Stories others have sent me.... (Read 1,628 times)

Via Dave Adams, 456th FIS

T-38 FOD, Rolling With A Frozen Stick And Accelerating Toward Supersonic Ejection


In 1969, I was assigned to the flight test section at Williams AFB, Arizona, where four other pilots and myself conducted functional flight checks (FCF) on the T-37s, T-38s, and F-5s assigned to the wing. FCFs were typically required after maintenance flight control rigs, period inspections, or special problems that had been identified for a specific aircraft. This was a good flying job that typically entailed around twenty-five sorties per week.. .


This is the story of one particular FCF that I performed in a T-38 “White Rocket” after it emerged from a routine 100-hour periodic inspection, and in my opinion proved to be my closest brush with the Grim Reaper during my flying career.

The FCF flight profile in a T-38 called for an afterburner climb from takeoff to 43,000 feet, followed by a supersonic run with 180 degree turns reversal back toward Williams AFB. At the conclusion of the turn reversal, we would routinely do a “junk check” to collect unwanted items that were hidden within the confines of the cockpit as result of previous flight or ground maintenance actions. Such items (foreign objects) included pencils, nuts, bolts, coins, paper clips, etc., any of which could potentially end up in the wrong place during in-flight maneuvers and cause trouble due to mechanical blockage.

To perform the maneuver you needed to apply enough negative G to “ float ” such objects upward the canopy above your head, where they would rest until positive G was reapplied. My practice was to initiate the maneuver with the nose up about 20 degrees and after rolling inverted, to “ shake the aircraft ” through several cycles of negative to positive G to firmly dislodge the unwanted objects from their resting place. Following this, I would run-in enough forward ( nose-up ) trim to sustain just a fraction more than zero-G while I picked up the junk from the canopy above my head with both hands, unzipped the left upper pocket of my flight suit (which I had emptied before the flight), stuff the junk inside the pocket and rezip it before rolling back upright with positive G. Having done hundreds of these checks, it was a totally routine but effective maneuver which had produced a surprising volume of the unwanted cockpit foreign objects.

On this day, everything was totally routine as I re-zipped my flight suit pocket and applied left aileron and aft-stick to roll upright. As the aircraft approached the upright position and I attempted to move the stick back to the right to arrest the approximate 200 degree per second rate of roll, I simply could not move the stick back to the right and the aircraft continued to roll left under positive G, with the nose precipitously dropping with each inverted attitude. As I grabbed the stick with both hands and pulled as hard as I could to move it back to the right,

I looked directly at both of the aircraft’s hydraulic system pressure guages, which were rock solid at the full system pressure of 3,000 pounds per square inch. The stick absolutely would not budge and the aircraft was really beginning to “wind-up” as the nose dropped further toward the vertical with each turn. I yanked the throttles to idle and extended the speed brakes in attempt to slow the rate of acceleration, but with the high starting mach number from over 30,000 feet, the airspeed was already transonic and rapidly increasing.

As I continued to yank at the stick with both hands and all of my adenine augmented strength, I realized that I only had seconds in which to get this problem under control, or pull the ejection handles as the aircraft passed through 10,000 feet. I also knew that ejecting at my near-supersonic airspeed was a terrible “least worst choice” as the slipstream would probably break me apart like a rag doll.

It was probably as I passed about 20,000 feet that I rationalized that since the hydraulic pressure was obviously not the culprit, something had to be mechanically blocking the flight controls, and it probably had something to do with the negative Gs that I had applied during the junk check.

Since the stick would move freely in the pitch axis, I started pumping it back and forth to alternate between positive and negative G, and after several cycles, the stick suddenly broke free. I immediately stopped the roll in a wing-level upright attitude and applied about 6-Gs to pull the nose back up to the horizon as I passed through approximately 8,000 feet.

After declaring an emergency, I set course directly for Williams AFB where I would fly a straight-in approach. Anyone observing my flight patch while enroute to “Willy” would have thought that I had to be the most uncoordinated pilot ever, as I made certain that I didn’t move the stick from the neutral aileron position, choosing to gently skid the aircraft around to final approach alignment and a perfectly normal landing.

Once parked on the ramp, I ran the ailerons back and forth through many cycles without a problem. After explaining what had happened to the maintenance personnel, all agreed that this emergency had to be the result of some sort of mechanical blockage and the aircraft was towed over to the NDI hangar where the portions of the wing that housed the aileron encasement boxes were located.

Although this particular bird had undergone NDI inspections on routine basis over its service life, it had failed to detect a 3/8”x 4” bolt that had apparently been left inside the aileron containment box when it had been opened for some sort of maintenance actions over two years earlier, and had been rattling around within ever since. On this particular day “Murphy’s Law” finally prevailed when I transitioned from negative to positive G just as the left aileron was up for my left-hand roll.

One of the maintenance NCOs put it into perspective by saying that this was the equivalent of a single quarter in a piggy bank with a slot no bigger than the quarter itself. Given enough repetitions of flipping the piggy bank from upright to inverted, the quarter would eventually standup and precisely align itself with the slot in the bank and fall through. The bolt was removed and the aircraft returned to service without any further problems. Although I held the bolt in my hand, I regret that I didn’t have the foresight to keep it as a souvenir and reminder of that day.

Precisely how my final actions of shaking the aircraft with alternating positive and negative G dislodged it is not clear to me, but I’m darn glad it worked, as my options would otherwise have been dubious at best.

By Philip " Hands " Handley
Colonel USAF (Ret.)

Source : from his just published autobiography " NICKEL ON THE GRASS"

That was an awesome flight story. Thanks for taking the time to type it in.