I remember Glenn once expressing his love for flying and the opportunity the Marine Corps provided him to do just that. “It’s a priceless feeling to look out at the airplanes parked on the flight line, knowing you were going to fly one of them that day.”
I started the six-month TPS course in February 1956. The day was split half and half between ground school and flying. The curriculum began with refreshers in math and physics and then progressed to aerodynamics, aircraft performance, and a multitude of other subjects, including stability and control, which, it turned out, became my specific area of expertise. The routine was as rigorous as it was fulfilling. We worked our tails off studying and writing reports. Saturdays were the only days off, because we had to hit the books Sundays in preparation for the week that followed. When we weren’t minding a classroom desk or filling a cockpit, we were sopping up every morsel of knowledge we could.
One of the hurdles we had to negotiate was writing an arduous, comprehensive Navy Preliminary Evaluation of an aircraft. I chose to do mine on the Grumman F9F-6 Cougar, a swept-wing fighter and one of the first supersonic aircraft—supersonic in a dive, that is. The aircraft was already flying in the fleet, so we knew a lot about it. I put it through all the required maneuvers, acquiring volumes of technical notes along the way. Because it had already joined the fleet, its capabilities were known. But the report was exclusively mine, based on my own observations. It consisted of an all-encompassing description in minute detail of the aircraft’s performance from takeoff to landing and all points in between. It was like writing a technical manual, and it was a springboard to those meticulous and demanding reports we would have to compose as engineering test pilots on new aircraft undergoing evaluation before their introduction to the fleet.
As to the Cougar’s supersonic capability, that airspeed could be achieved only by climbing to altitude, tipping over, and then diving straight down with full power on.
In retrospect, TPS was a grand prelude to what were my happiest years in the Navy. Thanks to Naval Academy training, the gift of an excellent memory, and the solid foundation in learning garnered at West End High School, I finished number one of twenty-five students in the TPS Class 16, which was frosting on the cake. My next assignment: the Carrier Branch of the Flight Test Division of the Naval Test Center.
I performed crosswind landing tests in the FJ Fury on board the USS Intrepid (CV-11), trying to determine the feasibility of landing on an aircraft carrier when the ship is not flying directly into the wind. The reasoning was that there may be occasions when the carrier is operating in a body of water, perhaps like the Arabian Sea, where maneuvering room is limited and the ship cannot maintain a steady course into the wind.
On one of the tests, I was on final approach to the USS Intrepid, nearing “low state,” or low fuel condition. I also suspected the accuracy of the fuel gage. Anyway, nearing touchdown, the engineers in the bowels of the ship elected to “blow the tubes,” expelling black, pent-up exhaust from the diesel engines through the ship’s stack, an absolute no-no during flight operations. The black cloud of smoke obliterated the sky. Day had suddenly turned into night. I had no choice but to ram on full power and wave off, which I did. The air boss directed me to “bingo,” to divert, to Naval Air Station Oceana near Virginia Beach, Virginia.
I climbed to fifteen thousand feet, aimed directly at Oceana, which was forty miles away.
Nearing the airfield, I radioed Oceana tower, informed the controller I was “low state,” and requested a straight-in approach.
“Roger,” the controller in the tower replied immediately, “you are cleared to land on runway 24. Proceed direct.”
At one point I thought I would make it, but the needle on the fuel gage was just about pegged on empty. I descended, keeping my landing wheels retracted to eke out every foot of distance I could manage. I would extend them at the last possible moment, should I reach the runway threshold. But I didn’t. The engine quit when I was several hundred feet from the paved end. I plowed into the turf and skidded forward onto the paved runway. Thankfully, the Fury did not catch fire. I was unhurt, and the aircraft was salvageable. I was incensed about banging up the jet, and it wouldn’t be easy informing Anne that I had once again terminated a flight with a crash landing. But I would live to fly another day.
I gave my report to officials at Oceana and Pax, and afterward all I could think about was Anne, pregnant with Wendy, our third child. This crash landing wasn’t going to set any better with her than the SNJ incident at the Kennedy Ranch in Texas and the cold catapult shot south of Hawaii in the Pacific had. It didn’t, but, outwardly, Anne soldiered on. Inwardly, her comfort level with my flying had to be at a low point.
We weren’t happy with the J65 engine that powered the Fury. It was manufactured by the Curtiss Wright Company but was a duplicate of a British engine. Interestingly, the British hand-tooled their engines. When Curtiss Wright built their duplicate, they employed mass-production techniques. As a result, the Curtiss Wright version vibrated because the company couldn’t achieve the tolerances established by the British.
I’m not sure how many times I had to shut down the J65 because of excessive vibrations, but it was more than several and culminated in precautionary flame-out type approach, relighting the engine on final.
I conducted minimum distance takeoffs in the Fury, working out the parameters that would be entered in a particular aircraft’s flight manual. This required detailed measuring of the distance needed to take off at gross weights ranging from the absolute minimum to the maximum. We varied the weight by placing such external items on the aircraft as bombs and fuel tanks.
The tests were difficult, because if you tried to lift the aircraft prematurely, it might stall with a sudden dropping of the wing, which was prelude to a colorful crash and explosion, with virtually no opportunity for escape. In addition, landing the aircraft at heavy weights called for heavy breaking, which, in turn, led to overheating the brakes and raising the temperature and pressure of the air inside the wheels and tires to the point they might explode. Inevitably, the aircraft would swerve and most likely depart the runway. On some occasions, the wheel apparatus and tires might disintegrate, hurling rubber and metal fragments in all directions, with the attendant danger to those who might be in their path.
The FJ’s wheel brake system was rather fragile and thus troublesome. Twice, the wheels exploded on me after landing. It’s normal for tires and brakes to heat up during landings because of the unavoidable friction produced when rolling rubber meets solid pavement. This was especially true with the Fury, because it was considered a low-drag airplane needing plenty of roll-out distance before coming to a halt.
I was returning from a flight in a FJ-4 Fury at Pax one day, having made a number of minimum-distance takeoffs at maximum weight. I landed, maneuvered onto the taxiway, and approached an intersection where a perimeter road used by trucks, cars, and other vehicles crossed the taxiway. A traffic fixture with green and red lights was situated at the intersection, and a line of vehicles was halted, awaiting my passage. As I came abreast of them, I was startled by a loud explosion. I brought the Fury to an immediate stop. I shut down the engine, climbed out to assess the situation, and found that the wheel and tire on the side facing the cars had burst, sending a shower of debris primarily at one car, beside which stood a highly agitated lady.
“Why are you trying to kill me?” she shouted.
I didn’t have an immediate answer for that. She was unhurt, fortunately, but the radiator in her car had been pierced by metal fragments, causing it to leak. It took me forever to convince the lady, the wife of a fellow officer stationed on base, that I had not intentionally caused the wheel and tire to explode. The Navy paid for the necessary repairs to her car, but the woman’s rage continued for a long time.
Anyway, this wasn’t a fault in just the Fury. The state of the art in those days was such that landing wheels and brakes on the jets were neither strong enough nor resistant
enough to heat. A wheel on a plane I was flying blew a second time during a catapult test, but no one was showered with hot rubber and metal.
I also flew the FJ configured with a small rocket mounted above the tailpipe. At altitude I ignited the rocket to boost the Fury’s speed and executed high-g pulls on the jet to measure performance at the increased velocity. We had some rudimentary telemetry in those days, which enabled the technicians on the ground to monitor, in real time, what we were doing in the sky.
During high-speed flight, we experienced aerodynamic heating caused by the friction of airflow across the skin of the plane. We learned that the heating effect is proportional to the square of the Mach number. If you’re at Mach II, you’re experiencing four times the aerodynamic heating you get at Mach I. It could get hot in the cockpit, especially flying from the desert at the Edwards Air Force Base complex out West.
I was no stranger to the “pucker factor,” the phenomenon known commonly as downright fear. Not panic, but genuine and controlled fear. That usually happened to me booming through the ozone when the jet starts to vibrate. Any way you look at it, vibrations declare that your airplane is out of balanced flight, if only marginally. But at tremendous speed, vibrations could be a prelude to disaster, like the bird coming unglued in midair. Still, nothing was more fearful to me than the shotgun shell sounds produced by compressor stalls.
In the F8U-3, with its twenty-eight thousand pounds of thrust, igniting the afterburner at low altitude sent a burst of fuel into the tailpipe section that was immediately ignited, producing a rather jarring explosion. At supersonic speed, there is supersonic airflow at the intake of the compressor. That airflow inevitably slows slightly, and as it does, shock waves result from this sudden disturbance. Thus, ram air doors were developed to facilitate the transition from supersonic to subsonic flight, diminishing the opportunity for shock waves to form. If the ram air doors were perfectly aligned when lighting the burner, the Crusader would experience a tremendous and threatening yaw. Obviously, precision design was a must.
Al Shepard and I became pioneers in pressure suits, a dubious honor, because nobody wanted to wear the damn things. We were on the Navy Preliminary Evaluation Team for the F5D Skylancer at Edwards Air Force Base in California. The tests consisted of some high-altitude zoom climbs and engine tests, so we had to wear cumbersome partial-pressure flight suits. They consisted of a completely enclosed helmet and cloth suit, with capstans that ran down the sides of both arms and legs.
During high-altitude decompression in an aircraft, the pilot would have to “pressure breathe.” When pressure breathing, the air is forced into the mouth on inhalation, and the pilot had to force it out on exhalation, just the opposite of normal breathing—a very exhausting evolution. Moreover, the capstans would fill with high-pressure air, pulling ribbonlike straps tightly across the chest, stomach, back, and legs to provide the pressure necessary to prevent formation of air bubbles in the blood.
Before each pressure-suit flight, the survival technicians would pressurize us so that we could practice pressure breathing and become familiar with functioning in a pressurized suit. During one of these sessions, Al and I were donning our partial-pressure suits, when he told the technician, “Give me full pressure today.”
The technician looked warily at Al and said, “Commander, I don’t think you want to do that. It’ll make you real uncomfortable.”
Shepard didn’t hesitate. “Just give me the full pressure,” he said.
The technician reluctantly obeyed, turned the pressure to full, and within seconds Al became as rigid as a robot, with arms and legs forcing him into a kind of spread-eagle stance. We had to hold back our laughter, as Al grimaced in extreme discomfort, forcing air into his lungs with painful effort and standing there like laundry hung on a line to dry.
For a month after that, Al looked like a zebra in the shower, because the straps had created red marks on his body as a result of the tight constraint at the highest pressure setting.
This was a typical Alan Shepard adventure, characterized by his pursuit of the ultimate challenge.
The irrepressible Al drove an MG sports car. Capt. Tom South, CO of Naval Air Station Patuxent, was a stickler for wearing uniforms properly. One day, as South was gazing out his office window, Al drove by at high speed in his little convertible, wearing a tam-o’-shanter and a white scarf with his uniform. South was furious, but he let Al off with a verbal reprimand. Alan Shepard was always on the leading edge.
It’s fair to say test flying was a bit more dangerous than routine flying in the fleet. Yet, naval aviators tend to be optimists, confident in their ability to handle adversity should it raise its annoying head and threaten one’s well-being. I wasn’t naïve enough to believe I could manage any emergency. Sometimes events occur with such rapidity a pilot doesn’t have time to consider corrective actions. So, I kept my personal affairs in order, wanting to assure Anne and the kids that they would be well taken care of. Most of the test pilots did the same.
We evaluated ejection seats. In jets, because of the high speed and high altitude regimes in which they operate, bailing out by manually climbing from the cockpit and pulling the ripcord à la World War II days was totally impractical. Ejection seats are pyrotechnic devices that kick you away from a stricken jet and automatically actuate the parachute, with a manual backup system available to the aviator, wherein he pulls a D-shaped ring to release the chute.
Marine major Tim Kean was flying an F8U-1 in afterburner at low altitude when he got into pilot-induced oscillations and the wing literally tore free from the jet. The jet went immediately out of control and crashed, killing Tim. We learned he probably tried to eject, but the subsequent investigation revealed that an incompatible firing pin had been installed in the seat by the technicians. Tim didn’t have a chance. It was a hard way to learn a lesson.
There were many accidents in those days, and it seemed as if we attended funerals with a depressing regularity, a point vividly made by Tom Wolfe in his book, The Right Stuff.
There were also lighter moments. We had been coordinating tests with the Forrestal Laboratories at Princeton, where naval officers were taking postgraduate courses in aeronautical engineering. I would fly the test they desired in an instrumented airplane, then mail them the data to analyze and use as needed. On one occasion I was invited to fly to Princeton with a package of data and to visit the students and professors at the facility. I invited Pete Conrad, a Princeton graduate and “astronaut to be,” to go along in a T-28 Trojan, a two-seat, piston-powered trainer. It was springtime, and we would be landing on a grass airfield at the New Jersey-based school. The officers at Princeton informed me the field had pretty much dried out from the winter rain and snow and that the turf was compact enough to accommodate the T-28.
With Pete in the rear seat, we launched early in the morning, made it to Princeton in good time, and landed quite smoothly. I delivered the data, and Pete and I spent a pleasant and informative day with our friends and their colleagues at the lab. We traded seats for the flight back, Pete flying the bird from the front. Preparing to depart in late afternoon, we were cautioned to taxi along the compacted taxiways. I noticed that Pete wasn’t paying attention to the briefing. He wore an expression that said, “Oh, I’ve been here before, I know what to do, and this briefing really isn’t necessary.”
Pete fired up the R-1820 engine, completed the checks, and lurched forward. Instead of adhering to the compacted taxiway, however, Pete aimed the Trojan directly across the grass toward the takeoff end of the runway. The T-28 shortly became mired in the soft, noncompacted ground. He added power to free us, but that only made matters worse, as the nose of the airplane dipped and the propeller blades churned into the soggy sod, causing sudden stoppage of the engine. We secured the switches and got out.
“Oh brother,” I thought, as pilot in command, “Two experienced naval aviators trapped in the mud. I’m in deep trouble now.” Small fragments from the extreme tips of tw
o of the three blades were missing. We’d probably need a new engine, new propeller blades, and a crew to do the repairs. This would take time, and I figured I’d be stuck in Princeton until the job was done.
The aircraft was towed back to the hangar, where an old-hand mechanic who had been at the Forrestal laboratory a long time surveyed the aircraft. He checked the oil strainer and found no metal particles, as would normally occur when there is sudden stoppage of the engine. He eyed the propeller blades for a long time in silence as I anxiously awaited his evaluation.
Finally, he said, “I have an idea. I’ll use a hacksaw and cut away the jagged area on one of the blades, then make a template and cut an equal amount from the other two blades.” Hopefully, this would preclude asymmetrical loads on the prop.
He did this in efficient short order, and I test ran the engine at high power, discovering happily that there was no untoward vibrations.
“You had your chance, Pete,” I said to Conrad. I’m going to fly it back.”
He didn’t protest.
I taxied out as twilight descended on New Jersey, lined up, added power, and commenced the takeoff roll. In the back of my mind I was uncertain about the “fix” the old hand had contrived. But the instrument readings were satisfactory, and as we lifted off and passed over power lines and trees at the perimeter of the airfield, anxiety was replaced by growing confidence. At points along the way I nearly convinced myself the engine was vibrating, but we safely—and smoothly—made it to Pax. Throughout the journey, the engine purred steadily. The fix worked and the mechs were impressed with the work of the old hand at Princeton. However, they did replace the propellers as a precaution, and that T-28 continued in service for many years.
There was a big plus to our journey, because Pete and I had an enlightening exchange with the chairman of Aeronautical Engineering Department, Court Perkins, one of the most respected men in the field.
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