First Man

by James R. Hansen

  People who were not even at Edwards on April 20 came to believe that Armstrong made it back by the skin of his teeth. NASA pilot Bill Dana, who was to fly the X-15 sixteen times, had taken an F-104 to Albuquerque, New Mexico, that day, “but I sure heard about it when I got back! Neil just barely made it back to the dry lake bed. And that isn’t exaggerated; it was close.” Air force test pilot Pete Knight did not see any of the flight, either, but “oh, yes, I heard about it” when fellow pilots started teasing Neil for his “record cross-country flight.” “We thought it was rather funny at the time,” Knight recalls, “to bounce back up and get into the thin air where you can’t turn. It’s not too bright.” Major Bob White, who was flying chase for Armstrong in an F-100, admits that he “kind of giggled over it a little bit” and “never did discuss the overshoot with Neil because it might have been a little bit embarrassing.”

  A number of people felt that Armstrong made some sort of mistake or such a long overshoot could not have occurred. Before his death in 2004 Pete Knight extrapolated: “I think it was a lax condition, not doing something wrong, but not paying attention to what was going on. Because certainly after you reenter the atmosphere, you can, if you don’t get the nose down and keep the airplane from climbing again, you can climb pretty fast and get back out into where you can’t turn too well. You can pull all you want, but you’ve got nothing to pull against. So, yes, it was a mistake. I think it was just a laxity, not in Neil’s ability or dedication, but just in his focus.”

  Knight was not the only person who came to this conclusion. More important, it was an opinion held by D. Brainerd Holmes, the director of the Office of Manned Space Flight at NASA headquarters in Washington, DC. According to Armstrong, “when the report went to Washington, Brainerd Holmes was fairly…I’m not going to say ‘critical,’ but it sounded like a screwup to him…But I just assumed that was because he didn’t really understand. He didn’t have any technical knowledge of the problem involved.”

  Today, Armstrong admits, “in this case, it might have been well advised for me to think, ‘Well, if the g-limiting isn’t kicking in, I’m not going to push it. I’ll leave that to the next flight and try it again.’”

  The inherent problem was lack of accuracy in the simulator. According to early NASA simulation expert Gene Waltman, “maybe after the pilots had flown a while they would begin to recognize some differences between the way the plane behaved and the way the simulator acted. But it was not a case where the pilots went out and flew the X-15 every day to get really well familiar with it. There were definite limitations, on the order of one hundred volts for every 4,000 to 5,000 feet.” Fellow NASA test pilot Bruce Peterson relates, “I made the first flight of the HL-10 lifting body in 1966 and it was almost unflyable. None of that did we pick up on in the simulator.”

  Whether Armstrong could have pulled the necessary g’s to get the g limiter to kick in without getting off his flight profile, no one can be sure. “There were ways to do the test he did without going to Pasadena,” suggests NASA test pilot Bill Dana. “But that’s kind of second-guessing. He just didn’t realize how far up the nose had gone.”

  Typically, Armstrong regards his infamous “overshoot to Pasadena” as “a learning thing.” Bill Dana concurs: “Neil was doing what he thought was the right thing. And if it won him a trip to Pasadena, why, he would not be doing that again! Probably nobody ever zoomed out of the atmosphere again on the X-15, because the pilots were all trained on the danger of that action based on what happened to Neil.”

  “He wasn’t a screwup and he wasn’t accident prone,” declares Roger Barnicki, a technician in the FRC’s Research Pilots Branch who was responsible for Armstrong’s and other test pilots’ personal flight equipment. “This guy was by the numbers, not fanatical, but by the numbers.”

  Just four days after his X-15 overshoot, Armstrong was involved in a second incident testing the notion that Karen Anne’s death may have been temporarily affecting his job performance. On Tuesday, April 24, 1962, Armstrong and Chuck Yeager made their only-ever flight together.

  The X-15 flight plan necessitated emergency landing sites all along the trajectory. One of the farthest flung was Smith Ranch Dry Lake, located some 380 miles due north of Edwards, and east of Reno, Nevada.

  Conditions on a dry lake bed needed to be carefully checked out, especially during the wet winter season. Employing a crude but effective method, teams of inspectors would walk the lake bed, dropping six-inch-diameter lead balls from a height of five feet. Measuring the diameter of the depressions made by the balls and comparing them to measurements that had been made on a firm, usable lake bed, the inspectors determined whether the lake bed would support the fifteen-ton weight of the X-15.

  The winter of 1962 was a particularly wet one in the western desert. On the weekend prior to Karen Armstrong’s death, Rogers Dry Lake became a real lake of measurable depth. Many roads leading to and from Edwards were closed and very little flying took place.

  On Monday, April 23, NASA’s Joe Walker took an F-104 up to Smith Ranch Dry Lake to check it out for possible emergency use, not by the X-15-2, which air force major Bob White was scheduled to fly the next day (because White’s flight was to be the first-ever launched from Delamar Dry Lake, in eastern Nevada), but by X-15-1, which Walker himself was scheduled to fly down from Mud Lake on April 25 (poor weather delayed the launch until April 30). The NASA R4D Gooneybird, flown by Jack McKay and Bruce Peterson, reported that day that Smith Ranch might be sufficiently dry to support a landing by the time of Walker’s launch on the twenty-seventh.

  Paul Bikle, the head of the FRC, wanted to be absolutely sure of the condition of Smith Ranch Dry Lake for Walker’s flight. On the twenty-fourth, after White’s X-15-2 flight was canceled due to clouds, Bikle made a phone call to the air force side of the base. Bikle talked to Colonel Chuck Yeager, the new commander of the Aerospace Research Pilots School at Edwards—and who also, incidentally, had been copiloting the launch B-52 just that morning when White’s flight was aborted due to clouds. Bikle and Yeager had served together postwar at Wright Field in Ohio, where Bikle, in Yeager’s view, had been one of those conservative flight test engineers “who thought the X-1 was doomed.” Still, Bikle agreed with Yeager’s self-assessment that the colonel’s firsthand knowledge of the dry lakes was “like the back of my hand.” In Yeager’s version, the conversation between the two men went like this:

  Bikle: What do you think about Smith’s Ranch Lake?

  Yeager: I was just up there yesterday in a B-57 looking at it, and it’s wet.

  Bikle: Well, my guys were over there today and they say it isn’t wet.

  Yeager: Well, then, be my guest!

  Bikle: Would you go up there and land on it?

  Yeager: No, I won’t. It’s wet.

  Bikle: Would you fly Armstrong up there and attempt a landing?

  Yeager: No way.

  Bikle: Would you do it in a [NASA] airplane?

  Yeager: Hell, no! I wouldn’t do it in any airplane because it just won’t work.

  Bikle: Would you go up there if Neil flew?

  Yeager: Yeah, as long as I’m not responsible for anything that happens. I’ll ride in the backseat.

  Pairing a NASA pilot and an air force pilot for such a purpose was unusual, but not unheard of. Earlier that April, NASA’s Joe Vensel had flown with Yeager in a helicopter survey of a number of wet lake beds.

  The plane was a T-33. Armstrong sat in the front, Yeager in the back. On this sunny and warm afternoon, both men wore just flying suits and gloves. Even before taking off, according to Yeager’s version:

  I tried my damndest to talk Armstrong out of going at all. “Honestly, Neil, that lake bed is in no shape to take the weight of a T-33.”…But Neil wouldn’t be budged. He said, “Well, we won’t land. I’ll just test the surface by shooting a touch-and-go”—meaning he’d set down the wheels then immediately hit the throttle and climb back up in the sky. I told him hewas crazy. “You’
re carrying a passenger and a lot of fuel, and that airplane isn’t overpowered, anyway. The moment you touch down on that soggy lake bed, we’ll be up to our asses in mud. The drag will build up so high, you won’t be able to get off the ground again.” He said, “No sweat, Chuck.I’ll just touch and go.”

  According to Yeager, Armstrong managed the first half of that:

  He touched, but we sure as hell didn’t go. The wheels sank in the mud and we sat there, engine screaming, wide open, the airplane shaking like a moth stuck on flypaper. I said from the back, “Neil, why don’t you turn off the sumbitch, it ain’t doin’ nuthin’ for you.” He turned off the engine and we sat there in silence. Not a word for a long time. I would’ve given a lot to see that guy’s face.

  Yeager’s story portrays Armstrong in unflattering terms, its telling further marred by factual errors.*

  “We went up there and looked it over,” Armstrong recalls, “and it looked like it was damp on the west side but pretty dry on the east side. So I said to Chuck, ‘Let’s do a touch-and-go and see how it goes.’” At no time on the way up to the Nevada site, according to Armstrong, did Yeager ever try to talk him out of trying to land.

  The touch-and-go took place with absolutely no trouble. Neil landed, ran the wheels over the surface, added power, and took off. The problem for Armstrong came next, when Yeager told him, “Let’s go back and try it again, and slow down a little more.”

  “Okay, we’ll do that,” Neil agreed. “So we landed a second time and cut the power back and slowed down, and then I could feel it starting to soften a little bit under the wheels so I added some throttle, and then it settled some more, and I added some more throttle. Finally, we were at a full stop, full throttle, and we started to sink in.” In Yeager’s version, what followed was an uncomfortable scene that neither enjoyed. Armstrong relates otherwise: “Chuck started to chuckle. Slowly he got to laughing harder. When we came to a full stop, he was just doubled over with laughter.”

  As Armstrong and Yeager got out of the T-33, an air force pickup truck immediately drove up to them, a fact that Yeager never mentions. “The driver came out and he had a chain,” Armstrong remembers. “So we put it around the nose gear and hooked it up to the truck and tried to pull the airplane out of the mud, unsuccessfully. We couldn’t do it, so we just sat there on the wing.” Neil actually took eight-millimeter film of the plane stuck in the mud with an inexpensive little movie camera that he had bought for his family: “I don’t think anyone has ever seen the film. I don’t remember ever showing it, because the image quality was not the best.

  “What an air force pickup truck was doing there, I have no idea, in retrospect,” Neil wonders. There was a perimeter road on the east shore of the 5,000-foot-high dry lake, but the nearest town, Austin, Nevada, was several miles away. Could Yeager have arranged for the pickup, possibly from Stead AFB near Reno, in anticipation of the T-33 getting stuck?

  The mishap took place at about 3:30 in the afternoon. With the sun dropping behind the high mountains to the west, the temperature fell quickly. For men wearing only thin flying suits, it soon grew cold. “Any ideas?” Yeager claims he asked Armstrong, with Neil grimly shaking his head no. Sometime after 4:00 P.M., they heard the sound of NASA’s Gooneybird approaching. According to Yeager, Bikle sent the plane up to Smith Ranch “because he suspected something might happen.” But the logbooks at the Flight Research Center clearly show that the R4D flight left Edwards with pilots McKay and Dana at the controls before Neil and Yeager even took off for Smith Ranch. Its flight plan indicated a northeasterly route to Ely, Nevada, up and along the X-15’s High Range. Because Edwards had not heard from the T-33, NASA radioed McKay and Dana to fly over to Smith Ranch and take a look.

  In Yeager’s story, he got back in the airplane, switched on the battery, and radioed McKay, “We only got one choice. If you land over next to the edge of the lake and keep the airplane rolling, you probably won’t sink, and then we can get back off the ground. Give us some time to walk over to the edge of the lake. Don’t slow the airplane down. Keep the door open and we’ll jump aboard.” If Yeager did actually radio this message to the NASA pilots, he failed to mention how he knew where the Gooneybird “probably wouldn’t sink.” It was because it was on that side of the lake that Armstrong had performed the touch-and-go safely in the first place.

  Bill Dana does not remember any of the specific conversation on board the returning airplane, but he does recall the “ribbing” that Neil took from Yeager and that Neil “did not rise to the bait.” It was clear to both Dana and McKay, as it certainly was to Armstrong, that “Yeager took delight in Neil’s embarrassment.” Back at Edwards long past sunset, Yeager remembers, Paul Bikle was still there. “I don’t know what he said in private to Neil Armstrong,” Yeager asserts, “but when Bikle saw me he burst out laughing.” According to Bill Dana, “Bikle felt Yeager was the best test pilot he ever worked with, because Chuck had a total recall. When Yeager came back from a flight, he could say, ‘Yeah, I pushed the left rudder a little bit, it rolled right, and then the nose went to the left. He could just about be a human script chart.’” Too bad Yeager’s detailed memory did not extend to pilots he did not like.

  In his autobiography and in subsequent published interviews, Yeager expressed several harsher sentiments toward Armstrong, culminating in this opinion: “Neil Armstrong may have been the first man on the Moon, but he was the last guy at Edwards to take any advice from a military pilot.” To which Neil has only responded wryly, “On this occasion at Smith Ranch, I did take his advice!”

  Armstrong and Yeager really did not know each other well. What Yeager was expressing in his dealings with Armstrong were long-standing animosities aimed at the entire civilian, NACA/NASA research pilot culture that had operated at Edwards alongside the military ever since the start of the X-1 program in the mid-1940s.

  According to Yeager’s autobiography, the NACA “wasn’t thrilled” with the army’s selection of him as the X-1 test pilot: “The NACA team thought I was a wild man.” One of the stories that NACA old-timers still commonly tell about Yeager concerns why the army air forces selected him to fly the Bell X-1 for the assault on the sound barrier. It was not because Yeager was the most qualified to meet the unknown dangers of the first supersonic flight, they say; it was because AAF leadership considered him “the most expendable” of all their test pilots.

  Yeager, who remembers being treated with this sort of condescension, called the NACA pilots “the most arrogant bunch” at Edwards: “There was nothing worthwhile that a military pilot could tell them…. I rated them about as high as my shoelaces. I lived balls-out, flew the same way. I had my own standards, and as far as I was concerned there was no room at Edwards for test pilots who couldn’t measure up to the machines they flew. I was harsh in my judgments because a pilot either knew what he was doing or he didn’t. The NACA pilots were probably good engineers who could fly precisely, but they were sorry fighter pilots.” Of course, NACA pilots were not supposed to be fighter pilots; they were supposed to be test pilots. “Neil was a pretty good engineer” has always been Yeager’s backhanded compliment, but “he wasn’t too good an airplane driver.”*

  Armstrong assesses, “Yeager was a pilot, and a good one. He had limited understanding of aeronautical engineering and limited educational exposure. He really, I don’t think, understood quite what we were trying to learn. He was very good at flying aircraft and doing aerobatics and loved getting into mock combat situations one-on-one. But he seemed to have less interest in precision and getting information and drawing conclusions from that. He seemed to be impatient—not so much bored—but impatient with the planning and the techniques [of] the NACA.”

  Back at the High-Speed Flight Station, Armstrong seemed to be suffering through a prolonged streak of bad luck. On Monday, May 21, Neil returned to work following his family vacation in Ohio.

  Following a crew briefing for an X-15 flight scheduled for Major Bob Rushworth the next day
, Joe Vensel told Armstrong to fly up and inspect Delamar Lake, about ninety miles north of Las Vegas. After a half-hour flight in an F-104, Neil set up an approach that would allow him to practice his dead-stick landings. “I did it just like we always did,” he recalls. “We made our flare and came down steeply just like the X-15, simulating putting the gear down in the middle of the flare, touching down, and then adding power and taking off. On this occasion I was doing that, but I was looking into the sun and the glare was very difficult.”

  Very few of the intermediate lake beds benefited from painted stripes and other markings, as did the regular runways on the big dry lakes near Edwards. From one lake bed to another, the texture of a surface could vary dramatically as could the surface cracks in its clay crust. Every experienced desert pilot knew that landing on a dry lake was like trying to judge height above glassy water. It was a problem in photo optics not dissimilar to what Armstrong and others at NASA studied so carefully in preparation for the lunar landings.

  Two factors contributed to the “accident” that happened. First, Armstrong failed to judge his height precisely enough. Second, he failed to realize that, when he extended his landing gear during the flare, the gear did not extend fully and lock in place, causing the fuselage to smack into the lake bed. “So I lost hydraulic pressure,” Armstrong explains. “I wanted to leave the gear down; I couldn’t pick it up, anyway. I couldn’t make it back to Edwards on the fuel I had. It was quite a ways away. I decided to go to Nellis Air Force Base, near Las Vegas, which was a lot closer.”

  His radio antenna gone, Armstrong could not communicate: “So I had to make a no-radio approach where you go over the field and waggle your wings, and the people in the tower, they’re supposed to see you and realize that you’re making a no-radio approach.”