When Rocket Planes Turn Fatal

THE LOSS OF MAJ. MICHAEL ADAMS IN X-15A-3

As had happened in some other research aircraft programs, a fatal accident signaled the end of the X-15 program. On 15 November 1967 at 10:30 a.m., the X-15-3 dropped away from its B-52 mothership at 45,000 feet near Delamar Dry Lake. At the controls was veteran Air Force test pilot, Major Michael J. Adams.

Maj. Michael J. Adams, USAF, was launched in X-15 Number 66672 on a mission to carry out seven different experiments. The flight was destined for disaster from the point of launch. At launch, the craft's vibration sensor shut down the engine. On Mike's second try, the engine ignited - 16 seconds after launch.

Starting his climb under full power, he was soon passing through 85,000 feet. Then an electrical disturbance distracted him and slightly degraded the control of the aircraft. Having adequate backup controls, Adams continued on. At 10:33 he reached a peak altitude of 266,000 feet. Major Mike Adams was now America's 27th astronaut.

At this stage of the flight, Major Adams may have been experiencing vertigo - a condition he had experienced before, and one which was experienced by many X-15 pilots on climbout. This was a feeling described as "going straight up" or even "going over backwards" - the source of more than one altitude undershoot.

In the Dryden Flight Research Center (DFRC) flight control room, fellow pilot and mission controller Pete Knight monitored the mission with a team of engineers. Something was amiss. As the X-15 climbed, Adams started a planned wing-rocking maneuver so an on-board camera could scan the horizon. The wing rocking quickly became excessive, by a factor of two or three. When he concluded the wing-rocking portion of the climb, the X-15 began a slow, gradual drift in heading; 40 seconds later, when the craft reached its maximum altitude, it was off heading by 15 degrees. As the plane came over the top, the drift briefly halted, with the plane yawed 15 degrees to the right. Then the drift began again; within 30 seconds, the plane was descending at right angles to the flight path. At 230,000 feet, encountering rapidly increasing dynamic pressures, the X-15 entered a Mach 5 spin.

In the flight control room there was no way to monitor heading, so nobody suspected the true situation that Adams now faced. The controllers did not know that the plane was yawing, eventually turning completely around. Telemetry on the High Range included over 400 channels, however did not include the heading of the craft - a situation that was later corrected. In fact, control advised the pilot that he was "a little bit high," but in "real good shape." Just 15 seconds later, Adams radioed that the plane "seems squirrelly." At 10:34 came a shattering call: "I'm in a spin, Pete." A mission monitor called out that Adams had, indeed, lost control of the plane. A NASA test pilot said quietly, "That boy's in trouble." Plagued by lack of heading information, the control room staff saw only large and very slow pitching and rolling motions. One reaction was "disbelief; the feeling that possibly he was overstating the case." But Adams again called out, "I'm in a spin." As best they could, the ground controllers sought to get the X-15 straightened out. They knew they had only seconds left. There was no recommended spin recovery technique for the plane, and engineers knew nothing about the X-15's supersonic spin tendencies. The chase pilots, realizing that the X-15 would never make Rogers Lake, went into afterburner and raced for the emergency lakes, for Ballarat, for Cuddeback. Adams held the X-15's controls against the spin, using both the aerodynamic control surfaces and the reaction controls. Through some combination of pilot technique and basic aerodynamic stability, the plane recovered from the spin at 118,000 feet and went into a Mach 4.7 dive, inverted, at a dive angle between 40 and 45 degrees.

Adams was in a relatively high altitude dive and had a good chance of rolling upright, pulling out, and setting up a landing. But now came a technical problem that spelled the end. The Honeywell adaptive flight control system began a limit-cycle oscillation just as the plane came out of the spin, preventing the system's gain changer from reducing pitch as dynamic pressure increased. The X-15 began a rapid pitching motion of increasing severity. All the while, the plane shot downward at 160,000 feet per minute, dynamic pressure increasing intolerably. High over the desert, it passed abeam of Cuddeback Lake, over the Searles Valley, over the Pinnacles, narrowing on toward Johannesburg. As the X-15 neared 65,000 feet, it was speeding downward at Mach 3.93 and experiencing over 15 g vertically, both positive and negative, and 8 g laterally. It broke up into many pieces amid loud sonic rumblings, striking northeast of Johannesburg. Two hunters heard the noise and saw the forward fuselage, the largest section, tumbling over a hill. On the ground, NASA control lost all telemetry at the moment of breakup, but still called to Adams. A chase pilot spotted dust on Cuddeback, but it was not the X-15. Then an Air Force pilot, who had been up on a delayed chase mission and had tagged along on the X-15 flight to see if he could fill in for an errant chase plane, spotted the main wreckage northwest of Cuddeback. Mike Adams was dead and the X-15 destroyed.

Adding to this tragedy, Mike's wife and mother were at NASA on the morning of the flight to monitor the flight from the viewing area outside the control room. Walter "Whitey" Whiteside recognized that Mike was in trouble and quickly led Mike's wife and mother from the control room viewing area to spare them the brutal details as Mike fought to save his life and the plane. America had suffered its first and only reentry accident and 66672 would not be destined for a museum.

http://area51specialprojects.com/adams_x-15_crash.html

https://history.nasa.gov/x15/adams.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_J._Adams

@ col mikel COL Mikel J. Burroughs @ ltc stephen LTC Stephen C. @ ltc stephen LTC Stephen F. @ ltc frank LTC (Join to see) @ ltc jeff LTC Jeff Shearer @ maj william Maj William W. 'Bill' Price @ capt tom Capt Tom Brown @ capt marty Maj Marty Hogan @ smsgt doc SMSgt Minister Gerald A. "Doc" Thomas @ tsgt joe TSgt Joe C. @ ssgt robert SSgt Robert Marx @ sra christopher SrA Christopher Wright @ msg andrew MSG Andrew White @ sfc mary SFC (Join to see) @ ssg robert SSG Robert Webster @ sgt jim SGT Jim Arnold @ sgt david SGT (Join to see) @ sgt david SGT David A. 'Cowboy' Groth @ sp5 mark SP5 Mark Kuzinski Alan K.