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This is a NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project transcript of astronaut James A. McDivitt, interviewed by Doug Ward at Elk Lake, Michigan, on 29 June 1999. McDivitt talks about flying F-86s in Korea, test pilot work at Edwards, and his first class at the Aerospace Research Pilot School. He also covers turning down Dyna-soar, joining NASA in 1962 and learning to be an Apollo Program Manager. He describes the Change Board and says decisions were not second-guessed.
“Nevers”36 pages
Johnson Space Center Oral History Project James A. McDivitt 29 June 1999 12-18 MCDIVITT: Yeah. Yeah. WARD: I think if I remember the statistic on that one. It’s 1 in 4 loss rate. MCDIVITT: Yeah. As a matter of fact, the airplanes they got killed in were all T-38s, which is a pretty reliable airplane. But that’s what flying’s about! WARD: Well, I recall after each one of those accidents, there seemed to be a hue and cry from the press and from members of Congress saying, “These things are just too dangerous. We can’t afford risking these highly trained, experienced people. And we need—” And then there would be a study and a look at whether we really needed high-performance aircraft as part of the training. MCDIVITT: I’m trying to remember how that went. When I joined NASA, we had some terrible airplanes. We had a couple of TF-102s, which are side-by-side 102s. The F-102 was a single-seat interceptor; and a TF-102 was a very—it was a difficult airplane. Well, it wasn’t difficult to fly. But it was a weird airplane in that they—most training airplanes for fighters are tandem cockpits. You’re like this [gestures]. For this airplane, they decided to make them this way [gestures]. And so, the fuselage sort of bulged out there; and the flying characteristics of the TF-102 were kind of weird. And if you flew it alone, you flew it—you were obviously in one side of the airplane; you couldn’t see out the other side very well. It had poor performance compared to the regular F-102; and it wasn’t a very good airplane. The T-33s were all very old and—but, you know, they served a purpose. They were reliable and all that, but they didn’t have good performance. And so, it was nice to pick up the T-38s. As a matter of fact, I went and got the first one. I’d been on a T-38 test flight run
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