F104 departing controlled flight

Yup yup, we have similar footage of the 38. Similar dynamics, requires drogue to stabilize out of it, and tons of altitude to recover. Very hard to get into a spin though, which is a good thing. Just like the 104, different spin recovery inputs than the conventional wisdom. Trying the latter in a 104 or 38 would guarantee youd never get out of it.
 
nauga said:
That's waaaay to clear to be flight test footage. ;)

Nauga,
tracked
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It is a clip from a CGI video someone made knocking off the Yeager/F-104 crash in "The Right Stuff". The guy took the time to replicate the entire F-104 scene from the movie from takeoff to the crash.
 
I don't understand why the pilot was not able to recover with the use of the drogue chute. That seems like it should have worked very well.

Can anyone explain why it went back into a spin afterwards?
 
RudyP said:
I don't understand why the pilot was not able to recover with the use of the drogue chute. That seems like it should have worked very well.

Can anyone explain why it went back into a spin afterwards?
Click to expand...

As I recall, the elevators in the F-104 are hydraulically operated. In the NF-104 crash, Yeager tried to "pull up" to correct the airplane's trajectory late in the effort and that's where the elevator stopped when hydraulic power was lost when the engine flamed out. The only ways to "unstick" the elevator were to deploy the Ram Air Turbine to generate hydraulic power or for the engine to spin up fast enough to power the hydraulics. Apparently, neither of those things happened, so when the drogue was released, the airplane simply pitched up and spun again.

<Edit: Turns out this recollection is only partially correct. Look for a link to a first person account later in the thread>
 
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RudyP said:
I don't understand why the pilot was not able to recover with the use of the drogue chute. That seems like it should have worked very well.

Can anyone explain why it went back into a spin afterwards?
Click to expand...
In this case it's because the animator 'drew' it that way.

In practice, it's entirely possible that a spin 'chute may not induce enough of a nose-down pitching moment to break the AOA or reduce the yaw rate enough to get the inertia coupling down to where aerodynamics can break the AOA, but it doesn't seem to be common in my memory. It's also possible to have a secondary stall and departure after jettison if you recover from the low-speed nose-down attitude too aggressively.

I'm aware of at least one spin chute that 'streamered' and was jettisoned before recovery, but it jerked things around enough that the airplane recovered after jettison anyway.

ETA: Or the scenario that @kyleb posted as I was typing. :)

Nauga,
round and round
 
Speaking of the F-104...This is a link to Joe Jordan a test pilot and the father of a VERY good friend of mine. Worth the read and watch the little video at the very end of the page. These guys were AMAZING...My buddy has tons of stories from his dad and his exploits. I wish I could have personally known him but he died at an early age.
https://www.thisdayinaviation.com/14-december-1959/
 
hindsight2020 said:
Yup yup, we have similar footage of the 38. Similar dynamics, requires drogue to stabilize out of it, and tons of altitude to recover. Very hard to get into a spin though, which is a good thing. Just like the 104, different spin recovery inputs than the conventional wisdom. Trying the latter in a 104 or 38 would guarantee youd never get out of it.
Click to expand...

This will send us off topic, but out of curiosity, is the T-38 OCF procedure (not sure if you use that term in wild blue yonder land) the same as the F-5? Because when the F-5 guys would recite their OCF boldface in mass briefs, it was like a really awkward, never ending, verbal diarrhea that made no sense. I used to know a little bit of it because I heard it so many times. Another aside, did you guys have the same weird pitch damper issue maybe 6-8 years ago, where you couldn't go rage low because the thing would uncontrollably pitch down? Or the unexplained engine flameouts of a couple years back? So many questions off topic that I have :)
 
35 AoA said:
This will send us off topic, but out of curiosity, is the T-38 OCF procedure (not sure if you use that term in wild blue yonder land) the same as the F-5? Because when the F-5 guys would recite their OCF boldface in mass briefs, it was like a really awkward, never ending, verbal diarrhea that made no sense. I used to know a little bit of it because I heard it so many times. Another aside, did you guys have the same weird pitch damper issue maybe 6-8 years ago, where you couldn't go rage low because the thing would uncontrollably pitch down? Or the unexplained engine flameouts of a couple years back? So many questions off topic that I have :)
Click to expand...

Funny bit about that, our spin procedures are not even boldface *yikes*. I sincerely doubt many within our community would know it by heart, let alone apply it correctly to make a difference. Garbage answer as that may be, that's the reality on the ground (no pun intended). Basically the understanding across the command is that the altitudes required to recover from a legitimate spin, effectively puts you out of the uncontrolled ejection altitude training rules. So it's moot.

They're not wrong on the altitudes, legacy testing at Edwards bears this out. I know the OP's linked video is CGI, but it is based on real testing and footage for the century series and era birds. We have that footage on the -38, with the same drogue setup and track camera. It takes a lot of altitude. In fairness to the airplane, it's incredibly spin resistant. At Edwards they had to use inordinate inverted pro spin inputs just to get it to pop into it, it's very difficult to do it on purpose. You have to be purposely ham handed at a very narrow airspeed-G corner, and hold said stupid inputs long enough to get it to develop beyond nominal post stall gyrations/steep spiral. There's several things about choosing to keep strapping into this thing for a living that keep me up at night, spin threat is not one of them.

Pitch damper? What's a damper? :D We lack even that stone age level of automation. It's all meat servo over here. I suppose we should be grateful they gave us a flap slap interconnect, so the thing doesn't do a 9G cobra and crash tailpipe first like a paper airplane, when you throw those plain flaps down. Another reason one wouldn't want to do this beyond one hour at a time.

We do have a yaw damper, drops out all the time. Plane doesn't really wag, sometimes in fingertip (your parade) if homeboy gets a little fast at the bottom of a leaf (and by 'fast' I mean 450KCAS at 3 feet separation, where normally they should have been at 350kcas at that point) and #2 gets into the wingwash. But otherwise it's a non-issue on the yaw side. The lack of pitch damper is noticeable though, it's pitchy at those merge-ish speeds. We don't have strakes so it's mostly shaking like you're in a paint mixer for most of trying to rate the nose. Such are the indignities of fighter LARPing with a walmart huffy bike for cavalry, and broomsticks for lances.


Flameouts? Well, not outright. But compressor stalls, idle decay (hell, just had one yesterday while doing a stall sortie, another Thursday in the life), AB no lights, and of course, the spectre of chucking the outer third of a so-called wing barely larger than an F-15 horizontal stab? Yes, very much so. We're currently operationally G-limited down low because of concerns we might not have enough altitude to recover on a low level if we shed an outer third of a wing again. But hey F-35 and their civilian remoras are paid and funded so... [insert kermit drinking tea meme here]. At this point my avatar is more like those 1970s sci-fi sketches on astrophysics books. "Artist rendering of what exoplanet sunset may look like...." :D
 
35 AoA said:
Another aside, did you guys have the same weird pitch damper issue maybe 6-8 years ago, where you couldn't go rage low because the thing would uncontrollably pitch down?
Click to expand...
We had ancient (even by T-38 standards) T-38's with pitch dampers and were administratively limited to something like 450 KIAS with pitch damper inop - not much of an impact but occasionally caused some scheduling creativity. Flameout issues, such as they were, were the standard 'blackstripe' area in the NATOPS (er, 'Dash-1'). OOCF recovery (post 'stall') was never an issue and boldface (if there was any) is long gone from my memory. This was >30 years ago, times and I'm sure airplanes have changed in the meantime.

Nauga,
from the straight and narrow
 
hindsight2020 said:
We do have a yaw damper, drops out all the time. Plane doesn't really wag, sometimes in fingertip (your parade) if homeboy gets a little fast at the bottom of a leaf (and by 'fast' I mean 450KCAS at 3 feet separation, where normally they should have been at 350kcas at that point) and #2 gets into the wingwash. But otherwise it's a non-issue on the yaw side. T
Click to expand...

Been a long, long time, but I do remember we had to pull the yaw damper CB on formation flights in the T-38 because of a previous midair when it apparently malfunctioned. Without the yaw damper, the nose would "hunt" a bit.

I think the midair was at my UPT base, Williams AFB, and involved a student pilot named Lt. Brightbill. He was memorable because he also lost a T-38 in a full aft stick stall. Two successful ejections. I never heard what he flew after he graduated.

What do you call the person who graduates last in medical school? "Doctor." Lt. Brightbill became a pilot.
 
Was Yeager's F-104 crash from one of the high altitude, special 104's? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_NF-104A

Somewhere I read a bit about that program, where they'd zoom climb modified F-104's to the point where the ailerons didn't work anymore, so they had mini-rocket boosted controls. That at altitude if flew like a spaceship, not an airplane, and it flew higher than anything else that had been a normal airplane before.
 
Albany Tom said:
Was Yeager's F-104 crash from one of the high altitude, special 104's? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_NF-104A

Somewhere I read a bit about that program, where they'd zoom climb modified F-104's to the point where the ailerons didn't work anymore, so they had mini-rocket boosted controls. That at altitude if flew like a spaceship, not an airplane, and it flew higher than anything else that had been a normal airplane before.
Click to expand...

It was.

 
Albany Tom said:
Was Yeager's F-104 crash from one of the high altitude, special 104's? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_NF-104A

Somewhere I read a bit about that program, where they'd zoom climb modified F-104's to the point where the ailerons didn't work anymore, so they had mini-rocket boosted controls. That at altitude if flew like a spaceship, not an airplane, and it flew higher than anything else that had been a normal airplane before.
Click to expand...

Yes. There is a website written by one of the guys who ran/flew in the program. Comes across as very bitter about Yeager's participation. The story is that the program was going along just fine until Yeager jumped in, wanting to set a new record. Yeager was a seat of the pants test pilot, rather than a guy who could hit the "numbers" specified in the test program. According to him, Yeager crashed the airplane because he couldn't fly the profile correctly and applied the wrong corrections during the climb. After the crash (again, per the website) Yeager wasn't gonna take the blame, and had enough allies to shield him, so the program took the hit, not Yeager...
 
kyleb said:
Yes. There is a website written by one of the guys who ran/flew in the program. Comes across as very bitter about Yeager's participation. The story is that the program was going along just fine until Yeager jumped in, wanting to set a new record. Yeager was a seat of the pants test pilot, rather than a guy who could hit the "numbers" specified in the test program. According to him, Yeager crashed the airplane because he couldn't fly the profile correctly and applied the wrong corrections during the climb. After the crash (again, per the website) Yeager wasn't gonna take the blame, and had enough allies to shield him, so the program took the hit, not Yeager...
Click to expand...

I believe that. Today ol' Chukie would be considered another banal insta clout chaser; likely couldn't make O-3 on account of a stack of LORs for misuse of govt property. And frankly, the Service would be better for it.

Seat of the pants is just a euphemism for imprudent, rationalization for sloppy hands, and an attitude of lack of accountability, in the context of test work. This isn't BFM/OODA loop jousting against another opponent for which unconventional reaction/abruptness could make a difference sometimes. And to be clear, he wasn't even unique at that either, compared to peers much more talented and who contributed more to that craft and ACM (Boyd et al).


The allegations of wagon circling and deflection on his part also don't surprise me. I believe it too. I've met similar high-rising imposters in the Service. I know this may be considered blasphemy, especially in the context of critiquing the dead, but in short, from a core competency perspective and in the context of the level of public notoriety attained....Yeager qualifies as a hack in my book.
 
I think hack is a little harsh, but over-hyped would definitely be applicable.
 
kyleb said:
As I recall, the elevators in the F-104 are hydraulically operated. In the NF-104 crash, Yeager tried to "pull up" to correct the airplane's trajectory late in the effort and that's where the elevator stopped when hydraulic power was lost when the engine flamed out. The only ways to "unstick" the elevator were to deploy the Ram Air Turbine to generate hydraulic power or for the engine to spin up fast enough to power the hydraulics. Apparently, neither of those things happened, so when the drogue was released, the airplane simply pitched up and spun again.
Click to expand...

A bit more research and it looks like this was wrong. The F-104 apparently had an AOA limit of 28 degrees and if exceeded bad things happened. Yeager didn't manage his profile correctly and instead of coming back into the thicker atmosphere at <28 degrees, reentered at well above that and went into a flat spin. Testing showed that even after the drag chute deployed, unusual recovery methods were required to avoid a recurrence.

Here's a link to the website, and the appropriate starting point for where this story is laid out:

http://www.kalimera.org/nf104/stories/stories_11.html
 
I can see how someone would be bent out of shape over the project being cancelled. An airplane, that effectively becomes a spaceship, and then an airplane again, taking off and landing with wheels, and with zero computer aided tech involved in the flight. That's pretty impressive. It takes "hold my beer while I try this" to a completely new level.
 
Ok after reading through all of this, my takeaway comes back to the T38. Losing a 1/3rd of the wing, did I read that right as a not so uncommon thing?
 
hindsight2020 said:
Funny bit about that, our spin procedures are not even boldface *yikes*. I sincerely doubt many within our community would know it by heart, let alone apply it correctly to make a difference. Garbage answer as that may be, that's the reality on the ground (no pun intended). Basically the understanding across the command is that the altitudes required to recover from a legitimate spin, effectively puts you out of the uncontrolled ejection altitude training rules. So it's moot.

They're not wrong on the altitudes, legacy testing at Edwards bears this out. I know the OP's linked video is CGI, but it is based on real testing and footage for the century series and era birds. We have that footage on the -38, with the same drogue setup and track camera. It takes a lot of altitude. In fairness to the airplane, it's incredibly spin resistant. At Edwards they had to use inordinate inverted pro spin inputs just to get it to pop into it, it's very difficult to do it on purpose. You have to be purposely ham handed at a very narrow airspeed-G corner, and hold said stupid inputs long enough to get it to develop beyond nominal post stall gyrations/steep spiral. There's several things about choosing to keep strapping into this thing for a living that keep me up at night, spin threat is not one of them.

Pitch damper? What's a damper? :D We lack even that stone age level of automation. It's all meat servo over here. I suppose we should be grateful they gave us a flap slap interconnect, so the thing doesn't do a 9G cobra and crash tailpipe first like a paper airplane, when you throw those plain flaps down. Another reason one wouldn't want to do this beyond one hour at a time.

We do have a yaw damper, drops out all the time. Plane doesn't really wag, sometimes in fingertip (your parade) if homeboy gets a little fast at the bottom of a leaf (and by 'fast' I mean 450KCAS at 3 feet separation, where normally they should have been at 350kcas at that point) and #2 gets into the wingwash. But otherwise it's a non-issue on the yaw side. The lack of pitch damper is noticeable though, it's pitchy at those merge-ish speeds. We don't have strakes so it's mostly shaking like you're in a paint mixer for most of trying to rate the nose. Such are the indignities of fighter LARPing with a walmart huffy bike for cavalry, and broomsticks for lances.


Flameouts? Well, not outright. But compressor stalls, idle decay (hell, just had one yesterday while doing a stall sortie, another Thursday in the life), AB no lights, and of course, the spectre of chucking the outer third of a so-called wing barely larger than an F-15 horizontal stab? Yes, very much so. We're currently operationally G-limited down low because of concerns we might not have enough altitude to recover on a low level if we shed an outer third of a wing again. But hey F-35 and their civilian remoras are paid and funded so... [insert kermit drinking tea meme here]. At this point my avatar is more like those 1970s sci-fi sketches on astrophysics books. "Artist rendering of what exoplanet sunset may look like...." :D
Click to expand...
Do the my test the newer stuff with this degree of real world tests? Or more reliant on cpu simulation?
 
benyflyguy said:
Do the my test the newer stuff with this degree of real world tests? Or more reliant on cpu simulation?
Click to expand...

The latter. The flying stuff is death by validation profile boredom anymore. It's pretty benign stuff.

I dabbled in a little bit of it doing flight test support aircrew during the rollout of the JASSM-ER in my prior MWS. Stuff really put you to sleep. The kaboom at the end was cool though, wish I had control of the pickle, didn't even get to do that.

Skymac said:
Ok after reading through all of this, my takeaway comes back to the T38. Losing a 1/3rd of the wing, did I read that right as a not so uncommon thing?
Click to expand...

No, you can say it's uncommon, but you're missing the point.... it's that the condition is known, and accepted for expedient reasoning.

To wit, the aircraft is merely operationally limited to give you a chance at surviving the next time it happens, in lieu of fixing it. Uncle Sammy drives a hard bargain. He only has time for one girlfriend, and these days it's Amy.
 
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benyflyguy said:
Do the my test the newer stuff with this degree of real world tests? Or more reliant on cpu simulation?
Click to expand...
Both. :D There is much more reliance on modeling and simulation than in the past, but nonlinear stuff like high angle of attack and OOCF are notoriously hard to predict with any degree of certainty. They still require flight test, both to determine the characteristics and to validate the models. In the end, in-flight validation of high AOA and departure models are done by test pilots, not by the poor bubba in the fleet who has a bad day in the vertical. That's not to say that there aren't new things found in fleet operations, but that the airplanes are not handed over to operational (or even training ;) ) squadrons with a wink and a "sim says it's good, you'll be fine, trust me."

Nauga,
more than a casual observer
 
nauga said:
Both. :D There is much more reliance on modeling and simulation than in the past, but nonlinear stuff like high angle of attack and OOCF are notoriously hard to predict with any degree of certainty. They still require flight test, both to determine the characteristics and to validate the models. In the end, in-flight validation of high AOA and departure models are done by test pilots, not by the poor bubba in the fleet who has a bad day in the vertical. That's not to say that there aren't new things found in fleet operations, but that the airplanes are not handed over to operational (or even training ;) ) squadrons with a wink and a "sim says it's good, you'll be fine, trust me."

Nauga,
more than a casual observer
Click to expand...

You did a buncha that work on the F-18, didn't you?
 
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