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http://www.airspacemag.com/military-avi ... 180953944/First, they tried an F-104.
“Not enough wing or thrust,” recalls Jack Petry, a retired U.S. Air Force colonel.
When NASA engineers were launching rockets at Florida’s Cape Canaveral in the 1960s,
they needed pilots to fly close enough to film the missiles as they accelerated through Mach 1 at 35,000 feet.
Petry was one of the chosen.
And the preferred chase airplane was the McDonnell F-4 Phantom.
“Those two J79 engines made all the difference,” says Petry.
After a Mach 1.2 dive synched to the launch countdown,
he “walked the [rocket’s] contrail” up to the intercept,
tweaking closing speed and updating mission control while camera pods mounted under each wing shot film at 900 frames per second.
Matching velocity with a Titan rocket for 90 extreme seconds,
the Phantom powered through the missile’s thundering wash,
then broke away as the rocket surged toward space.
Of pacing a Titan II in a two-seat fighter,
Petry says: “Absolutely beautiful. To see that massive thing in flight and be right there in the air with it—you can imagine the exhilaration.”
“yes, 68,000 is well above the F-4’s operating range,” says Jack Petry.
“We weren’t supposed to go above 50-, so we didn’t tell anybody.”
That day in January 1965, while he and his backseater, Captain Ray Seal, were chasing the Titan II rocket, their Phantom’s “smash”—flight energy—pushed the space program’s comfort zone.
In his helmet headset, Petry could hear that the range controller at Cape Canaveral was getting nervous:
“Break it off,” the controller repeated.
“Negative,”
Petry replied,
assuring the controller that his finite momentum wouldn’t mess with the missile.
“The whole idea was to keep the airplane pointed at the missile,” he says.
“So we stayed with it just as long as we had the airspeed—to keep the cameras rolling.”
For a fleeting moment, his altimeter eclipsed 68,000 feet.
“We had virtually no energy left,” says Petry.
“We weren’t flying anymore at that point—just riding. But the F-4 stayed quite stable.”
The Titan leaned into its trajectory and barreled downrange.
Petry broke away inverted and maneuvered to restore airflow over the wings.
He and his backseater kept Gemini II in the F-4’s camera sights, he says, “until we fell out of the sky.”
is weliswaar in maart 2015 gepubliceerd
, maar er zitten nog veel meer leuke en interessante stukjes in.
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