Experimental Flight Test Center at Edwards Air Force Base. Some rare, unclassified footage

Great stuff. I worked at Edwards for nearly 24 years, so I'm very familiar with the facilities and the airplanes. The later segments of the video were narrated by James O. Young, who was the historian at Edwards for many years. He was a terrific guy. I knew a lot of those test pilots, too. One of them, the pilot of the F-111 that crashed during the spin test, later became commander of Area 51. Obviously, he successfully ejected the F-111's escape capsule and survived along with his flight test engineer, who later became a high-ranking USAF civilian at Area 51 and an renowned expert in aircraft survivability ("stealth"). Fun fact: I have visited that F-111 crash site. Again, lots of terrific footage in this video. Brings back some good memories.
 
@Whisperstream : would be delighted to hear more about that F-111 ejection. And many more story...

The video above seems to show an ejection at 14kft with the spin chute apparently working.
I guess that 14kft was msl, hence a lot of less altitude for a safe recovery in reality. Can you tell us more? Is there a report accessible somewhere? Or was there anything else preventing them to stay a little bit longer with the bird?
 
TomcatViP said:
@Whisperstream : would be delighted to hear more about that F-111 ejection. And many more story...

The video above seems to show an ejection at 14kft with the spin chute apparently working.
I guess that 14kft was msl, hence a lot of less altitude for a safe recovery in reality. Can you tell us more? Is there a report accessible somewhere? Or was there anything else preventing them to stay a little bit longer with the bird?
Click to expand...

The airplane in the video was the 21st F-111A built (and the third production model), USAF serial 65-5703. It served as a test aircraft during its entire service life and was modified to accommodate a 40-foot diameter spin recovery parachute in a canister attached to the aft end of the aircraft and the right seat was removed from the crew capsule. Initial spin testing took place from 1969 to the spring of 1972.

In August 1972, the airplane was transferred to the Air Force Flight Test Center at Edwards AFB for initiation of the Air Force Stall/Post-Stall/Spin-Prevention Program. The right seat was reinstalled in the crew capsule to accommodate a flight test engineer.
On 11 September 1972, Maj. Charles P. “Pete” Winters piloted the aircraft’s 124th flight with Sgt. Patrick S. Sharp as flight test engineer. Winters initiated an intentional stall and entered a spin at 35,000 feet. The spin chute was deployed at 20,000 feet and a speed of 220 knots. The chute failed and separated from the aircraft and the crew ejected in the escape capsule at an altitude of 11,500 feet.
An accident investigation later determined that the aircraft may, in fact, have recovered from the spin. The crew, however, did not recognize the recovery and initiated the ejection sequence. The aircraft entered a steep dive and plunged into the desert near Aerial Acres, north of Edwards AFB, and was completely destroyed.
 
The information about the F-111A spin tests comes from a combination of material from a test report (I'm sure I have an original copy of it someplace) and talking with Pete Winters. Really, There are great stories for just about every frame of this video. I will just throw a few of them at you.

About 19 minutes in, there's a short clip of static firing at one of the rocket test stands on Leuhman Ridge. It's funny. When standing on the Edwards flightline, you can see the tests stands atop the ridge and it looks like it's not that far away. When looking back at the main base from the test stand, however, it seems like it's practically in another state. The distance is more than 10 miles. One time, someone took me down into the basement of a building at the Rocket Site and we came to a massive concrete bunker with a steep stairway leading upward. We followed it up and occasionally along horizontal passages lined with cots, and through rooms including a cafeteria and a morgue. There were remnants on fallout shelter supplies here and there. Eventually, we emerged out the back side of Leuhman Ridge.

At 00:25:19, there is a clip of a B-1B landing on the lakebed with its nose gear retracted. The only damage was a bit of paint scraped off the bottom of the nose and a some debris ingested by the engines. The airplane was placed on static display at the Edwards air show shortly afterward.

The Northrop YB-49 flying wing, seen at 00:41:42, is probably my favorite airplane, a real beauty. The narration describes how Muroc was renamed Edwards in honor of copilot Glen Edwards following the crash of the second prototype in 1948. Forbes AFB in Kansas is named for the aircraft commander, Danny Forbes. So, here's a story for you. A friend of mine once took a guy to the crash site sometime in the 1990s and that guy found a nicely cut star sapphire, like from a ring. Lots of people had visited the site and dug it up like crazy over the years, so it seemed like something a tourist probably lost. A few years later, Don Thomson walks into a museum where my buddy was a volunteer. Don liked to talk about the old days at Edwards as he had been there since the mid 1940s. He was the last guy to see the YB-49 crew alive, when he closed the crew hatch prior to takeoff. He was telling my friend this story, when he paused and said, "Danny Forbes was recently married and his wife had given him a star sapphire ring; they found the setting, but they never did find the stone." Long story short, that stone got returned to Forbes' widow and eventually donated for display at Forbes AFB.

The F-100C Super Saber accident (00:47:40) took place on 10 January 1956. That footage has long been referred to as the "Saber Dance." I came across pieces of the plane near the edge of the runway as well as other wrecks (B-24, F-104D, MGT-101 Mini Guppy, etc.).

The M2-F1 lifting body (1:03:00), otherwise known as the "Flying Bathtub," was made mostly of wood and fabric around a tubular steel framework. For many of its flights, it was towed aloft behind a Pontiac automobile speeding across the lakebed. A DC-3 tow plane was used for higher-altitude flights. One time, the I was a teenager, I visited Edwards North Base with a couple friends. We pushed open the door of one of the old hangars and found the M2-F1 inside, covered with dust. We took turns sitting in the cockpit and trying to imagine what it must have been like to fly a wingless aircraft. Good times.
 
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Yeah, really eerie. Also extremely unlikely considering how many people had dug up that site over the years. Back in the 1980s, a guy from California City spent days digging and sifting the soil. He collected a vast amount of material, but somehow missed that stone. The widow Forbes identified it from a photograph she had kept all those years.
 

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