Hubble to be abandoned

(George William Herbert) wrote:

There are several ex-nukes who have contributed to alt.war.nuclear
over the years...

At least over here on the seaborne side of the house 'nukes' are the
guys who operate the reactor. 'Weaponeers' work the missile launch
and fire control systems.

D.
--
The STS-107 Columbia Loss FAQ can be found
at the following URLs:

Text-Only Version:
http://www.io.com/~o_m/columbia_loss_faq.html

Enhanced HTML Version:
http://www.io.com/~o_m/columbia_loss_faq_x.html

Corrections, comments, and additions should be
e-mailed to , as well as posted to
sci.space.history and sci.space.shuttle for
discussion.

Peter Stickney wrote:

In article ,
"Terrell Miller" writes:
"Pat Flannery" wrote in message
...


Peter Stickney wrote:

The airplane was also rather dangerous to fly, as well, and losses
were high. - by 1960, when it had been in service for 5 years, more
than 500 had been totally destroyed in flying accidents.


I knew about the roll coupling problem due to the undersized vertical
fin, but didn't know the attrition rate was quite that appalling.


this may be urban myth, but a long time ago I read that part of the "Saber
Dance" thing was because a specific old-timer at the McDonnell plant was
supposed to be installing nuts upside down for some reason, but he'd been
there twenty years and he knew damn well you don't install nuts back'ards.
So under certain flight profiles an aileron would get hung up on the
"properly" installed nut. Apparently they never told the poor schlub how
many pilots he'd killed.

It sounds like the conflation of two stories. The Sabre Dance (the
film of one appears in the movie "X-15", with Charles Bronson as a
steely-eyed Test Pilot) occurred when you got an F-100 way on the
backside of the Thrust/Drag Curve, where Induced Drag is incredibly
high, and the airplane's going too slow for the controls to have much
effect. At that high an AoA, you can be well below the power-off
stall speed - you've got the engine's thrust helping fight gravity,
you see, and there's not enough oompth to accelerate to a reasonable
flying speed. That's one of the most chilling pieces of film I've
ever seen. You know the guy's had it, there's no way out, he's too low
& slow to eject, even if he could take his hand off hte stick to reach
for the handle, you just don't know when.

The other problem offurred with F-86Fs and F-86Hs built, I believe, at
North American's Inglewood plant. There was a connection in the
aileron linkage that, because of the danger of the linkage binding
when the wing flexed at high speeds, needed to be assembled in an
unusual, non-standard manner. (This fault, BTW, is what killed Joe
MacConnel, the #1 USAF/UN Ace from the Korean War, while testing the
F-86H) Some guy on the line figured that the drawings were wrong,
'cause you just don't put a bolt in that way, and did the hookup the
way he thought it should be done.

Reminds me of one of Bob Hoover's test flights in the F-86. They had
just installed a new hydraulic system for the control surfaces and
Hoover made the first test flight. He taxied out to the runway, pushed
the throttle forward, and when the plane reached flying speed he pulled
the stick back, lifted off the runway, and retracted the gear. He heard
the gear thump into the wheel wells - and immediately lost all control
of the airplane! The elevator was frozen into a nose up attitude, so
the plane entered an ever steeper climb, came to a dead stop with the
nose vertical, swapped ends, and dove straight toward the ground. The
plane pulled out of the dive a few feet above the runway and repeated
the process.

The ground was screaming "Eject!, Eject!, Eject!" at him, but he knew he
was too low. The plane went through several of those wild gyrations
when a new problem developed: Hoover saw that he was headed straight
for a hanger. Fortunately, with each gyration the plane gained a little
bit of altitude and JUST cleared the hanger.

Once out over the ocean Hoover began to work the problem and discovered
that by manipulating the trim control he could dampen out the
oscillation and set up a reasonably stable climb. "OK, you have enough
altitude, now Eject!" the ground told him, but he refused. He wanted to
save the airplane so they could determine what went wrong. He also
discovered that he had a little bit of aileron control with the stick,
so he got the plane turned to the north and headed for the dry lake bed
at what is now Edwards AFB.

He carefully got the plane set up on a long final approach, dropped the
gear, and again went through another series of oscillations until he
could get the plane re-trimmed for the new configuration. Again the
ground told him "Eject! You have no way to do a proper flare, so when
you touch down, you'll lose control and crash!" Again he refused. Once
the plane got down into ground effect, the nose came up and the plane
greased itself onto the dry lakebed so smoothly that the only way that
Hoover could tell he was on the ground was a slight vibration from the
gear. He said later that it was the smoothest landing he ever made.

Thanks to Hoover's remarkable feat it didn't take long to figure out
what the problem was. The new hydraulic system controls were wired to a
new ground stud in a wheel well. They neglected to check for clearance,
so when the gear came up, it knocked off the stud, and the redundant
hydraulic systems, which had ALL been wired to that one ground stud,
failed, freezing the control surfaces.

They discovered another minor detail too: Someone had forgotten to
remove the safety pin from the ejection seat! Hoover couldn't have
ejected if he had wanted to! He said that had he tried to eject, and
discovered that he was trapped, he might have panicked and lost it. Had
Hoover not decided to try to save the airplane, some other pilot might
have died too before they found the problem.

The roll-yaw coupling is something that really started appearing when
airplanes began getting very long, woth their mass distributed along
their length. Since the datum line of teh aircraft is almost always
at some angle to the flight path, a fast roll will tend to make thos
masses want to moge away from teh axis of the roll. This makes the
fuselage yaw. The magnitude and rate of onset of that yaw can be high
enough to be completely out of control, and may lead to structural
failure. The early short-tailed F-100As, and the X-3 research
aircraft were the first serious cases of this problem.

--
Pete Stickney
A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many
bad measures. -- Daniel Webster

In article , Derek Lyons wrote:
(George William Herbert) wrote:

There are several ex-nukes who have contributed to alt.war.nuclear
over the years...

At least over here on the seaborne side of the house 'nukes' are the
guys who operate the reactor. 'Weaponeers' work the missile launch
and fire control systems.

Now there's a job title that sounds like you should get a jumpsuit and a
cape.

--
-Andrew Gray

In article , George William Herbert wrote:
Peter Stickney wrote:
The First Rule of Nuke Stuff. Those who know don't post. Those who
post don't know.

That has been grossly exaggerated.

Those who know often post; so far, nobody who knows has
posted inappropriate material which was not either otherwise
declassified or rendered non-sensitive by the passage of time.

....that anyone noticed.

--
-Andrew Gray

Andrew Gray wrote:

In article , Derek Lyons wrote:
(George William Herbert) wrote:

There are several ex-nukes who have contributed to alt.war.nuclear
over the years...

At least over here on the seaborne side of the house 'nukes' are the
guys who operate the reactor. 'Weaponeers' work the missile launch
and fire control systems.

Now there's a job title that sounds like you should get a jumpsuit and a
cape.

In the USAF, the officers in the silos are called Missile Launch Officers
(or they were back in the day when that was to have been my MOS . . . long
story . . .); they were often referred to as "missileers" informally.


--
Herb Schaltegger, B.S., J.D.
Reformed Aerospace Engineer
Remove invalid nonsense for email.

On Wed, 18 Feb 2004 14:52:27 +0000, Henry Spencer wrote:

Kevin Willoughby lid
Imagine that, a FROG ON-OFF switch, hardly the work
for test pilots. -- Mike Collins

Collins would be on stronger ground there if astronauts weren't notorious
for a significant error rate on switch-flipping for experiments... :-)

One could argue that astronauts/test pilots error rate for switch
flipping actually strengthens Collin's ground, since it raises the concern
that test pilots shouldn't be entrusted with such tasks, maybe the frog
itself would do better. G

In article ,
(Derek Lyons) writes:
(Peter Stickney) wrote:

The First Rule of Nuke Stuff. Those who know don't post. Those who
post don't know.

Second Rule of Nuke Stuff: Those who cite the first rule really don't
know.

I kept going. didn't I? that should have been clue enough.

(Didn't the Navy have their Regulus subs in the Pacific until the
mid-late '60s, too?)

The Regulus patrols ended in 1964. (I knew a guy who made some
patrols on Tunny and Growler. Scary stuff.) IIRC SSBN's began making
patrols in the Pacific shortly thereafter.

Ah, O.K. I know that the big subsonic cruise missiles stayed in
service for longer than anywone would have expected.

--
Pete Stickney
A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many
bad measures. -- Daniel Webster

(Peter Stickney) wrote:
F-102A 875 Single Seat All Weather Interceptor
TF-102A 131 Two-Seat Transition trainer, Combat Capable
Total 1006 F-102 All-Weather Intercptors


Growing up in Portland, Oregon, I naturally thought Delta Daggers were
*the* definition of cool aircraft (although I didn't spend much time
near the ANG site until well after these were retired).

Probably why I thought the Hustler was cool.

/dps

On Wed, 18 Feb 2004 05:46:04 GMT, LooseChanj
wrote:

I saw one of those Gulfstreams obviously doing a simulated shuttle landing
from the parking lot of the KSC headquarters building. Nothing quite prepares
you for the sight of an airplane headed almost straight *down*.

It's really not straight down at all. It's about 30 deg. (A normal
airliner glide slope is 3 deg, just for a reference.) It sure does
look like it's straight down, though, particularly if you're looking
at it head-on.

Mary

--
Mary Shafer Retired aerospace research engineer

On Wed, 18 Feb 2004 17:57:15 -0500, Rick DeNatale
wrote:

On Wed, 18 Feb 2004 14:52:27 +0000, Henry Spencer wrote:

Kevin Willoughby lid
Imagine that, a FROG ON-OFF switch, hardly the work
for test pilots. -- Mike Collins

Collins would be on stronger ground there if astronauts weren't notorious
for a significant error rate on switch-flipping for experiments... :-)

One could argue that astronauts/test pilots error rate for switch
flipping actually strengthens Collin's ground, since it raises the concern
that test pilots shouldn't be entrusted with such tasks, maybe the frog
itself would do better. G

You do both know, don't you, that the latest test crew comprises one
test pilot and one dog? The dog is there to bite the test pilot if
the pilot even touches the switches and the test pilot is there to
feed the dog.

Mary

--
Mary Shafer Retired aerospace research engineer