AEROSPACE VALLEY, Calif.— When people involved in making or studying cutting edge flight test history came together in a Zoom history symposium on Feb. 26, the sum of their individual experiences might be expressed as, “failing to learn or just dismissing the lessons of history can ruin your whole day.”
Setting the stage for the more than four-hour program was nationally recognized aerospace historian Richard P. Hallion, PhD, whose theme, Breaking the Sound Barrier: 75th Anniversary Perspective,” broke the usual pattern for X-1 lectures.
Jumping past common knowledge of what happened over Muroc Army Airbase on Oct. 14, 1947, Hallion started his history of supersonic flight where it began: Kitty Hawk, N.C., in 1903. He tracked global technology’s reach for ever faster aircraft through two world wars, the jet age, rocket planes, and current events — new quests in the hypersonic flight regime.
“Breaking the Sound Barrier” in the program title, set up the audience for recurring moments of myth-busting and memory reevaluation beginning with the revelation that there was never a tangible barrier to be broken when an aircraft flew at Mach 1 speed. “The Sound Barrier was a myth,” he said. But the Mach 1 ride by Chuck Yeager both validated rocket propulsion and the design approach for the X-15’s reach into hypersonic speed.
Creating a program-unifying question for each of the three presenters who followed, Hallion’s historical overture included his own short list of What Were the Lessons Learned?
Observing that among all the many lessons learned from the history of aviation, “There are some fundamental truths that need to be repeated. “
Hallion said, “Lessons learned are perishable,” and argues that people need to get away from the notion that the history of scientific inquiry is no longer useful.
Next up was Eileen Bjorkman, now executive director of the Air Force Test Center at Edwards AFB, and 30 years ago a young captain and pilot assigned to the Flight Test Office team responsible for the first flight and early flight testing of the McDonald Douglas C-17 Globemaster III.
Her list of Lessons Learned from that experience was led by “not letting your guard down about simple things,” like the 50-cent part that could bring down a $100 million airplane.
Other things on her list included:
- Looking out for improper installation of parts, panels and other things that might fall off, such as the fuselage panel that harmlessly landed on a freeway when the first C-17 lifted off on its first flight from Long Beach Airport to Edwards.
- Avoid jumping to conclusions when tracing a problem’s source, as occurred when an inflight refueling problem was briefly misdiagnosed as mechanical rather than pilot-induced osculation.
- Be flexible, but don’t let pressure or politics interfere with doing the job right.
- Take advantage of downtime when the aircraft breaks.
Artemio “Tim” Cacanindin, currently Deputy Director/Director of Projects at the Global Combined Test Force at Edwards, occupied one of those edge of the seat, white-knuckled, BP-elevating management jobs for the F-16 High Angle of Attack Test Program.
Lockheed Martin’s high performance, bantam weight, single-engine, multi-mission Fighting Falcon was already considered to be the leader of the advanced technology pack when it first flew in 1974. It was the first production American fighter with fly-by-wire control systems and first with a sidestick controller.
So well designed and sturdily built was the F-16 that by the mid-1980s owners of the proud bird began hanging bigger and better toys beneath the wings and alongside and beneath the slim fuselage.
Cacanindin said adding such vital features as two LANTIRN system pods for day or night operations in all-weather with Terrain-Following Radar and Forward-Looking Infra-Red targeting for the aircraft’s on-board fire control and target illumination kept test pilots busy.
Along the way, HiAoA test pilots discovered some unpleasant wrinkles, including a sidestick controller glitch that denied pilots the tactile sensitivity to accurately control the aircraft. Even though the problem was quickly corrected with a programming adjustment, Cacanindin recalled the experience of an early morning taxi test in which a replacement pilot’s F-16 became suddenly airborne, leaving the runway and flying erratically before the pilot gained enough control to land. Calling the incident Flight Zero, Cacanidin remembers the substitute pilot saying he was motivated to survive because he didn’t want his tombstone epitaph to say, “He died with his sneakers on.” Since the mission wasn’t supposed to leave the runway, the pilot didn’t bother with flight boots.
More serious and mysterious was discovery and investigation of the F-16s unpredictable and intermittent entry into what is called a deep stall. Typically occurring in flights at higher transonic speed, and at altitudes between 16,000 and 25,000 feet AGL, the deep stall announced itself by pitching nose to tail and ultimately entering an inverted or rolling spin out control.
Recovery methods ultimately included activating the manual pitch override to bring up the nose, rocking the nose and tail to get the nose at a high enough angle of attack and sufficient forward propulsion to nose-over and dive to recovery. Also tested was use of tail or underbelly-mounted drogue parachutes to put the aircraft into a nose down position for control recover or a soft flat landing on one of the R-2508 Spin Areas at Edwards.
In a Phase II spin test, the drogue parachute mounted on the tail of Lockheed Martin test pilot John Fergoine’s F-16 failed to deploy, but his piloting skills saved himself and his aircraft after he did something that became the Number One Item on Cacanidin’s list of Lessons Learned.
As the cockpit video cam shows what Fergoine is seeing as the F-16 was spinning wildly, he momentarily released his grip on the control stick and reached up. In seconds the video screen shows the aircraft is recovering to a normal flight condition.
Lessons Learned:
Airplanes are designed and built to FLY — not to CRASH. When all else is failing, sometimes it is wise to put one’s faith in the airplane’s natural capacity to self-correct its problems.
And from Symposium attendee Dr. Tim Jorris: “Let go of the stick.”
B-1A 74-0159 / Flight #2 of 127 / Aug. 29, 1984
In an emotionally moving closing segment of the symposium, one of three crewmen aboard that final flight of the B-1A that day, Flight Test Engineer Otto Waniczek is alone among the two crash survivors to pass along the account for future generations. Senior Pilot Air Force Maj. Dick Reynolds subsequently passed, while Co-pilot Doug Benefield perished in the crash.
The B-1 program concept was studied and debated for a decade until an RFP was released in 1969. North American Rockwell won the contract the following year, and Southern California’s High Desert communities came to love the graceful lines and throaty road of the white bird called Lancer.
There was jubilation when the first B-1A rolled out in 1974, but three days before Christmas that year, the program contract was scaled back to four planes. But the bottom fell out when three years later, President Jimmy Carter cancelled the B-1 program with the provision that the four could continue to be flown until April 1981.
That deadline never came, as newly elected President Ronald Reagan took office in January 1981 and restored the program with the new model B-1Bs. The downside was the size of the order. The original contract was for 244 A models. But most were never built. The new contract was for 100 bombers, and all were delivered to the Air Force.
Waniczek, who attended the Test Pilot School in 1982, went back to the B-1 test ships. Of the early B-1s still flying, he remembers that only 0159 used the crew ejection capsule which separated from the fuselage by explosive charges and parachuted back to earth. The other B-1s had separate ejection seats for crew.
He remembers the flight test mission seemed routine at first. But what he described as seemingly little things popped up as time went on.
By the end of his narrative on what happened that terrible day, Otto Waniczek had already amassed his list of Lessons Learned, which turned out to be the longest list of the day.
Takeoff was delayed two hours by the sudden discovery that two tires had to be changed. Two minimum airspeed calibration passes of the tower had to be done. A power check with all four engines had to be repeated because the speed brakes weren’t set correctly.
Then came that moment when manual operation of pumps failed to rebalance the fuel load for trim while swinging the wings back for supersonic flight and forward for slow speeds, takeoffs and landings. In short, the nose went up causing loss of forward momentum, began to yaw heavily, rotated laterally, pitched and rolled.
Waniczek said, “the airplane was trying to fly its best” right up to the point where its nose went to 70 degrees. Flight records showed the crew escape system was activated when the bomber was at 1,505 feet above ground level, far below the 10,000-foot ejection order. Waniczek said that when the crash became inevitable “we had 3,500 feet of altitude and 29 seconds to ejection.”
Lessons Learned from B-1A/74-0159
- Beware of Warning Fatigue, a 1980s name for how we become numbed to incessant danger warnings which we come to regard as unreliable false alarms. The B-1A had warning lights that flashed on an obscured panel that frequently sent needless signals. It should have alerted the crew to the fuel transfer failure.
- Greater attention should be given to crew composition, especially to close and clear communications and working relationships between senior people and newbies.
- What we have here is a failure to communicate. About 95 percent of the time we are talking past each other in everyday life. Air crews and all crews need to talk together, share experiences and ask questions.
- Swallow your pride. When you’re out of control, get out of the cockpit before it’s too late. Sure, it’s only human nature to want to save the day and the plane but delaying the ejection decision when it’s hopeless cuts the odds of survival.
- Take a hard look at the point sequences of test program cards, and test point set-ups versus test execution. The practice of Control Rooms going on a break while the test aircraft continues its trip to the next test point fails to support the complete test flight.
- Staffing for the Control Room should be guided by the necessity of maintaining a fully trained-up staff so that the loss of a senior member doesn’t require using a rookie to fill a crucial job.
- While the Inquiry Board decision on its investigation of the B-1A crash cited Air Crew Error as the proximate cause for the loss of the airplane, there might be an argument to be made that some others behind the scenes deserve to share the finding.
The symposium was jointly produced by the Antelope Valley Section of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the High Desert Chapter of the Society for the Advancement of Materials & Process Engineering, the Society of Experimental Test Pilots, and many other groups.