Aircraft Accidents Involving Test Pilots, Astronauts and Cosmonauts
NAME:
Theodore C. Freeman (Captain, USAF)
PERSONAL
DATA: Born February 18, 1930, in Haverford, Pennsylvania. Died October 31, 1964,
at Ellington Air Force Base, Houston, Texas, in the crash of a T-38 jet.
Survived by his wife Faith and one daughter.
EDUCATION:
Freeman completed his secondary education in 1948. He attended the University of
Delaware at Newark for one year, then entered the United States Naval Academy
and graduated in 1953 with a Bachelor of Science degree. In 1960, he received a
Master of Science degree in Aeronautical Engineering from the University of
Michigan.
ORGANIZATIONS:
Member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and the
Society of Experimental Test Pilots.
EXPERIENCE:
Freeman graduated from both the Air Force's Experimental Test Pilot and
Aerospace Research Pilot Courses. He elected to serve with the Air Force. His
last Air Force assignment was as a flight test aeronautical engineer and
instructor of experimental flight pilots at the Aerospace Research Pilot School
at Edwards Air Force Base, California. He served primarily in performance flight
testing and stability testing areas.
He
logged more than 3,300 hours flying time in the air force and later, including
more than 2,400 hours in jet aircraft. Selected as a member of the Astronaut
Corps.
Freeman
died when his T-38 jet struck a snow goose causing pieces of plexiglass from his
canopy to enter both engines. He ejected, but was too low for his parachute to
deploy completely.
NASA
EXPERIENCE: Freeman was one of the third group of astronauts selected by NASA in
October 1963.
NAME:
Charles A. Bassett, II (Captain)
PERSONAL
DATA:
Born in Dayton, Ohio, on December 30, 1931. Died February 28, 1966, in St.
Louis, Missouri, in the crash of a T-38 jet. He is survived by his wife, Jean,
and two children.
EDUCATION:
He attended Ohio State University from 1950 to 1952, and Texas Technological
College from 1958 to 1960. He received a Bachelor of Science Degree in
Electrical Engineering with honors from Texas Tech; He had done graduate work at
University of Southern California.
ORGANIZATIONS:
Member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Phi Kappa Tau,
Eta Kappa Nu, Tau Beta Pi and the Daedalians
EXPERIENCE:
Bassett was an Air Force Captain. He graduated from the Aerospace Research Pilot
School and the Air Force Experimental Pilot School.
He served as an experimental test pilot and engineering test pilot in the
Fighter Projects Office at Edwards Air Force Base, California.
He logged over 3,600 hours-flying time, including over 2,900 hours in a jet
aircraft.
NASA
EXPERIENCE:
Bassett was one of the third group of astronauts named by NASA in October 1963.
In addition to participating in the overall astronaut-training program, he had
specific responsibilities pertaining to training and simulators. On November 8,
1965, he was selected as pilot of the upcoming Gemini 9 mission. He died on
February 28, 1966, in the crash of a T-38 jet.
NAME:
Elliot M. See, Jr.
PERSONAL
DATA:
Dallas, Texas, July 23, 1927.
EDUCATION:
Received bachelor of science degree, U.S. Merchant Marine Academy; Master of
Science degree in engineering, University of California at Los Angeles.
MARITAL
STATUS:
Married to the former Marilyn J. Denahy of Georgetown, Ohio.
CHILDREN:
Sally, February 22, 1956; Carolyn, November 16, 1957; David, August 12, 1962.
ORGANIZATIONS:
Member of Society of Experimental Test Pilots; Associate Fellow of American
Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
EXPERIENCE:
Naval aviator from 1953 to 1956.
General Electric Company from 1949 to 1953, and 1956 to 1962 as a flight test
engineer, group leader, and experimental test pilot. Served as project pilot of
J79-8 engine development program in connection with F4H aircraft. Conducted
powerplant flight tests on the J-47, J-73, J-79, CJ805 and CJ805 aft-fan
engines. This work involved flying in F-86, XF4D, F-104, FllF-lF, RB-66, F4H,
and T-38 aircraft. He has logged more than 3,900 hours flight time, including
more than 3,300 hours in jet aircraft flight.
NASA
EXPERIENCE:
See was selected as an astronaut in the group named in September 1962. He
participated in all phases of the astronaut training program and was selected as
the pilot of the backup crew for the Gemini 5 flight, and the command pilot for
the Gemini 9 flight. He and Major Charles A. Bassett, the pilot for the Gemini 9
flight, were killed on February 28, 1966, during an instrument landing approach
at McDonnell Aircraft Corporation's St. Louis plant.
NAME:
Clifton C. Williams, Jr. (Major, USMC)
PERSONAL
DATA: Born September 26, 1932, in Mobile, Alabama. Died on October 5, 1967, near
Tallahassee, Florida, in the crash of a T-38 jet. He is survived by his wife
Jane and a daughter.
EDUCATION:
Graduated from Murphy High School, Mobile, Alabama; received a Bachelor of
Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from Auburn University, Auburn,
Alabama.
ORGANIZATIONS:
Associate member of the Society of Experimental Test Pilots and member of Pi Tau
Sigma (national mechanical honorary, and Tau Beta Pi (national engineering
society).
EXPERIENCE:
Williams, a Marine Corps Major, graduated from the Navy Test Pilot School at
Patuxent River, Maryland.
He was test pilot for three years in the Carrier Suitability Branch of the
Flight Test Division at Patuxent River. His work there included land based and
shipboard tests of the F8E, TF8A, F8E (attack), and A4E and automatic carrier
landing system.
Of the 2,500 hours flying time accumulated, he has more than 2,100 hours in jet
aircraft. Selected as a member of the Astronaut Corps.
NASA
EXPERIENCE: Williams was one of the third group of astronauts named by NASA in
October 1963. He served as backup pilot for the Gemini 10 mission and worked in
the areas of launch operations and crew safety.
Major Williams died on October 5, 1967, near Tallahassee, Florida, in the crash
of a T-38 jet.
In
June l967, Robert Henry Lawrence, Jr. was named the first African-American
astronaut, though he never made it into space. Several months later, on December
8, Lawrence died when his F-104 Starfighter jet, in which he was a
co-pilot/passenger during a training flight, crashed at Edwards Air Force Base,
California.
Lawrence
was born October 2, 1935, in Chicago. He received an undergraduate degree in
chemistry from Bradley University in 1956, and was commissioned a Second
Lieutenant into the US Air Force upon graduation at age 20. Lawrence later
earned a Ph.D. in physical chemistry in 1965 from Ohio State University.
Lawrence
distinguished himself as an exceptional Air Force test pilot and was among the
first to be named to the USAF Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL) program, which
was a precursor to today's successful NASA space shuttle program.
In
1997, thirty years after his tragic death, the Chicago native son's name was the
17th added to The Astronauts Memorial Foundation Space Mirror. The mirror was
dedicated in 1991 to honor all US astronauts who have lost their lives on space
missions or in training for missions.
The
astronaut, Michael Adams was born in Sacramento, California on 5 May 1930. He
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 AFB, Texas.
Adams served as a fighter-bomber pilot during the Korean conflict, followed by
30 months with the 813th Fighter-Bomber Squadron at England AFB, Louisiana and
six months rotational duty at Chaumont Air Base in France.
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 AFB, 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. Adams 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 July 1966, Major Adams came to the X-15 pilot program, a joint USAF/NASA
project. He made his first X-15 flight on 6 October 1966 in the number one
aircraft. 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 1967, the X-15 -3 dropped away
from the NB-52B at 45,000 feet over Delamar Dry Lake. At the controls was Major
Michael J. Adams, making his seventh X-15 flight. Starting his climb under full
power, he was soon passing through 85,000 feet. Then an electrical disturbance
distracted him 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 started a planned wing-rocking maneuver so an on-board camera could scan
the horizon. The wing rocking quickly became excessive, by a factor of two or
three. At the conclusion of the wing-rocking portion of the climb, the X-15
began a slow drift in heading; 40 seconds later, when the aircraft 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 increasing dynamic
pressures, the X-15 entered a Mach 5 spin.
In the NASA 1 control room there was no way to monitor heading, so nobody
suspected the true situation that Adams and his X-15 now faced. The controllers
did not know that the airplane was yawing, eventually turning completely around.
In fact, Knight advised Adams that he was "a little bit high," but in
"real good shape." Just 15 seconds later, Adams radioed that the
aircraft "seems squirrelly." At 10:34 came a shattering call:
"I'm in a spin, Pete." Plagued by lack of heading information, the
control room staff saw only large and very slow pitching and rolling motions.
One reaction was "disbelief; the feeling that possibly he was overstating
the case." But Adams again called out, "I'm in a spin." As best
they could, the ground controllers sought to get the X-15 straightened out.
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, went into afterburner
and raced for the emergency lakes; Ballarat and Cuddeback. Adams held the X-15's
controls against the spin, using both the aerodynamic control surfaces and the
reaction controls. Through some combination of pilot technique and basic
aerodynamic stability, the airplane recovered from the spin at 118,000 feet and
went into an inverted Mach 4.7 dive at an angle between 40 and 45 degrees. Adams
was in a relatively high altitude dive and had a good chance of rolling upright,
pulling out, and setting up a landing. But now came a technical problem; the
MH-96 began a limit-cycle oscillation just as the airplane came out of the spin,
preventing the gain changer from reducing pitch as dynamic pressure increased.
The X-15 began a rapid pitching motion of increasing severity, still in a dive
at 160,000 feet per minute, dynamic pressure increasing intolerably. As the X-15
neared 65,000 feet, it was diving at Mach 3.93 and experiencing over 15-g
vertically, both positive and negative, and 8-g laterally. The aircraft broke up
northeast of the town of Johannesburg 10 minutes and 35 seconds after launch. A
chase pilot spotted dust on Cuddeback, but it was not the X-15. Then an Air
Force pilot, who had been up on a delayed chase mission and had tagged along on
the X-15 flight to see if he could fill in for an errant chase plane, spotted
the main wreckage northwest of Cuddeback. Mike Adams was dead; the X-15 -3
destroyed.
NASA and the Air Force convened an accident board to look into the X-15
accident. Chaired by NASA's Donald R. Bellman, the board took two months to
prepare its report. Ground parties scoured the countryside looking for wreckage;
critical to the investigation was the film from the cockpit camera. The weekend
after the accident, an unofficial FRC search party found the camera;
disappointingly, the film cartridge was nowhere in sight. Engineers theorized
that the film cassette, being lighter than the camera, might be further away,
blown north by winds at altitude. FRC engineer Victor Horton organized a search
and on 29 November, during the first pass over the area, Willard E. Dives found
the cassette. Most puzzling was Adams' complete lack of awareness of major
heading deviations in spite of accurately functioning cockpit instrumentation.
The accident board concluded that he had allowed the aircraft to deviate as the
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 MH-96 adaptive control system then caused the
airplane to break up during reentry. 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 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.
Mike Adams was posthumously awarded Astronaut Wings for his last flight in the
X-15, 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.
Colonel
Yuri A. Gagarin was born on a collective farm in a region west of Moscow, Russia
on March 9, 1934. His father was a carpenter. Yuri attended the local school for
six years and continued his education at vocational and technical schools.
Yuri
Gagarin joined the Russian Air Force in 1955 and graduated with honors from the
Soviet Air Force Academy in 1957. Soon afterward, he became a military fighter
pilot. By 1959, he had been selected for cosmonaut training as part of the first
group of USSR cosmonauts.
Yuri
Gagarin flew only one space mission. On April 12, 1961 he became the first human
to orbit Earth. Gagarin's spacecraft, Vostok 1, circled Earth at a speed of
27,400 kilometers per hour. The flight lasted 108 minutes. At the highest point,
Gagarin was about 327 kilometers above Earth.
Once
in orbit, Yuri Gagarin had no control over his spacecraft. Vostok's reentry was
controlled by a computer program sending radio commands to the space capsule.
Although the controls were locked, a key had been placed in a sealed envelope in
case an emergency situation made it necessary for Gagarin to take control. As
was planned, Cosmonaut Gagarin ejected after reentry into Earth's atmosphere and
landed by parachute.
Colonel
Yuri Gagarin died on March 27, 1968 when the MiG-15 he was piloting crashed near
Moscow. At the time of his death, Yuri Gagarin was in training for a second
space mission.
NAME:
Stephen D. Thorne (Lieutenant Commander, USN)
BIRTHPLACE
AND DATE:
Born February 11, 1953, in Frankfurt-on-Main, West Germany. Died May 24, 1986.
Cdr Thorne is survived by his wife, Sue. He enjoyed baseball, running, reading,
and general aviation.
EDUCATION:
Graduated from T.L. Hanna High School, Anderson, South Carolina, in 1971;
received a bachelor of science degree in systems engineering from the U.S. Naval
Academy in 1975.
ORGANIZATIONS:
Member of the Society of Experimental Test Pilots. Life member of the Naval
Academy Alumni Association.
SPECIAL
HONORS:
Received Navy Commendation Medal in January 1986.
EXPERIENCE:
Upon graduation from the Naval Academy, Thorne entered flight training and
received his wings in December 1976. Following training in the F-4 Phantom, he
joined Fighter Squadron 21 (VF-21) and deployed to the Western Pacific aboard
the USS Ranger. After training at the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School in 1981,
Thorne spent the next two years at Strike Aircraft Test at the Naval Air Test
Center, Patuxent River, Maryland, flying mostly ordnance and weapons systems
tests in the F-4 and A-7 Corsair II. Thorne completed F-18 Hornet transition
training in October 1984 and joined Strike Fighter Squadron 132 (VFA-132) aboard
USS Coral Sea until departing for NASA.
He
accumulated over 2,500 hours and 200 carrier landings in approximately 30
different types of aircraft. He was a member of the Astronaut Corps.
NASA
EXPERIENCE:
Thorne was selected as an astronaut by NASA in June 1985 and, in August,
commenced a one-year training and evaluation program to qualify him for
subsequent assignment as a pilot on future Space Shuttle flight crews.
Lieutenant Commander Thorne was killed in an aircraft accident, in which he was
a passenger, on May 24, 1986.
NAME:
Manley Lanier "Sonny" Carter, Jr. (Captain, USN)
PERSONAL
DATA: Born August 15, 1947, in Macon, Georgia, but considered Warner Robins,
Georgia, to be his hometown. Died April 5, 1991. He is survived by his wife,
Dana, and two daughters. He enjoyed wrestling, golf, tennis, L.A. Dodger
baseball, and old movies. Carter was a professional soccer player from 1970-73
for the Atlanta Chiefs of the NASL.
EDUCATION:
Graduated from Lanier High School, Macon, Georgia , in 1965; received a bachelor
of arts degree in chemistry from Emory University in 1969, and a doctor of
medicine degree from Emory University in 1973.
ORGANIZATIONS:
Member of Sigma Delta Psi, Alpha Tau Omega, the Marine Corps Aviation
Association, and SETP.
SPECIAL
HONORS: Recipient of the Air Medal, Meritorious Service Medal, Navy Achievement
Medal, Meritorious Unit Citation, Marine Corps Aviation Association Special
Category Award 1982, NASA Meritorious Service Medal 1988, and NASA Space Flight
Medal 1989. Carter was the Guest of Honor at the 215th Marine Corps Birthday
Ball.
EXPERIENCE:
Carter graduated from medical school in June 1973 and completed a straight
internal medicine internship at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia. In
July 1974 he entered the U.S. Navy and completed flight surgeon school in
Pensacola, Florida. After serving tours as a flight surgeon with the 1st and 3rd
Marine Air Wings he returned to flight training in Beeville, Texas, and was
designated a Naval Aviator in April 1978. He was assigned as the senior medical
officer of USS Forrestal, and in March 1979 completed F-4 training at VMFAT-101
Marine Corps Air Station, Yuma, Arizona. He was subsequently reassigned as a
fighter pilot to duty flying F-4 phantoms with Marine Fighter Attack Squadron
333 at MCAS Beaufort, South Carolina. In 1981 he completed a 9-month
Mediterranean cruise aboard USS Forrestal with VMFA-115. In September 1982 he
attended U.S. Navy Fighter Weapons School (TOPGUN) and then served as 2nd Marine
Air Wing standardization officer and F-4 combat readiness evaluator at MCAS
Cherry Point, North Carolina. He then attended the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School,
graduating in June 1984. He has logged 3,000 flying hours and 160 carrier
landings.
NASA
EXPERIENCE: Selected by NASA in May 1984, Carter became an astronaut in June
1985, qualified for assignment as a mission specialist on future Space Shuttle
flight crews. Carter was assigned as Extravehicular Activity (EVA)
Representative for the Mission Development Branch of the Astronaut Office when
selected to the crew of STS-33. The STS-33 crew launched, at night, from Kennedy
Space Center, Florida, on November 22, 1989, aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery.
The mission carried Department of Defense payloads and other secondary payloads.
After 79 orbits of the earth, this five-day mission concluded on November 27,
1989 with a hard surface landing on Runway 04 at Edwards Air Force Base,
California. With the completion of his first mission, Carter logged 120 hours in
space.
At the time of his death, Captain Carter was assigned as a mission specialist on
the crew of STS-42, the first International Microgravity Laboratory (IML-1). He
died April 5, 1991, near New Brunswick, Georgia, in the crash of a commercial
airplane while on NASA business travel.