Michael J. Adams
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Michael J. Adams (born in Sacramento, California on 5 May 1930, died 15 November, 1967) was an American aviator and NASA astronaut.
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Background
Military experience
Adams enlisted in the U.S. Air Force in 1950 after graduation from Sacramento Junior College and earned his pilot wings and commission in 1952 at Webb Air Force Base, Texas. He served as a fighter-bomber pilot during the Korean War, followed by 30 months with the 813th Fighter-Bomber Squadron at England Air Force Base, Louisiana and six months rotational duty at Chaumont Air Base in France.
Education and flight experience
In 1958, Adams received an aeronautical engineering degree from Oklahoma University and, after 18 months of astronautics study at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was selected in 1962 for the Experimental Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base, California. Here, he won the Honts Trophy as the best scholar and pilot in his class. Adams subsequently attended the Aerospace Research Pilot School (ARPS), graduating with honors in December 1963. He was one of four Edwards aerospace research pilots to participate in a five-month series of NASA moon landing practice tests at the Martin Company in Baltimore, Maryland. In November, 1965 he was selected to be an astronaut in the United States Air Force Manned Orbiting Laboratory program. In July 1966, Major Adams came to the North American X-15 program, a joint USAF/NASA project. He made his first X-15 flight on 6 October 1966 in the number one aircraft.
The X-15 flight that Claimed his Life
Adams' seventh X-15 flight took place on 15 November 1967 in the number three aircraft. The X-15-3 would also make the most tragic flight of the program. At 10:30 in the morning on 15 November, the X-15-3 dropped away from underneath the wing of an NB-52B at 45,000 feet over Delamar Dry Lake.
While in powered flight, an electrical disturbance distracted Adams 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. In the NASA 1 control room, mission controller Pete Knight monitored the mission with a team of engineers.
As the X-15 climbed, Adams began a planned wing-rocking (rolling) maneuver so an on-board camera could scan the horizon. At the conclusion of the wing-rocking portion of the climb, the X-15 had begun a slow drift in heading; 40 seconds later, when the aircraft had reached its maximum altitude, it was off heading by 15 degrees. As Adams came over the top, the drift briefly halted, with the airplane yawed 15 degrees to the right. Then the drift began again; within 30 seconds, Adams was descending at right angles to the flight path. At 230,000 feet, encountering rapidly changing air pressure, the X-15 entered a Mach 5 spin.
In the NASA 1 control room there was no way to monitor the heading of the aircraft, so the situation was unknown to the engineers monitoring the flight. Normal conversation continued between Knight and Adams, with Knight advising Adams that he was "a little bit high," but in "real good shape." Adams radioed that the aircraft "[seemed] squirrelly," and moments later told Knight that he had entered a spin. The ground controllers sought to get the X-15 straightened out, but there was no recommended spin recovery technique for the X-15, and engineers knew nothing about the aircraft's supersonic spin tendencies. The chase pilots, realizing that the X-15 would never make Rogers Dry Lake, headed for the emergency lakes; Ballarat and Cuddeback, in case Adams attempted an emergency landing.
Adams held the X-15's controls against the spin, using both the flight controls and the reaction controls. He managed to recover from the spin at 118,000 feet and went into an inverted Mach 4.7 dive at an angle between 40 and 45 degrees. In theory, Adams was in a good position to roll upright, pull out of the dive and set up a landing. However, due to technical problems with the aircraft, the X-15 began a rapid pitching motion of increasing severity, still in a dive at 160,000 feet per minute. As the X-15 neared 65,000 feet, it was diving at Mach 3.93 and experiencing more than 15-g vertically, and 8-g laterally.
The aircraft broke up northeast of the town of Johannesburg 10 minutes and 35 seconds after launch. An Air Force pilot, who was filling in for another chase pilot, spotted the main wreckage northwest of Cuddeback Lake. The crash site coordinates are 35° 25' 12" N - 117° 36' 07" W. The aircraft was destroyed, and Adams killed.
Aftermath
Investigation
NASA and the Air Force convened an accident board. Chaired by NASA's Donald R. Bellman, the board took two months to prepare its report. Ground parties scoured the countryside looking for wreckage, specifically the film from the cockpit camera. The weekend after the accident, an unofficial FRC search party found the camera, but could not find the film cartridge. FRC engineer Victor Horton organized a search and on 29 November, during the first pass over the area, Willard E. Dives found the cassette.
The accident board found that the cockpit instrumentation had been functioning properly, and concluded that Adams had lost control of the X-15 as a result of a combination of distraction, misinterpretation of his instrumentation display, and possible vertigo. The electrical disturbance early in the flight degraded the overall effectiveness of the aircraft's control system and further added to pilot workload.
The board made two major recommendations: install a telemetered heading indicator in the control room, visible to the flight controller; and medically screen X-15 pilot candidates for labyrinth (vertigo) sensitivity. As a result of the X-15's crash, the FRC added a ground-based "8 ball" attitude indicator in the control room to furnish mission controllers with real time pitch, roll, heading, angle of attack, and sideslip information.
Adams remembered
Adams was posthumously awarded Astronaut Wings for his last flight in the X-15-3, which had attained an altitude of 266,000 feet - 50.38 miles. In 1991, Adams' name was added to the Astronaut Memorial at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
On June 8, 2004 a memorial monument to Adams was erected near the crash site, northwest of Randsburg, California.
Reference
- NASA X-15 Biography (http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/x15/adams.html)
External links
- NASA's X-15 website (http://history.nasa.gov/x15/cover.html)
- X-15 website (http://www.x15.com)
- Another X-15 website (http://www.x-15.com)
- X-15 Research Results (1964) (http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/SP-60/cover.html)
- X-15 photos at Dryden (http://www.dfrc.nasa.gov/gallery/photo/X-15/)
- Encyclopedia Astronautica's X-15 chronology (http://www.astronautix.com/craft/x15a.htm)
- The Crash Site of the X-15A-3 (http://www.check-six.com/Crash_Sites/X-15A_crash_site.htm)
- Major Michael Adams Monument (http://www.xb-70.com/wmaa/x15/monument/)