Newly Released Video Shows Then Col. Chuck Yeager Losing Control and Crashing an NF-104A At Edwards AFB in 1963
Fantastic footage released by Edwards Air Force Base History Office shows the famous Dec. 10, 1963 “Zoom Flight” incident depicted in “The Right Stuff”.
It’s December 10th, 1963.
Col. Chuck Yeager, Aerospace Research Pilot School Commander, wearing a full pressure suit, straps in the cockpit of a an NF-104A Starfighter (#56-0762) serving as a low-cost “manned spacecraft transition trainer” for test pilots destined to fly
the X-15 at
Edwards Air Force Base, California, home of the Air Force’s Aerospace Research Pilot School,
later renamed U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School.
The NF-104A is one of three heavily modified Starfighters that has just entered service and reach altitudes of about 125,000 feet. It features a 6,000-pound thrust rocket engine at the base of the vertical tail, nose and wingtips’ reaction control thrusters, a larger vertical tail, increased wingspan, as well as tanks to store the rocket propellants, provision for a full pressure suit, a cockpit hand controller to operate the reaction control thrusters, and modified cockpit instrumentation.
The NF-104A is used to perform “Zoom” flights: a typical flight profile sees a level acceleration to Mach 1.9 at 35,000 feet; the rocket engine ignition and on reaching Mach 2.1, a 50-70 degree climb at 3.5 g. The
J79 afterburner would start to be throttled down at approximately 70,000 feet followed shortly after by manual fuel cutoff of the main jet engine itself around 85,000 feet. From that point, the pilot began a parabolic arc to the peak altitude, where he would experience zero “g” (or “weightlessness” for about one minute) and use hydrogen peroxide reaction control to handle the aircraft around the pitch, roll and yaw axis, before descending back into denser air where the main engine could be restarted using the windmill restart technique for recovery using a conventional landing. A standard mission would last about 35 minutes from taxi to touchdown.
Newly Released Video Shows Then Col. Chuck Yeager Losing Control and Crashing an NF-104A At Edwards AFB in 1963 – The Aviationist