it really wasn't combat they weren't shooting at us they just wanted to let us go ahead and get our people and get on out of there so altogether 56 missions but the majority of them because this was 1972 and we cancelled the bombing halt that had been in place since 1968 most of those were over the north so I went to Hanoi and Haiphong and went up to the Chinese border not quite to the Chinese border and Happy Valley and all those kinds of places so I was a 25 year old fighter pilot in and this was my first cruise and I'll never forget when I flew off the carrier and landed back in Miramar my dad who was the one who had taught me how to fly walked up to me and gave me a big hug and said you will never know how for the last six months I wished I had never taught you to fly and I guess I'll just never forget that it just it just chokes me up anytime I think about it okay what kind of airplane do I own and fly I think I interpret your question as I own I own a Beechcraft Bonanza an old v-tail h3h H 55 model from 1957 and I also own a and have been flying since March the first 1984 a Formula one racer started life as a Cassatt and over the years I have modified it so many times that it's now more of a Gibson it has a different bubble canopy on it I designed and built a carbon fiber and fiberglass wing for it that's a much more efficient wing than the stock wing that's on them and with that wing the performance was so much better that I set two World Records in my little home-built Cassatt one was a world altitude record in 1991 of 27,000 feet using a Cessna 150 engine Oh 200 hundred horsepower got it up to twenty-seven thousand and forty feet got a world altitude record in it and then in 2004 I broke the world's hundred kilometer closed course speed record in it to break a record that had stood for 20 years and so people asked me what's your favorite airplane that's one of my favorite airplanes is my little home-built the other one surprisingly is the Russian mig-21 what a fun airplane that thing is and it's it's a lightweight fighter takes two minutes to crank that thing up go through all the checks you need to go through and taxi and so it's a real hot rug I really have enjoyed it I didn't fly it as an adversary I flew it in air shows and I also had flown a MIG 15 in air shows and I really enjoyed that airplane as well but when we do a simulated Korean War dogfight against an f-86 I always got shot down because it had to end that way we weren't going to let me shoot down the f-86 even though I could have but we had a smoke system in the MIG and so when we had dog had finished dogfighting for long enough I would flip on the smoke system and come back in and make an emergency landing it's a little bit hokey but but it was a lot of fun flying in air shows the question was do I have a comment on the judgement of the decision to launch the space shuttle Challenger in the conditions that existed that day yes we certainly blew that opportunity to do the right thing and I guess it wasn't apparent to us us being NASA I wasn't part of the decision process obviously because I was just debriefing from my second mission at the time and in fact we were in the midst of a debrief and somebody stuck their head in the doorway and said hey they're at two minutes and Counting you want to take a break and watch the the launch and then we'll come back and continue the debriefing and I said yeah let's do that so guess what we never came back to the debriefing so we were watching we had all the air-to-ground loops in this conference room we had the video and I watched my friends die on the Challenger so we couldn't have made a bigger error than what we did and somehow we lost sight of one fundamental thing and that was we had never qualified those booster rockets below about 50 degrees and yet somehow we concluded we were ok to launch when the temperature outside had been down to what was it 28 degrees overnight and at the time of launch it was 30 32 35 something like that we lost sight of the fact that we're outside of our qualification envelope and it like I say it cost us very dearly and at NASA we refer to ourselves as pre challenger NASA and post Challenger NASA so it was a it was a real watershed event the other thing that didn't happen was the engineers who were the experts on the booster rockets said no we don't want to launch at these temperatures and the NASA engineers I hate to say that were over them browbeat them so bad over that call that vehicles management who built the booster rockets vehicles management said let us go offline here it was a telecon said let us go offline here and discuss this and they overrode their engineers and called NASA we are go for launch and so those are some of the things that happen to us so you don't want to have you want to have transparency you want all of your engineers to be able to speak to the highest levels of management and if they have concerns about it same thing happened to us with Columbia the tile engineers on the Columbia accident were really nervous but the management overrode them and said it's not a problem or if we find out there's a problem what are we going to be able to do about it anyway well you don't know you don't know what you're gonna do until your backs against the wall look at Apollo 13 maybe there was something we could have done but we didn't try so not just not just challenger but Columbia as well we made the wrong call on both of those missions the question was what was the scariest part of all the different flying that I've done and I don't know that I would point to anything and say ok this was really scary I've had some close calls all these all these dead-stick landings that I had at Reno in racing planes I mentioned the three times that I blew up the engine and the second see fury that that I raced each time I made a really nice landing and the reason was not because I'm a superior pilot the reason was you practice that stuff and so all the things that you practice very very extensively are things that you're gonna do very well so I don't know that I've ever had a a a real scary one I will say that one of the world records that I set in a friend's airplane I was it was another little tiny home-built with a with a know two hundred hundred horsepower engine in it and I was going for the world's time to climb record I was in a practice flight and I was about 40 miles away from home base and the propeller disintegrated at 28,000 feet and so I established best glide and let me tell you you don't want to sit there at a relatively slow speed gliding back 40 miles to home base you want to get it on the ground right now only if you do that you're not gonna make it back and so I had to talk to myself and say okay you need to be patient you need to stay right at best glide speed and do you think you're so good that you're just absolutely gonna survive this and I had to say to myself no no none of us are so good that you can say I am positively gonna survive this so I was talking to myself and saying you better do this right because if you don't do this right then you may not survive it so I don't I wasn't scared but I was I was capable with sand to myself that okay you know this could turn out very badly so I think all of us have those and the more you practice for those kind of scenarios that better off we are obviously question is comment on the retirement of the Space Shuttle well I I was disappointed by our decision to retire the Space Shuttle at the same time I think I understand the rationale that NASA used in looking at it and that basically was you know it's a wondrous machine when it works right when it doesn't work right we're gonna lose the entire crew and I think the philosophy at NASA was capsules are more survivable parachutes are more survivable I'm not sure that's true chuckle our II I'm not sure that's true parachutes can be very unforgiving if things aren't perfectly done correctly with parachutes so I was a little disappointed with it but they didn't even ask me what I thought but well the the hand has been played so so we are we are going to build the SLS the Space Launch System which gives us the ability to go back to the moon it gives us the ability to send astronauts to Mars so I say it's time to look forward and to move forward and I was disappointed by the decision but we still have great things to do in space oh and I have one more great thing to do Cindy I have a surprise present for you so you have to come up here to get a surprise present I am so pleased that I got invited to come out here and get to speak to all of you here at the Western Museum of Flight so thank you so very much [Applause] thank you for watching Peninsula seniors out and about I'm Betty Wheaton see you next time [Music] you
Hoot is a cool dude. Had an opportunity to be around him for years at the Reno Air Races. Class act guy. I was always kinda bummed he didn't have a more competitive aircraft than Riff Raff was back then.
Oh! That’s dope!
Late last century they had Reno air racers demo at Oshkosh for a couple years, one of those times we were up there hanging out at Acee Ducee on a week night playing pool. I was pretty lit but enjoying the pilot banter, and out of the corner of my eye noticed guy standing next staring at me. Turned to look and it's Hoot Fucking Gibson sippin' a Blue Ribbon and grinning like a madman! He laughed while I stammered.