Pilots

It's sunny and 70 degrees, but it's Monday and that means it's a day of meetings at Edwards Air Force Base. So test pilot Gordon Fullerton won't be up flying anything today. Instead, he will have time to kick back and reflect a bit on the flight plan that got him to this point.

"I remember being intrigued by airplanes because of my father," he begins. It was after World War I, and Charles Fullerton and three others bought a surplus Jenny from a pilot who taught them to fly. His dad went into the Army Air Corps to train pilots during the next world war, and he'd send young Gordon postcards of the air bases where he was stationed. For his tenth birthday, in October 1946, Charles gave Gordo his first airplane ride.

Gordo joined the Air Force ROTC, and spent time flying in the backseat of military aircraft such as the North American T-6 and the Douglas C-47. He got his first jet ride in a Lockheed T-33A. In 1957, he got his bachelor's in mechanical engineering and his commission as a second lieutenant; he returned to graduate school and earned his master's in the same subject. In 1958 he got his wings.

"There's a saying," Fullerton explains. "Join the Navy and see the world; join the Air Force and see Texas." He did see Texas, all right, behind the stick of a North American Sabre jet. "In North Texas I became the world's greatest fighter pilot, then I was assigned to SAC as a bomber pilot," he laughs. He ended up as something of a rarity then, and now — a pilot proficient in single- and multiengine jets.

In the 1960s, however, the Air Force had greater plans for Fullerton. The service wanted to launch the Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL) — essentially a Gemini capsule docked to a Titan III transtage — and Fullerton was chosen as one of the astronauts who would inhabit the space station. "For three years we had our annual 'Three Years to Launch' party," he explains. But after schedule delays and cost overruns, President Nixon finally canceled the program in 1969. NASA offered astronaut jobs to the youngest seven in the MOL program.

Fullerton found himself assigned as a support crewmember to Apollos 14, 15, 16, and 17. "We were gophers for the other crews," he says. "I'd be the last man inside the lunar module before launch, taking a picture to prove that all the switches were in the right position, or we'd strap the crew in the command module." Along came Skylab, and Apollo-Soyuz, and Fullerton was still third banana. But with the space shuttle, Fullerton was assigned to engineer the vehicle's cockpit. His work led to NASA choosing him as copilot, along with Apollo 13's Fred Haise, to perform the odd-numbered landing tests of the Enterprise. "All that was in '77 — but it was a fairly long time before the first orbital flight tests," Fullerton says. "There were all the problems with the thermal tiles coming off and redesigns." He finally blasted into space in 1982, riding Columbia on the third shuttle mission, with Jack Lousma as commander. "The ride up — it doesn't take long to get there," he says. "The solid rocket boosters fire and it's 1.5 Gs right off the bat. There's no doubt you're going up; the feeling of power and all is awesome." But it's also an important phase of flight for the pilots. "If anything goes wrong, like engine failure, you have to do the right thing right away," he explains. The pair spent eight days in orbit, and because of storms at Edwards the ship landed in White Sands, New Mexico, the first and only time a shuttle touched down there.

On his next flight NASA made Fullerton mission commander, this time of a seven-person crew. Less than six minutes after launch, the engines of the shuttle Challenger shut down prematurely. "At cutoff we had enough velocity to go around," he says. "Halfway around we circularized at 160 miles instead of 210 miles, but we had a good orbit." By the end of the mission, Fullerton was exhausted. "I had this overwhelming feeling of trying to do everything exactly right and not waste fuel and not do the wrong thing," he remembers. "When we rolled the shuttle down the end of Runway 25 I felt accomplishment, relief, and pride."

The next year he took a flight-test job at Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base. His research there makes a difference: He flew an F-15 and an MD-11 to touchdown with propulsion control alone; tomorrow we'll be flying with F-18s, using GPS for precise autonomous formation flight (see " Pilot Briefing," p. 52). "He still thinks he has the best job in the world — getting to flight-validate the aeronautical technologies of tomorrow," says Alan Brown, spokesman for Dryden.