Riding Rockets

If only God would have watched out for me all the way to the chocks. On one occasion Brewster Shaw let me fly our jet to a landing. After touchdown, I made the mistake of lowering the nose too quickly. The tire impacted a barrier wire stretched across the approach end of the runway (used by tailhook-equipped aircraft in an emergency), which dented the wheel and caused the nose tire to go flat. In the vernacular of the military flyer, we had just “stepped on our dicks.” One of the few rules in NASA’s playbook was that backseaters didn’t land the plane. Brewster attempted to cover our violation by telling the flight-line mechanics he had screwed up the landing. “I let the nose down too early.” The maintenance chief seemed to accept this explanation and we thought we were home free…until the next Monday morning meeting. TFNG Dave Walker brought the flat tire into the conference room! He hefted it from behind the table and said, “Brewster, you want to explain this? The incident report says you forgot to hold the nose up for aero-braking.” Dave had recently been appointed the TFNG safety rep for flight operations, so it was not surprising he had heard about the flat tire.

Brewster, a short, wiry, reticent air force pilot, shot Walker a look that read, “After this meeting is over, I’m going to personally shove that freakin’ tire up your ass and then reinflate it!” We had been caught, given up by one of our own. There was no way anybody in that room was going to believe Brewster, a test pilot, had forgotten to hold up the jet’s nose, any more than they would have believed Nolan Ryan had forgotten how to throw a fastball. John Young, in particular, was looking for an explanation.

An hour later we were in his office giving him one…the truth. “I let Mike do the landing, John.” After the confession it was painfully obvious we were going to need new assholes. Young gave us a well-deserved reaming. “I’m constantly fighting headquarters to keep these ’38s and stunts like this jeopardize it for all of us. MSes aren’t pilots. Letting Mullane land was the dumbest thing I’ve heard in a long time.”

During our grilling, I was struck by how uncomfortable Young appeared to be with command. As with his welcome speech, he couldn’t make eye contact. He looked at his shoes. He looked at papers on his desk. He looked out the window. He looked everywhere but into our eyes. In every prior ass chewing I had ever received from my military commander, and there had been a few, their eyes had been the worst. They had drilled into my very soul and filled me with dread. I recalled my last commander, Colonel Jim Glenn, haranguing me and my pilot for having disobeyed a checklist procedure to jettison some hot ordnance before making an emergency landing. Colonel Glenn had stared at us with the intensity of a cobra. I was embarrassed for Young and his dancing eyes. His unease was palpable. But we were finally dismissed to return to our offices and worry about whether we’d ever fly in space.

The flat tire incident didn’t hurt Brewster’s career. In fact he flew before Dave Walker, on STS-9 as—get this—John Young’s copilot! I can only assume that Young never really knew it was Brewster who had screwed up because he had never looked him in the face.

There was one aspect of the T-38 flying I wondered about. How would the civilians handle the issue of airsickness? Some of them were going to be affected, of that, I was sure. I had been in my early air force flying career. When I made my transition to the backseat of the F-4 Phantom, I vomited enough for a squadron of men. Would any of the civilians have a similar experience? Would any of them give up? There were whispers of some being as tormented as I had been. The office grapevine had it that Rhea Seddon was struggling and Hoot Gibson was taking her on flights to help her adjust. She didn’t quit. None of the civilians did. I admired them for it. It was a shared experience and another lesson for me that the civilian TFNGs were not the wimps I had imagined they were.

Chapter 13

Training

The training we had all been anxiously anticipating—how to operate and fly the space shuttle—began in earnest in 1979. It was a training program that would last our entire careers. The shuttle cockpit has more than a thousand hardware and software switches, controls, instruments, and circuit breakers. Before our first ride, we would have to know the function of all of them.