Approaching 30,000 feet, one of the B-29 engines quit. Passing the controls over to Neil, Butchart turned around to consult with flight engineer Joseph L. Tipton. “Butch, number four quit,” Tipton told the pilot, pinpointing the far right starboard engine. With no power, the propeller blade on number-four engine windmilled in the air stream.
“I wasn’t too concerned about it, really,” recalls Butchart. “B-29 engines are not all that dependable.” On his control panel, Butchart had four “feathering” buttons designed to shut down, or “feather,” the rotation of a propeller up to three times. Feathering his far starboard engine, he expected the propeller to come to a standstill. Instead, just as the prop came close to stopping, it started spinning again. With Neil flying the plane and Butchart “kind of scratching my head thinking about what was going on,” the maverick propeller came back up to full speed, matching and then even exceeding the rpm’s of the other props.
The B-29 pilots were learning firsthand that “a windmilling propeller that has lost its governor will rotate proportionally…to the true airspeed of the aircraft. So if you speed up,” Neil explains, “the propeller’s going to go faster. If you slow down, the propeller should slow down.” Armstrong and Butchart faced a critical choice: “try to slow down and hope we can keep the rpm of the propeller under control” or “speed up and get rid of the rocket plane underneath.”
Butchart hit the same feather button a second time. The propeller kept spinning wildly. Down to his last chance, Butchart hit the button again, with the same result. In the meantime McKay down in the cockpit of the Skyrocket called up, “Hey, Butch, you can’t drop me! My Grover loader valve just broke.” (The valve regulated the buildup and release of fuel pressure in the D-558.) Given that the rebel propeller could fly loose at any moment, Butchart announced: “Jack, I’ve got to drop you!”
Already, Butchart had motioned over to Armstrong to nose down the B-29. If the speed at launch was anything less than 210 mph, the Skyrocket would come out in a stall—falling but not flying. But in gaining speed by nosing over, the runaway prop spun just that much faster, increasing its likelihood of busting loose according to an altogether predictable law of physics known as centripetal disintegration.
Butchart put his hand on the emergency release lever and pulled. Nothing happened. He pulled two or three times. Nothing. Then he reached up and hit the two toggles that armed the “pickle switch” (conventionally used to drop bombs) which the NACA had adapted to drop its research airplanes. The D-558-2 fell away sharply from the B-29—and not a second too soon. Butchart has always wondered whether the very act of dropping the D-558-2 might have been jarring enough to the B-29’s flight stability to push the runaway propeller beyond the limit. Whatever the trigger, the prop almost instantaneously let go.
The blades flew off in every direction, one of them slicing through the air intake scoop on the B-29’s number-three engine, through its bomb bay where test pilot Jack McKay had been sitting in the Skyrocket a few seconds earlier, and hit its number-two engine on the other side.
Getting the B-29 down for landing was not going to be easy. The starboard number-three engine was still running, but its instrument readings—throttle control, oil pressure, and fuel pressure—had shut down. The pilots shut the engine down. Number one had not been damaged, but it had to be shut down because of the wicked torque it caused out on the far port side with neither of the starboard engines running. Butchart and Armstrong had to fly the B-29 down from 30,000 feet with only one engine.
Butchart tried to take over the flying from Armstrong, but his wheel was loose and floppy. He looked over and said, “Neil, you got control?” and Neil answered, “Yeah, a little bit.” Both pilots had rudder and longitudinal control, but Butchart did not have pitch control, nor did he have any control of roll because his cables to the ailerons were shot. What controls Armstrong had were all dicey.
“So we just made a slow, circling descent, tried never to get to a very large bank angle, and were successfully able to make a straight-in landing on to the lake bed,” Armstrong remembers. According to Butchart, during the descent “Neil kept saying, ‘Get your gear down! Get your gear down!’ and I said, ‘Wait a minute. I have to make sure I can make that lake!’ because there was no way of going around and I couldn’t use too much power even on [number] two because we couldn’t hold the rudder down. We were both standing on rudder…. So it was pretty tense coming down.”
With typical understatement, Armstrong has summed up the experience: “We were very fortunate. It could have turned ugly.”
McKay in the Skyrocket landed safely. The matter of his malfunctioning Grover loader valve caused him no trouble on the way down.
Over the course of his seven-year career at Edwards, Armstrong piloted or copiloted a launch plane more than one hundred times. He dropped or flew chase for every type of NACA/NASA research airplane then flown at Edwards. Virtually every day that conditions were suitable for flying, the young test pilot took to the air. From the time he came to Edwards in July 1955 to the time he left to join the astronaut corps at the end of September 1962, Armstrong made well over nine hundred total flights, an average of over ten flights per month. Averaging something less than twenty workdays per month (given holidays and vacation time), Neil was flying more than half the days he worked.
His busiest time was his first three and a half years (July 1955–December 1958) and his last year (January to September 1962); his least busy was 1959. It wasn’t that Neil worked less hard in 1959; he was simply assigned to projects requiring fewer flights. Flight Operations Division logbooks indicate approximately 2,600 hours total flight time, roughly fifteen and one half weeks of twenty-four-hour days in the cockpit of some of the country’s most advanced, high-performance, and risk-laden experimental aircraft. Most of his flights came in jets. More than 350 of his flights took place in one of the famous “Century” series fighters: the North American F-100 Super Sabre, the world’s first fighter capable of sustained supersonic speeds in level flight; McDonnell F-101 Voodoo; Convair F-102 Delta Dagger; Lockheed F-104 Starfighter; Republic F-105 Thunderchief; and Convair F-106 Delta Dart.
The first time Armstrong broke the sound barrier came in October 1955, an F-100A flight investigation of longitudinal stability and control characteristics involving various wing slots and slats in different leading-edge configurations.
In June 1956, Armstrong started flying the F-102, newly supersonic thanks to NACA aerodynamicist Richard T. Whitcomb’s recent development of the so-called area rule, by which the drag of a wing and the drag of the body of an aircraft must be considered as a mutually interactive aerodynamic system. “I flew the YF-102, which was the pre-area-rule F-102,” Armstrong remembers. “Kind of a dog of an airplane,” it was “not a lot of fun to fly,” and “I don’t think I could ever get it supersonic.” Applying the area rule by pinching the waist of its fuselage measurably improved the F-102’s speed and overall performance even with approximately the same engine thrust. Because it was a delta-wing airplane, the F-102 did suffer, however, from very high induced drag, that is, drag due to lift. “It was a very nice flying airplane, [with] very nice handling qualities,” Neil explains, “but if you turned, it would really slow down. It was the only plane I’ve ever been in where you could do a ‘split S’ in afterburner and slow down in the process!”
In the NACA’s F-102s, Armstrong “did a lot of landing work, because we more than anyone else at that point in time were flying the rocket airplanes and having to make unpowered landings.” Armstrong also flew dead-stick landings in the F-102 as well as the F-104: “These would vary the geometry of the pattern and the [flight] speeds and the energy management aspects of the trajectory to come up with a conclusion, what is the probable best technique?”
About a third of the 900-plus flights piloted by Armstrong at Edwards were true “research” flights. The other two-thirds involved familiarization flights, chase, piloting air launches, or flying transport. Consider
ing the two-year period from 1957 to 1958 as a representative sample shows that Armstrong flew the greatest number of flights in the R4D/DC-3 followed by the F-100A, F-104, B-29, F-100C, and B-47. Besides the F-51 Mustang and the aforementioned Century series fighters, Armstrong logged time in the venerable T-33 “T-Bird,” a two-seater derivative of the F-80 Shooting Star fighter; North American’s F-86E Sabre; McDonnell’s F4H Phantom; Douglas F5D-1 Skylancer; and Boeing’s KC-135 Stratotanker. Armstrong pushed past Mach 2 in Bell’s X-1B and X-5, and went hypersonic in the North American X-15. He also piloted a unique experimental vehicle called the Parasev.
The flights Armstrong made lasted on average less than one hour apiece, particularly the research flights. Typically, less than ten flights in any year lasted more than two hours and only four or five lasted more than three hours. Many of these longer flights took place in the R4D/DC-3 on transport missions to other NACA laboratories, to aircraft manufacturers, or to military bases, or involved taking the B-29 up to high altitude for air-launch operations.
“Our principal responsibility was engineering work,” Armstrong explains. “We did not do a lot of flying. It was program development, looking at the problems of flight. It was a wonderful time period, and it was very satisfying work, particularly when you found a solution.”
Almost everyone who has ever rated Armstrong as a pilot, including his commanders back in the navy, has made a connection between his piloting skills and his engineering background and talents. Flight Research Center colleague Milt Thompson has written that Neil was “the most technically capable of the early X-15 pilots” and “the most intelligent of all the X-15 pilots, in a technical sense.” Bruce A. Peterson, the NASA test pilot whose spectacular (and, amazingly, nonfatal) accident in the M2-F2 lifting body at Edwards in 1967 served as the opening footage for the popular ’70s television show The Six Million Dollar Man, says that Neil “made a point of wanting to understand everything.” William H. Dana, who as a NASA research pilot flew in some of the most significant aeronautical programs ever carried out at what became NASA Dryden Flight Research Center, emphasizes how “bright” Armstrong was about the aircraft he flew: “He understood what contributed to a flight condition…. He had a mind thatabsorbed things like a sponge and a memory that remembered them like a photograph. That set him apart from mere mortals.” On one occasion, Armstrong was talking in the company of fellow NACA pilots about lift-drag ratio, one of the most significant parameters in aerodynamics. Neil said that “L over D was a function of airspeed, angle of attack, and the wing area, and I thought [otherwise],” Dana relates. “So I looked it up and it turned out Neil was right.”
As impressive as Armstrong’s abilities were to pilot-engineers, aeronautical engineers who did not fly appreciated Armstrong as a pilot even more. At Edwards in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Neil often worked with Eugene J. Matranga, a 1954 graduate in mechanical engineering from Louisiana State University. “Neil ran circles around many test pilots, engineering-wise,” Matranga has declared. “The other guys who flew seat of the pants knew instinctively what to do, but they didn’t always know why. Neil knew why.” In Matranga’s view, Armstrong was “the best engineering test pilot that I ever dealt with.
“As long as he could convince himself that something was going to be successful,” Armstrong’s “openness to doing things,” in Matranga’s opinion, compared favorably to a “pretty hard and fast reluctance on the part of many pilots” to surrender any of their authority to nonfliers. “Neil did not have that bias.”
Some pilots who weren’t engineers were not nearly as impressed with Armstrong’s flying. Chuck Yeager was the most prominent detractor, joined by William J. “Pete” Knight, Armstrong’s colleague on the X-15. That Yeager and Knight were air force pilots, whereas Armstrong was a naval aviator flying for NACA/NASA as a civilian, may partially explain the criticisms. Yet a greater reason was that neither Yeager nor Knight were engineers. Yeager did not go to college; Knight never earned a college degree. Asked how an engineering pilot like Armstrong flew, Knight responded, “It’s more mechanical than it is flying, basically. I think that’s why Neil got into trouble on numerous occasions [in his flying], because some things didn’t come natural to him….[He was] flying the airplane all right and doing everything necessary, but not being aware of some of the other important things that were going on.”
While “trouble” would, in fact, pop up from time to time in Armstrong’s flying at Edwards, ultimately, there can be no doubt that Armstrong’s experience and talents as a professional engineer served the cause of his flying career extremely well. Those who handpicked him in 1962 for the second class of astronauts, without question, favored Neil’s engineering qualifications.
A telling admission came from Christopher C. Kraft Jr., a NACA flight researcher and one of the founding fathers of the American space program: “I was prejudiced for the fact that this guy’s been a NACA test pilot. So he’s probably head and shoulders above…. I shouldn’t say it that strongly. But he was above the capability of the other test pilots we had in the loop because he’d been through the daily contact with flight engineers, of which I was one.”
According to Kraft, key people on the astronaut selection board, notably NACA veterans Robert R. Gilruth, Walter Williams, and Dick Day, felt even more partisan in Armstrong’s favor, especially Williams and Day. Both men were themselves engineers rooted in the NACA’s engineering research culture. Both came to NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center after spending years in flight research with NACA/NASA at Edwards, where they had come to know and admire young Armstrong. “Neil was about as good as you could come by in evaluating a man from a test-pilot-performance capability,” Kraft states. The only real uncertainty about Armstrong’s choice as an astronaut in 1962 came down to whether he, Neil A. Armstrong, personally wanted to become an astronaut.
For why choose to become an astronaut when Armstrong was already so deeply and so creatively involved in what were the biggest, most technically challenging flight programs ever attempted? Two of these programs—the X-15 and Dyna-Soar—had as their goal not just flying piloted winged vehicles at hypersonic speeds, but flying them transatmospherically, into and back from space.
CHAPTER 13
At the Edge of Space
The rarefied conditions into which Armstrong “zoomed” in his sleek fighter jet were far closer to those on the Martian surface than anything down on Earth. Streaking upward past 45,000 feet he passed the biological threshold at which a person could survive without the protection of a spacesuit. When his near-vertical climb reached 90,000 feet, atmospheric pressure fell to a scant 6 millibars, about 1 percent of the pressure at sea level. Outside his cockpit, the temperature dipped to 60 degrees below zero F.
This was space. The only way to control his plane at the top of its ballistic arc was to invoke Newton’s Third Law and expel some steam via jets of hydrogen peroxide. A pilot in a near vacuum could maneuver his airplane in pitch, yaw, and roll just as manned spacecraft would later do. With all the energy from the zoom dissipating, Armstrong’s jet came close to a virtual standstill, sitting on its tail. For over half a minute at the top of his climb, he experienced a feeling of weightlessness. At about 70,000 feet, Neil had shut down the engine to prevent it from exceeding its temperature limit. The cockpit’s ingenious auxiliary pressurization system released a squirt of compressed gas.
The engine’s not running at the top of the arc was critically important to the goal of the flight test. If not shut down, the engine would have introduced yaw motions challenging Neil’s capacity to control the aircraft.
Streaking down nose-first into the atmosphere, enough air molecules eventually passed through the jet’s intake ducts to allow Armstrong to restart his engine, and, at a speed of about Mach 1.8, begin his recovery from the unpowered dive. From that point on, with luck, the rest of the flight was routine all the way down to the runway. If Neil did not get an engine restart, he could make a dead-stick landing. If
necessary, in the moments after touchdown, he could pull a lanyard to deploy a drag chute housed just below the plane’s vertical stabilizer to decrease his landing rollout distance.
In this fashion, Neil Armstrong and his fellow NASA test pilots at Edwards—at the controls of a long pointy jet plane nicknamed “The Missile with a Man”—made the country’s first dramatic excursions to the edge of space.* They did so for research purposes more than half a year before Commander Alan B. Shepard became the first American astronaut to fly in space.
These facts fly in the face of popular lore. Thanks to author Tom Wolfe’s 1979 bestseller The Right Stuff, and the 1983 Hollywood film adaptation, most people believe that the man who first flew in an airplane to the edge of space was U.S. Air Force test pilot Captain Chuck Yeager. Yeager made his December 10, 1963, flight in a rocket-equipped version of the Lockheed F-104A (designated NF-104A), the episode providing the stirring conclusion to Wolfe’s provocative account of the early days of the Space Age. Wolfe’s final sequence begins when four of the seven celebrated astronauts still had not flown into space, with the solitary Yeager taking the NF-104A up over Edwards, firing its auxiliary rocket motor, and zooming up so high that in the movie version Yeager glimpsed stars. Never mind that such a sight was optically impossible due to light reflecting off the Earth. Shooting for the stars—in an airplane named Starfighter—was the stuff of legend.
Reaching the dizzying height of 108,700 feet (Yeager wanted to set a new altitude record), his plane pitched up and went out of control. In his 1985 autobiography, Yeager claimed that a rocket thruster on the nose malfunctioned and stuck open, but some pilots at Edwards knowledgeable about the NF-104A and Yeager’s piloting of the aircraft that day have suggested that Yeager “plain screwed up,” letting his pitch attitude and angle of attack get away from him.*
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