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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.
Johnson Space Center Oral History Project James A. McDivitt 29 June 1999 12-19 at Edwards, and when we finally decided—NASA finally decided to get some better airplanes, I was asked to go out and pick the first one up. I hadn’t flown one for two or three years! Went out and signed for it, and had a look—run through the tech order a little bit to see—I couldn’t remember what the airspeeds were for landing! And I remember I took off at Palmdale [California] with it and flew—the first flight was across country to El Paso [Texas]. So, when I got to El Paso, they had a big runway and I shot a few landings and sort of did a little flight testing on the way and then brought it back into Ellington [Field, Houston, Texas]. And it was a big day. As a matter of fact, I was down there recently and I saw a picture of me delivering the first airplane. And after that, the airplanes were better. But that’s where we had our accidents. WARD: How important is high-performance jet flying to training people to fly in space? MCDIVITT: Oh, I think it’s absolutely crucial. As a matter of fact, you know, even when I became the Apollo Spacecraft Program Manager, I continued to fly my T-38s. I think when you’re making quick decisions, you’ll be forced into deciding something right now, that you don’t have any extra time, you sort of have to have experience in that. And you have to have current experience. And I used to joke about: I flew the T-38 when I was the Program Manager to just keep my adrenaline level up. In a sense, that was it; because when spacecraft were flying and we had a problem, most of those decisions, long-term decisions, fell to me. And I had to make them quickly, because when you got out to the Moon, it was an hour across the front side and an hour across the back side, and usually that’s about all the time we had to make a decision and it wasn’t one of those things where I could sit around and mull over for three days whether we should go or not go. I had to make a decision then. The same thing as it is with an airplane. T-38s never had much fuel, and you
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