Deke!- Great Book, Some Questions

I just read the book last week. I also enjoyed it throughly except for the first chapter where he constantly mentions how thing used to be done on the farm. Kind of reminded me of "grumpy old man" from SNL..LOL. The rest of the book is great.

"Well my name is Jim, but most people call me.....Jim."

If you like astronaut books, that's definately one of the best.

Another worth checking out is "Two Sides of the Moon" written by Dave Scott and Alexei Leonov (the cosmonaut who was first to walk in space). They take turns thelling the alternating stories of their humble beginnings, becoming pilots, and later joining their respective countries' space programs.

If you're a fan of the mini-series, then you've GOT to check out Andrew Chaikin's "A Man on the Moon", upon which the mini-series was based.

Gene Cernan's book "Last Man on the Moon" was a pretty good read too, as was Neil Armstrong's authorized biography "First Man".

All of the original Mercury 7 astronauts have written books, even Gus Grissom wrote one shortly before his death called "Gemini!" My library used to have a copy, possibly even a first edition. Unfortunately after I pointed out that some thoughtless person had cut out a few pages, the book was pulled and I fear it was thrown out or destroyed. What a waste.

I'm not a test pilot, but I believe the following should help you:

"Roll coupling is just another name for lateral stability. It is the tendency to roll away from a sideslip. In normal flight this is generally desirable since when a wing drops, the airplane slips toward the low wing and the roll response tends to lift the low wing back to level flight. As others have described, it is roll in response to yaw"

What I believe Slayton is describing is a test for lateral stability. Test aircraft are wired with recording instruments and Slayton was doing a check-- the four points he mentions were maneuvers with the aircraft that would be plotted from which a mathamatical model would be constructed.

It seems Slayton did three of the four maneuvers without incident. The fourth caused the aircraft to go in to an uncontrolled roll. At least that is how I understand it. Again, I'm not 100% sure about this. It might be that Slayon had to do a combination of 4 flight control inputs, and it was the 4th and final input that caused the problem (this opposed as to doing the inputs one at a time separately).

Imagine zipping along at 500 miles an hour and in response to a flight control input the aircraft suddenly goes in to continuous, uncontrolled rolls along the direction of flight. That what I think he's talking about when he says it "unwound" on him.

This was a great book, BTW.

What always interests me is that in the early days (and far beyond) of the manned space program, there was this bias towards being a test pilot. The original 7 astronauts were all test pilots.

Additionally, Slayton was director of flight crew ops, and made the crew assignments. Alan Sheppard ran the astronaut office.

So test pilots were always at the top of the food chain. Then regular pilots, then everyone else.

I think the dirty little secret of the space program was that you really didn't need to be a test pilot, or even a pilot with thousands of hours in jet aircraft.

The simulator people at NASA used to say that they could take any reasonably intelligent, healthy person and train them to fly a lunar landing mission in 3 years or less. I believe it.

Of course, being a pilot (and especially test pilot) gave one a huge advantage when dealing with complex problems and emergencies where quick action was required. It also gave a person excellent prep in being a trained observer.

However, flying in space was not the same as flying in an atmosphere. In fact, there was precious little flying that actually needed to be done.

And even being quick to react in an emergency was perhaps not desirable. Pete Conrad often said that when in doubt, do nothing. (as applied to Apollo 12 and the problems at liftoff).

AE36