6.11.2009

NASA 747 pilot shares experience carrying the space shuttle


"NASA 747 pilot shares experience carrying the space shuttle
Read the detailed experience of the NASA pilot who flew the 747 carrying the space shuttle ATLANTIS back to the KENNEDY SPACE CENTER. A bit lengthy, but trust me... worth every second reading! You will feel that you were there!!! Very good narrative of what it was like!

"FAILURE IS NOT AN OPTION", Gene Kranz, APOLLO-13
"....it's all imbedded in the software!"

From: Triple Nickel
Sent: Thursday, June 04, 2009 9:34 PM
Subject: (JSCAS ) Shuttle Carry

Well, it's been 48 hours since I landed the 747 with the shuttle Atlantis on top and I am still buzzing from the experience. I have to say that my whole mind, body and soul went into the professional mode just before engine start in Mississippi, and stayed there, where it all needed to be, until well after the flight...in fact, I am not sure if it is all back to normal as I type this email. The experience was surreal.
Seeing that "thing" on top of an already overly huge aircraft boggles my mind. The whole mission from takeoff to engine shutdown was unlike anything I had ever done. It was like a dream...someone else's dream.
We took off from Columbus AFB on their 12,000 foot runway, of which I used 11,999 1/2 feet to get the wheels off the ground. We were at 3,500 feet left to go of the runway, throttles full power, nose wheels still hugging the ground, copilot calling out decision speeds, the weight of Atlantis now screaming through my fingers clinched tightly on the controls, tires heating up to their near maximum temperature from the speed and the weight, and not yet at rotation speed, the speed at which I would be pulling on the controls to get the nose to rise. I just could not wait, and I mean I COULD NOT WAIT, and started pulling early. If I had waited until rotation speed, we would not have rotated enough to get airborne by the end of the runway. So I pulled on the controls early and started our rotation to the takeoff attitude. The wheels finally lifted off as we passed over the stripe marking the end of the runway and my next hurdle (physically) was a line of trees 1,000 feet off the departure end of Runway 16. All I knew was we were flying and so I directed the gear to be retracted and the flaps to be moved from Flaps 20 to Flaps 10 as I pulled even harder on the controls. I must say, those trees were beginning to look a lot like those brushes in the drive through car washes so I pulled even harder yet! I think I saw a bird just fold its wings and fall out of a tree as if to say "Oh just take me". Okay, we cleared the trees, duh, but it was way too close for my laundry. As we started to actually climb, at only 100 feet per minute, I smelled something that reminded me of touring the Heineken Brewery in Europe...I said "is that a skunk I smell?" and the veterans of shuttle carrying looked at me and smiled and said "Tires"!
I said "TIRES??? OURS???" They smiled and shook their heads as if to call their Captain an amateur...okay, at that point I was. The tires were so hot you could smell them in the cockpit. My mind could not get over, from this point on, that this was something I had never experienced.
Where's your mom when you REALLY need her?
The flight down to Florida was an eternity. We cruised at 250 knots indicated, giving us about 315 knots of ground speed at 15,000'. The miles didn't click by like I am use to them clicking by in a fighter jet at MACH .94. We were burning fuel at a rate of 40,000 pounds per hour or 130 pounds per mile, or one gallon every length of the fuselage. The vibration in the cockpit was mild, compared to down below and to the rear of the fuselage where it reminded me of that football game I had as a child where you turned it on and the players vibrated around the board. I felt like if I had plastic clips on my boots I could have vibrated to any spot in the fuselage I wanted to go without moving my legs...and the noise was deafening. The 747 flies with its nose 5 degrees up in the air to stay level, and when you bank, it feels like the shuttle is trying to say "hey, let's roll completely over on our back"..not a good thing I kept telling myself. SO I limited my bank angle to 15 degrees and even though a 180 degree course change took a full zip code to complete, it was the safe way to turn this monster.
Airliners and even a flight of two F-16s deviated from their flight plans to catch a glimpse of us along the way. We dodged what was in reality very few clouds and storms, despite what everyone thought, and arrived in Florida with 51,000 pounds of fuel too much to land with. We can't land heavier than 600,000 pounds total weight and so we had to do something with that fuel. I had an idea...let's fly low and slow and show this beast off to all the taxpayers in Florida lucky enough to be outside on that Tuesday afternoon. So at Ormond Beach we let down to 1,000 feet above the ground/water and flew just east of the beach out over the water. Then, once we reached the NASA airspace of the Kennedy Space Center, we cut over to the Banana/Indian Rivers and flew down the middle of them to show the people of Titusville, Port St.Johns and Melbourne just what a 747 with a shuttle on it looked like. We stayed at 1,000 feet and since we were dragging our flaps at "Flaps 5", our speed was down to around 190 to 210 knots. We could see traffic stopping in the middle of roads to take a look. We heard later that a Little League Baseball game stop to look and everyone cheered as we became their 7th inning stretch. Oh say can you see...
After reaching Vero Beach, we turned north to follow the coast line back up to the Shuttle Landing Facility (SLF). There was not one person laying on the beach...they were all standing and waving! "What a sight" I thought...and figured they were thinking the same thing. All this time I was bugging the engineers, all three of them, to re-compute our fuel and tell me when it was time to land. They kept saying "Not yet Triple, keep showing this thing off" which was not a bad thing to be doing. However, all this time the thought that the landing, the muscling of this 600,000 pound beast, was getting closer and closer to my reality. I was pumped up! We got back to the SLF and were still 10,000 pounds too heavy to land so I said I was going to do a low approach over the SLF going the opposite direction of landing traffic that day. So at 300 feet, we flew down the runway, rocking our wings like a whale rolling on its side to say "hello" to the people looking on! One turn out of traffic and back to the runway to land...still 3,000 pounds over gross weight limit. But the engineers agreed that if the landing were smooth, there would be no problem. "Oh thanks guys, a little extra pressure is just what I needed!" So we landed at 603,000 pounds and very smoothly if I have to say so myself. The landing was so totally controlled and on speed, that it was fun. There were a few surprises that I dealt with, like the 747 falls like a rock with the orbiter on it if you pull the throttles off at the "normal" point in a
landing and secondly, if you thought you could hold the nose off the ground after the mains touch down, think again...IT IS COMING DOWN!!!
So I "flew it down" to the ground and saved what I have seen in videos of a nose slap after landing. Bob's video supports this! :8-)
Then I turned on my phone after coming to a full stop only to find 50 bazillion emails and phone messages from all of you who were so super to be watching and cheering us on! What a treat, I can't thank y'all enough. For those who watched, you wondered why we sat there so long.
Well, the shuttle had very hazardous chemicals on board and we had to be "sniffed" to determine if any had leaked or were leaking. They checked for Monomethylhydrazine (N2H4 for Charlie Hudson) and nitrogen tetroxide (N2O4). Even though we were "clean", it took way too long for them to tow us in to the mate-demate area. Sorry for those who stuck it out and even waited until we exited the jet.
I am sure I will wake up in the middle of the night here soon, screaming and standing straight up dripping wet with sweat from the realization of what had happened. It was a thrill of a lifetime. Again I want to thank everyone for your interest and support. It felt good to bring Atlantis home in one piece after she had worked so hard getting to the Hubble Space Telescope and back.

Triple Nickel
NASA Pilot"

--taken from a NASA e-mail

EDIT: The reliability of this e-mail has been put into question (see below comments). I can neither confirm nor deny that this piece was written by the 747 pilot, I can only confirm that it was distributed through NASA e-mail by a NASA Director (where he got it I do not know).
The real 747 pilots have an official NASA blog which can be found here: http://blogs.nasa.gov/cm/blog/shuttleferry.blog/

27 comments:

  1. That was one of the most exciting narratives I've ever read! Nice to know that "business as usual" isn't, and that the people directly involved in these events are as excited as we down here on Fantasy Island. Thanks, Triple Nickel!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
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      Delete
    2. Joanne Friedman,
      Thanks for one of few nice comments. I am Triple and I did fly this mission and I did write this article. Why? Well I’m a member of an astronomy club and often gave speeches. After my shuttle ferry mission two club members ask me to type up a recap of the flight. So I sent a “PRIVATE” email to these two members on a “PRIVATE “ email server. One copy led to another copy and before I knew it, this email went PUBLICLY viral. I never thought it would be read by outsiders so I took several libirties to embellish this story. The facts are correct but for example, we didnt really just miss the trees. Close, but safely clear of them. But to me they looked like an insurmountable wall! Again, thanks for your nice comment. To the other nay sayers, I can only caution them to hold off unlesss they have been there and know how that unique 747 operates. It’s not like any other!
      Triple

      Delete
  2. Great story 3x5cents !!

    Maybe next time they could hook up about 8 SkyCranes and make the trip haha.

    Tom Ratcliff
    tomratcliff@gmail.com

    ReplyDelete
  3. I’m not sure I believe this for two reasons. First, I don’t think NASA would plan a ferry that had the runway used to the last foot and then have trees at the end. In addition, the runway is 15,000 feet long not 12,000. Second, there is no way it would fly at 1000 feet over the beach.

    The following NASA site the pilot says the 747 flies normally.
    http://www.nasa.gov/returntoflight/crew/ferryflight.html

    ""It handles remarkably the same," says SCA pilot Gordon Fullerton. As chief pilot at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center, his daily job involves flying jets for high-performance aircraft research. But Fullerton's experience with the orbiter and SCA dates back nearly three decades. In addition to being a Space Shuttle commander and pilot, he was one of four NASA astronauts to land the Enterprise during the Space Shuttle Approach and Landing Test program in 1977.

    "It's obvious [the orbiter] is up there, because there's a constant rumble that you can feel because of the wake of the orbiter hitting the vertical stabilizer of the 747," Fullerton says of ferry flights. But other than long takeoff rolls and the need for some extra care in steep turns, "it's pretty much the same."

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  4. Columbus AFB does not have a runway 16. Rotating early causes a longer takeoff roll. There are other problems as well. This appears to be a well written, but not well researched, piece of fiction.

    ReplyDelete
  5. The reliability of this e-mail has been put into question (see above comments). I can neither confirm nor deny that this piece was written by the 747 pilot, I can only confirm that it was distributed through NASA e-mail by a NASA Director (where he got it I do not know).
    The real 747 pilots have an official NASA blog which can be found here: http://blogs.nasa.gov/cm/blog/shuttleferry.blog/

    ReplyDelete
  6. Hello Sir

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    ReplyDelete
  7. 1st of all, I can't confirm the posting is from Jack "Triple" Nickel or not, but according to Google Earth, Columbus AFB, after a nominal clearing, has trees at both ends of the runways and according to the USGS and Wikipedia, the long runway is 12,000 fet. long. Columbus AFB doesn't indeed have a runway 16 and the only thing I can sum up there is, that's a type-O, although if you look at the keyboard number pad, the 6 is right above the 3 key ?

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  8. A nice bit of fiction to say the least. Like was previously said, they are not going to takeoff when every last inch of runway is needed. The chemicals are removed when the shuttle is still on the runway, they aren't going to fly it home with hazmat still onboard. They will have enough fuel on board to get where they need to go and land, not fly around to burn down to landing weight. And they aren't going to landing overweight unless there is an emergency that would dictate IMMEDIATE landing.

    ReplyDelete
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    Thank you
    With Regards,
    John David

    ReplyDelete
  10. This is an exciting thing because it's difficult to believe so my cousin told me that a man named Sildenafil Citrate was the leader of that experience besides he told him all his adventures.

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  11. Looks amazing!!!! /I look forward to your feedback /thanks for this man it was very helpful.

    Tires Florida

    ReplyDelete
  12. Here are 2 videos from June 2009 documenting the fly-by

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VN1eWasQ-c8

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQi_6SM9KME

    ReplyDelete
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  21. This must have been a once in a lifetime exsperience

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  22. Writing this entry to reassure the skeptics of this flight story. I can attest to the integrity of the legendary Jack “Triple” Nickel and this amazing true life tale. Jack (before he was known as "Triple") was one of my Cal Poly San Luis Obispo college roommates. At that time, he already had many hours in his flight log on rental planes and he often asked us to accompany him as he continued to fill his book. His plan was to graduate, use his engineering degree just to get into Air Force flight school, and after four years in jets, he wanted to go on to become an airline pilot.

    He did go on to the Air Force, but flying jet fighters got him hooked on speed, and high technology planes. He put in twenty years, staying in first-line fighters at various assignments around the globe. Then as age crept up and his body could no longer handle the g-forces, he was gently forced out of fighters, and became a highly regarded combat tactics instructor, then a commander of the Air Force version of Top Gun School. If you squint your eyes, he does look a little like Tom Cruise.

    He earned a pension, and then switched to working for the Air National Guard in Houston for a few years teaching weekend warriors all about combat fighter tactics. His skill and reputation earned him work at NASA as a “Research Pilot.” Soon he was teaching Astronauts how to land the space shuttle and then flying a chase plane alongside the shuttle as it approached the runway, “consulting” by radio with the Shuttle Commander about his one-shot landing. He also piloted a stripped-down passenger plane which simulated the weightlessness of outer space for astronaut trainees by climbing sharply, then dropping the nose for several minutes in a free-fall. Years ago, he called me “out of the blue,” to meet him at a local air base where he made a stopover with the “Super Guppy,” a one-of-a-kind bloated cargo plane that transports sections of the space station from manufacturers on the west coast to the launch facility in Florida. Later he was one of the 747 pilots that piggybacked the Space Shuttles from the California desert back to Florida. And that is when he wrote this flight story.

    In retirement, he and his sons shared an interest in amateur astronomy, including making their own telescopes and traveling to remote mountaintops to study the stars. Years ago I caught a radio show interview of him by Dr. David Levy, of Shoemaker-Levy Comet fame. ""Triple" is now retired and lives in Texas.

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