Why you don’t want to be a test pilot

From Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed (Ben Rich)…

(from an Other Voices section, written by a test pilot of the Have Blue stealth prototype) A couple of hours later I was completing a routine flight and coming in for a landing. I came in at 125 knots, but a little high. I was just about to flare and put the nose down when I immediately lost my angle of attack and the airplane plunged seven feet on one side, slamming onto the runway. I was afraid I’d skid off the runway and tear off the landing gear, so I decided to gun the engines and take off and go around again. I didn’t know that that hard landing had bent my landing gear on the right side. When I took off again, I automatically raised my landing gear and came around to land. Then I lowered the gear, and Colonel McClain, my chase, came on the horn and told me that only the left gear was down. I tried everything—all kinds of shakes, rattles, and rolls—to make the right gear come down. I had no way of knowing it was hopelessly bent. I even came in on one wheel, just kissed down on the left side, hoping that jarring effect would spring the other gear loose—a hell of a maneuver if I have to say so—but it proved useless. By then I was starting to think serious thoughts. While I was climbing to about 10,000 feet, one of my engines quit. Out of fuel. I radioed, “I’m gonna bail out of here unless anyone has any better idea.” Nobody did. I would’ve preferred to go a little higher before punching out, but I knew I had to get out of there before the other engine flamed out too, because then I had all of two seconds before we’d spin out of control. Ejecting makes a big noise—like you’re right up against a speeding train. There was flame and smoke as I got propelled out. And then everything went black. I was knocked unconscious banging my head against the chair. Colonel McClain saw me dangling lifelessly in the chute and radioed back, “Well, the fat’s in the fire now.” I was still out cold when I hit the desert floor face down. It was a windy day and I was dragged on my face by my chute about fifty feet in the sand and scrub. But the chopper was right there. The paramedic jumped out and got to me as I was turning blue. My mouth and nose were filled with sand and I was asphyxiating. Another minute or two and my wife would’ve been a widow. I was flown to a hospital. When I came to, my wife and Ben Rich were standing over my bed. Ben had flown her in from Burbank on the company jet. I had been forced to bail out four times over fifteen years of flight testing for the Skunk Works, and I never suffered a scratch. This time I had an awful headache and a throbbing pain in my leg, which was in a cast. A broken leg was not fatal in the test flight business but my pounding headache was. I had suffered a moderate concussion and that was the end of the line for me. The rules were very strict about the consequences of head injuries to professional pilots.

We were great innovators, rule benders, chance takers, and when appropriate, corner cutters. We did things like fuel airplanes inside an assembly area—a strictly forbidden act that risked fires or worse—to solve the problem of not having to move a very secret airplane into daylight to see if its fuel system leaked. Our people knew what they were doing, worked skillfully under intense pressure, and skirted hazards mostly by sheer expertise and experience. But as we grew, the skill level decreased and sloppiness suddenly became a serious problem. Midway into the stealth fighter project we began experiencing foreign object damage (FOD) caused by careless workmen. This particular problem is familiar to all manufacturers of airplanes but had been practically nonexistent in our shop. Parts left inside an engine can destroy it or cost lives in fatal crashes. We’ve all heard about surgeons leaving sponges or clamps inside bodies—but I know of a case in the main Lockheed plant where a workman left a vacuum cleaner inside the fuel tank of an Electra. The vacuum cleaner began banging around inside the fuel tank at ten thousand feet and the pilot landed safely before disaster struck.

But there was always a price to pay when too many inexperienced workers were doing vital work on an airplane. On April 20, 1982, Major Whitley’s stealth fighter was ready to take its Air Force acceptance flight out at the secret base. Whitley himself wanted to take the flight, but that was strictly against our rules. Our veteran test pilot Bob Riedenauer got the assignment. The airplane had performed perfectly during predelivery testing, but the night before the test flight we relocated a servomechanism from one equipment bay to another and rewired it. Riedenauer had barely lifted off the runway when he found to his horror that the wiring had accidentally reversed his crucial pitch and yaw controls. The airplane was only thirty feet off the deck when he flipped over backward and crashed on the side of the lake bed in a billowing cloud of dust. Bob was trapped in the cockpit and had to be cut free, sustaining serious leg injuries that kept him hospitalized seven long and painful months.

A few months after the first successful [SR-71] Blackbird test flight in April 1962, test pilot Bill Park appeared at my desk and dropped his plastic flight helmet in my lap. “Goddam it, Ben, take a look at that,” he said, pointing to a deep dent near the crown. As Bill described it, he was cruising at sixty-five thousand feet on a clear, crisp morning above New Mexico, when suddenly, with his airplane blistering at 2.7 Mach, he was deafened by a loud bang and violently flung forward in his harness, smashing his head against the cockpit glass and almost knocked unconscious. “It felt like a couple of the L.A. Rams shaking me as hard as they could,” Bill said. The problem was called an “unstart.” It occurred when air entering one of the two engines was impeded by the angle of the airplane’s pitch or yaw and in only milliseconds decreased its efficiency from 80 percent to 20 percent. The movable-spike inlet control could correct the problem in about ten seconds, but meanwhile the pilot was flung around helplessly, battered all over the cockpit. Bill Park and Lou Schalk and several of our other pilots were experiencing these awful “unstarts” as much as twenty times in ten minutes. The damndest part was that the pilot often couldn’t tell which engine was affected and sometimes he turned off the wrong one to get a relight and was left with no power at all. This happened to a Blackbird over West Virginia. The pilot struggled to relight both engines as the airplane plunged toward earth. Finally at thirty thousand feet, the two engines came alive with a tremendous sonic boom that shattered windows for miles and toppled a factory’s tall chimney, crushing two workers to death.

Not necessarily that much better flying completed aircraft designs…

(regarding the U-2 spy plane) But [the pilot] also had to guard against climbing too slowly, that is, below 98 knots, or the airplane would stall and fall out of the sky. Above 102 knots the airplane experienced dangerous Mach or speed buffeting. So the slowest it could safely go was right next to the fastest it could go as it climbed steeply to above sixty-five thousand feet. And the shuddering felt the same whether it was the result of going too fast or too slow, so a pilot had to keep totally alert while making corrections. A mistake might make the buffeting worse and shake the airplane to pieces. And to make life more interesting, our test pilots reported that sometimes during a turn the inside wing would be shaking in stall buffet while the outside wing was shaking even more violently in Mach buffet.

At altitude the pilot flew nose high and wings level, so for him to be able to see down we installed a cockpit device known as a drift sight—basically an upside-down periscope that had four levels of magnification and could be swiveled in a 360-degree arc. The pilots also had to plot their navigation by sextant, plotting precise routes while maintaining total radio silence and photographing particular targets with the pinpoint accuracy of a bombardier. A screwup could mean death by ground fire or fighter attack—and a guaranteed international crisis.

More: Read the book.