Woo Hoo! First Man is out.

I dropped into the local bookstore last weekend to pick up Richard
Clarke's new novel. As I entered the store, there was a familiar face on
a dust jacket. First Man, The life of Neil A. Armstrong by James Hansen
is now available.

I'm only up to the section where Armstrong is flying the X-15, but I'm
convinced this is biography we've been waiting for. Authoritative and
detailed. Perhaps overly detailed - we can see all of Armstrong's
college grades (quite good but far from perfect - think "top 10%", but
not "top 5%"). Each of his training flights in an SNJ/T-6 is documented.
(Whatever happened to the instructor who said Armstrong might someday
become an adequate pilot?) This book is a marked contrast to Wagner's
One Giant Leap, the so-so Armstrong biography.

One of many things I've learned: There were multiple opinions on how to
land the X-15. Crossfield wanted something like an aircraft-carrier
landing. Another test pilot wanted a long, straight-in, high speed
approach. Armstrong and some other (unnamed) pilots developed a more
flexible spiral approach, one still used by in landing the Shuttle.

Armstrong has had few negative critics. Chuck Yeager is perhaps the best
known. Without saying so explicitly, Hansen suggests Yeager is the most
intuitive of all rudder & stick pilots, but lacking engineering skills,
was threatened by the new generation of test pilots who where as much
engineer as pilot. (Armstrong was an engineer first and pilot second.)
This was illustrated by Yeager's attempts to set new altitude records in
the rocket-assisted NF-104. Yeager was unable to even equal what other
pilots had done in the very same aircraft because he refused to follow
the dictates of the flight plan. He was just "strap it on and go",
accumulating a total of zero hours in the simulator before making these
flights - that'd be considered reckless today. (Hansen refers the
reader to www.nf104.com, written by the pilot who outflew Yeager in the
NF-104, for details. This web site makes pretty clear that the famous
100,000-foot spin was caused by Yeager's pilot error. He just didn't
know how to handle an airplane when it wasn't flying aerodynamically.)
Armstrong, first an engineer and then a pilot, is the antitheses of
Yeager. To further underscore the idea that Yeager had it in for the
new-generation of engineer/test-pilots, Hansen quotes multiple tellings
of an event where Armstrong and Yeager got stuck doing touch-and-gos in
a T-33 on an almost-dry lake bed. Yeager's story varies over time, so
it's hard to say which, if any, is accurate.

Hansen wrote the book with the cooperation of Armstrong. This is the
"authorized" biography. Still, he doesn't whitewash Armstrong. In
particular, Hansen tackles the difficult question of Armstrong's
performance during the time he and his wife were dealing with their
daughter's eventually fatal brain tumor. Armstrong had a run of bad
flying during this period, suggesting his personal grief at loosing his
daughter may have effected his flying. Hansen also acknowledges a few
cases of clear pilot error.

Armstrong on the Right Stuff: "I did see the movie. I thought it was
very good filmmaking but terrible history: the wrong people working on
the wrong projects at the wrong times. It bears no resemblance whatever
to what actually was going on."
--
Kevin Willoughby lid

The loss of the American system of checks and balances
is more of a security danger than any terrorist risk.
-- Bruce Schneier

Kevin Willoughby wrote:

(Whatever happened to the instructor who said Armstrong might someday
become an adequate pilot?)


He's probably still showing his friends footage of the LLRV with
Armstrong at the controls. :-)

Pat