I was a Navy test pilot at Flying Qualities and Performance Branch, Flight Test Division, NATC Patuxent River from 1968 to 1971.  We did it all – If it had a fixed wing and a tail hook, we tested it.  It was our branch that wrung out captured Soviet aircraft at obscure locations in Nevada, we did spin and out-of-control work with carrier-based aircraft, and we did all kinds of more mundane aircraft testing.  Some of it was done at NATC, and some was done “on the road” at the contractor’s own facilities. 

Look, some of this stuff was pretty ordinary – and some tests seemed to drone on and on.  In January, 1971, I found myself grinding away at LTV Dallas trying to get a handle on something called Seek Eagle, which involved performing and evaluating some pretty high-g maneuvers in the A-7E airplane.  The routine was that I would go out on the range and do the maneuver,  then relay my qualitative impressions to base.  “Base” was a small LTV communications facility that received real-time data from the test airplane as well as lots of verbal inputs from the test pilot.  Sometimes I would do the talking during the maneuver, but talking at 6g’s could be a bit strained. 

Flight ELEVEN was coming up, for crying out loud.  Still no end in sight.  I had noticed early-on that the Flight Test Engineer, Ed Hardesty, manned the base and spent his time copying our entire conversations by hand – legal pad and pencil!  Even though some of the control inputs were deliberately ham-fisted, the bulk of the conversations were aerodynamics-techie stuff.  How does that get done with just pencil and paper?  When I gave him a questioning look, I got a long dissertation about how he ALWAYS got ALL of the conversation without missing a beat.  Don’t trouble your little heart, DD.

Well OK.  I mean, it seemed a bit like a challenge to me.  My feeling was that we needed to do something to up the pace.  So … that evening I spent some time fashioning a nonsensical spiel of aeronautical gibberish to feed him on Flight 11.  As long as we’re testing things – let’s take a look at his stenographic skills!  

Morning came and I blasted into the wild blue.  I had carefully transferred my phony comments to my kneeboard pad.  I couldn’t wait for the first maneuver!  

It went something like this (my call sign was Cobra II):

Engineer:  “… Your static margin is 1.8.”

Cobra II:   “Got it.  Some comments on maneuver #1.  Once reaching 500 KIAS and hammering on the g, I …ah… got some lateral, ambidirectional vicissitudes that resulted in quasi-perturbations, initially curvilinear then asymptotic to the force gradient.”

Engineer:  “Whaat?  I, ah … broke my pencil!  Run that by me again, Cobra.”

Cobra II:   “You have spare pencils, Ed?”

(Long pause)

Engineer:  “OK.  We’ve sent a guy for a dictionary.”  (Long, long pause.)  “Cobra, if you would stick to the more accepted engineering terminology, like ham-fisted instead of vicissitudes, I think we could handle you a little better.”

Cobra II:  “Roger.”  (Big grin!)

It wasn’t long after returning to NATC that I received the enclosed sketch.  I know it’s a little hard to read, so here’s the quote:

“Following the last pilot-induced lateral, ambidirectional vicissitudes, the resulting quasi-perturbations of the contractor-furnished equipment caused additional ham-fisting of the control inputs resulting in exceeding the design limits of the aero plane.”

OK — it might be a bit of a stretch, but this airplane has two wings! It has a clipped delta main wing and a smaller wing located just aft of the cockpit. This forewing is much too large to be called a “canard” and it’s equipped with full-span flaps. It is aerodynamically brilliant, but so is the rest of this marvelous airplane.

The first question I get about the Swedish AJ37 Viggen (“Thunderbolt”) fighter is along the lines of, “What in the heck is the U.S. Navy doing testing a Swedish Air Force fighter?” It’s a reasonable question with a long answer. In a nut shell, the Eisenhower administration entered into an agreement with the Swedish government whereby the U.S. would exchange advanced aeronautical technology for Sweden’s development of a cutting-edge fighter to counter the Russian threat in the Baltic. The project was called “37-Annex,” and when prototype aircraft became available in 1970, the Naval Air Test Center was called upon to form a test team.

You can imagine my joy when I got the call! I was to be one of two test pilots on the team. George White was the other pilot, and two flight test engineers rounded out the test group. Life couldn’t be better!

The Viggen was awesome! The engine was a JT8D (widely used on Boeing airliners) equipped with a huge Swedish-designed afterburner. Dubbed the Volvo RM8, it was the second-largest engine ever to be installed in a fighter aircraft. It was more than 18-ft long and 4-ft in diameter. I used to say that a family of four could comfortably have lunch in the afterburner section! The Viggen was designed to operate out of Sweden’s highway system, so it had tandem main wheels, a thrust reverser, head-up display and a Navy-style angle-of-attack indicator to get that job done. With the reverser, it could execute a turnabout on a highway! I swear — hang a hook on this bird and it would be ready to land on a carrier!

Some tests were a bitch. Try pulling 9g at .9 Mach at 1000-ft and holding it for 10-sec so the cockpit recorder could pick it up. Do it ten times before you get it right! Other tests were more routine — handling characteristics, wind-up turns etc. We checked all the corners of the performance envelope, from stall to Vmax (which was 1.67 IMN, by the way). I was honored to be the 24th pilot to fly this airplane. Saab built 329 Viggens until the final bird was retired in 2005. It was replaced by the JAS-39 Grippen.

I’ve attached a couple of videos. The first shows me manning up for my first flight, assisted by Saab Chief Test Pilot Eric Dahlstrom. The second cut is my first take-off: max afterburner with the control stick full aft in my lap.

More on the Viggen next time …

This could be a long session, since I came to love flying many of the 33 types of aircraft I have strapped on over the years.  I cut my teeth on the A-4 Skyhawk, and it’s hard to beat that little plane for its snappy performance, awesome roll rate and versatility. It was an airplane with a forgiving heart – which I have learned to appreciate as I look back on my youthful  (translate:  occasionally bumbling) years as an aviator. 

My next love just has to be the F-8 Crusader.  It may be hard to understand how a 54-ft long fighter could “fit the pilot like a glove,” but that it did.  It was a sexy-looking machine, and it put you in the 1000-mph club!  It was fun just to walk out to the airplane, it was a pleasure to climb into and it was a hoot to fly.  It was the last of the Navy gunfighters. Just don’t take it around an aircraft carrier.

The F-4 Phantom II wasn’t a favorite of mine, but it sure had my respect!  After spending so much time in the tiny cockpit of the A-4, the F-4’s cockpit seemed like somebody’s living room.  That airplane was a blistering performer!  For years I heard the story: the F-4 could climb from the deck to 35,000-ft faster than it could descend from 35,000-ft to the deck.  Yeah, right.  Well, later I got a chance to check that out.  While going to test pilot school I performed a time-to-climb test with a clean F-4G, full fuel load.  Brake release to 35,000-ft in 1-min 50-seconds. 

But I think the F-14 Tomcat takes the cake – if for no other reason than the airplane simply does whatever you want it to do, and it does it with class.  It’s comfortable to handle, and quick for its size.  Of course, it has that swing wing and a couple of big afterburners.  You want to go Mach 2 – no problem.  You want to go to 55,000-ft – routine.  It was a good machine around the carrier — I thought it handled much like an A-4. Even the F-14A with the TF-30 engine was faster than an F-4, and was a tad better in acceleration.  Both would go from 250kts to 550kts in about 21 seconds. 

I’ve included a shot of my wife’s ’72 Corvette with my F-14A.  There’s also a pic of me flying an F-14 with my back-seater, Pete Angelina.  We had no idea at the time that we would soon go to Hell and back in an F-14 flat spin.  More on that next time. 

As you might guess, testing an airplane to determine its spin characteristics can be a complicated thing. It has a BIG matrix! It has to be tested at all possible centers of gravity (CG), so lead weights have to be moved fore and aft in the fuselage. We had to look at all manner of external configurations, so bombs and tanks were continually loaded and unloaded. We even tested the airplane with three different engines! Then there were the flight techniques: straight-ahead 1g entries, vertical entries and accelerated entries (the airplane is placed in a hard turn pulling multiple g’s).

Once on the range, the test airplane was tracked by several ground cameras and transmitted 30 parameters (air data, control positions, engine status) to a ground station. It didn’t take us long to figure out that the A-7 didn’t really have a spin problem — we only encountered a handful of auto-rotative spins in the whole program! However, it had a LARGE issue with post stall gyrations (PSG) once it departed from controlled flight. These could be serious. For instance, we found it took a heavily loaded A-7 up to 10,000-ft to recover from a departure and PSG’s. Accelerated stalls resulted in high speed cartwheels that were shocking and disorientating to the pilot.

Fortunately, once we defined the problem the solution was fairly simple. First, we re-wrote the spin section of the pilot’s handbook to fully detail the A-7’s actual behavior in the post-stall environment. Second, we were successful in implementing in-flight, hands-on training of A-7 pilots in the replacement air wings. The loss rate of A-7 aircraft to “out of control flight” essentially went to zero.

Here are three brief videos — and I apologize in advance for their quality. The first shows a quick glimpse of a fully loaded test bird, followed by a separate shot of a left accelerated stall and a left departure. Cut two is a left accelerated stall with a right (over the top) departure. The last clip is a pretty good look at an autorotative spin.

The A-7 Corsair II aircraft was introduced in the mid-sixties as the Navy’s premier attack platform. And indeed it was, as it evolved over the years to become the USAF A-7D and the Navy A-7E. The A-7 was a computer-driven machine, employing an inertial platform and a low-bypass ratio turbo-fan engine. It was truly a generational leap in air-to-ground weapons delivery technology.

But in spite of contractor assurances to the contrary, and in spite of the glitz and glamour of this shiny new machine, the A-7 had a dark side. It had a violent out-of-control mode that could be encountered in just about any portion of the airplane’s normal flight envelope. It scared the bejeezus out of pilots! The Navy lost 14 A-7’s to “out-of-control flight” in pretty short order — and half of the time we lost the pilot, too.

I was on my first tour as a test pilot in Flight Test at the Naval Air Test Center in Maryland. The Navy suddenly became intensely interested in solving the A-7 “spin problem” and funds and aircraft were made available to do the job. I was named as the primary project test pilot. Thus began a 47-flight, 350 maneuver, 2-year program to identify, define and solve the out-of-control flight problem in the A-7 airplane.

I’m enclosing a couple of videos. The first shows some of the A-7 gyrations following a vertical entry at 38,000-ft. The second video was taken on Flight #1 and shows us testing the spin recovery parachute — something we would normally use in an emergency only. The parachute was huge, and successful jettison was essential, since the airplane could not fly with the chute attached. What a weird ride that was — hanging at the end of that parachute with no control over the airplane whatsoever!

I don’t mean when the pilot forgets to PUT it down, I’m talking about when one or more the landing gear simply won’t come out of the well. Or, they may come out of the well but fail to lock in place. Instances like this are not as rare as you think. The gear could have been damaged on the catapult shot. It could have taken battle damage. A tire blown on take-off may have been retracted into the well and now it won’t come out. There are literally dozens of ways that landing gear can get hung up.

Fortunately, each aircraft has its own way of coping with this emergency. Some involve powerful hydraulic accumulators; some involve compressed air bottles. In the case of the A-4 Skyhawk the solution is simple, just like the rest of the airplane. The landing gear retract forward, and once stowed in the wheel well the hydraulics are depressurized and the gear simply rest on the doors. In an emergency, the pilot pulls a cable that unlocks the gear doors and the landing gear fall into the air stream. Air loads lock the gear down nice and tight.

The pucker factor goes abruptly northward when one of the main gear will not come down. For many fighter-type aircraft this is an ejection situation. History shows that attempting to land with just a nose gear and one main landing gear extended can result in a fireball with loss of both airplane and crew. If the two good landing gear will retract — definitely go for a smooth belly landing!

That’s what happened to the Bluehawk A-4E in these photos. Damage was limited to the two 300-gallon tanks and a little metal on the nose. The airplane flew the next day.