Stabilised video of Neil Armstrong crashing the LLTV

[smartcooky]

Worth a look!

http://sploid.gizmodo.com/the-aircraft-accident-that-almost-killed-neil-armstrong-1589559600

[Kiwi]

And here's Armstrong's matter-of-fact description, back in 1969, of the accident.  From First on the Moon -- A Voyage With Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, Edwin E. Aldrin Jr. Written with Gene Farmer and Dora Jane Hamblin. Epilogue by Arthur C. Clarke. Michael Joseph, London, 1970, pages 216-218:

   The LLRV's experience was not a happy one. The basic problem remained: to simulate LM performance in an earthly environment, and in a literal sense that was impossible. But Neil Armstrong flew it...

<< I guess we should say first that this machine flies in two methods. One, it flies as if it were flying over the moon, and in the other method it does not. That is, it isn't simulating the lunar environment but rather flying like a vertical landing and takeoff aircraft, on earth. Now you use the latter method in taking off, lifting off the surface, and flying to the point where you want to start the trajectory, where you're simulating the lunar descent from about five hundred feet. The vehicle would fly a good bit higher than that, but when we went very much higher we would not be able to simulate the lunar descent. A higher altitude requires a higher velocity. That is, as you are descending to the lunar surface you are also decelerating, and we pass through a five hundred-foot altitude at about the maximum speed of the LLRV, so we start the program at its maximum speed. This corresponds to an altitude of about five hundred feet. So the initial liftoff and climb — that's somewhat like flying a helicopter. It's a matter of flying to the position where you want to start the trajectory and then — what we call setting up the initial conditions. The initial conditions are those characteristics of the point where you want to start working on your problem, those characteristics of the LM that you can duplicate. We're talking about things like speed, altitude and the attitude of the vehicle. At — let's say — seventy feet per second or fifty mph, and then in an attitude that would be nearly level but pitched up a little bit, you would be slowing down at the start of the problem. You would be in effect, then, at the time you started coping with the problem, in an identical relationship with the landing area — how far away the landing area is, what difference in altitude you have, what speed — with what it would be like when you tried to land the real thing on the moon.
    The thing that surprises people on their initial flights in a lunar simulation mode is the tendency of the vehicle to float well beyond where you think it's going to go. It takes a good bit of practice to anticipate the distance necessary for you to slow down. Let's say you're approaching the landing area at thirty mph and you want to stop in a particular spot. Everything you've learned on earth will be wrong. If you try to do something the way you do it on earth, as in a helicopter, you will probably overshoot by a couple of hundred feet. So you have to learn to anticipate and start your braking much earlier so that you will stop where you want to stop. Similarly, if you change your mind — if you come to a hover and then change your mind, and decide you want to fly over fifty feet to the left or fifty feet in front of you, it takes a lot of effort to get yourself moving again. The vehicle appears to be sluggish in its translating ability, so it takes a long time and big angles to pick up a little speed to go over fifty feet. Again, it's a matter of anticipating earlier what your requirements will be. We hope to have a minute and a half or two minutes of fuel essentially in hover when we are landing on the moon, but you can chew that up right fast if you change your mind frequently about where you want to go. Anticipation is the key.
    The LLRV rocket engines use hydrogen peroxide as a propellant. Hydrogen peroxide is just water with extra oxygen in it. The propellant doesn't burn; it just decomposes into water in the form of superheated steam and oxygen. It's decomposed by being passed over a silver catalyst in the rocket engine chamber. On damp Houston days, and there are a lot of them because we have high humidity in the area, we get a lot of white steam around the vehicle. It comes from this steam being exhausted in the atmosphere. It makes the training vehicle look even stranger than the real LM — a kind of cross between an old-fashioned Stanley Steamer and a calliope. >>

    Then there was May 6, 1968, and that was a day Neil Armstrong was in the lunar landing research vehicle, the "flying bedstead," at Ellington Air Force Base, near Houston...

<< It was my twenty-first flight in the LLRV. I was flying the terminal portion of a simulated lunar landing profile; I lifted the vehicle off the ground and reached an altitude of about five hundred feet in preparation for making the landing profile. I had been airborne for about five minutes and was down to about two hundred feet when the trouble began. The vehicle began to tilt sharply. Afterward this incident was reported as an explosion, but that was erroneous. It's just that there are all the exhaust products of those rocket engines going off, and since there were a lot of engines firing at once people on the ground thought they were seeing an explosion. They were mistaken.
    The first sign of trouble was a decreasing ability to control the vehicle. There was less and less response. The trouble developed rather rapidly, but it was not an abrupt stop. It was a decay in attitude control. You have to have attitude control to point the main engines down, the engines that keep you from falling down to the surface. Without attitude control there is no chance to maintain the orientation and keep upright. The vehicle does have two separate systems for doing this, but in this case both systems failed at their common point, when the high pressure helium was supposed to pressurize the propellant to the rocket engines. So we were losing both systems simultaneously, and that's where you have to give up and get off.
    My guess is that I ejected at one hundred feet, plus or minus some. We don't have a way of measuring accurately, even from photographs. Seven months after this happened, Joseph S. Algranti, chief of MSC's aircraft operations office, who had been assigned to the team which investigated my accident, ran into a similar situation and ejected — at an altitude a bit lower than the one at which I had to get off. How far the ejection throws you depends on your attitude at the time you leave and also the upward or downward velocity you have at the time. But if you start from an upright attitude at about a hover, it will take you up about three hundred feet. Both of the ejections I am talking about were close to that, perhaps two hundred fifty feet. The chute ejector is automatic, although there is a manual override. I had always thought that I might be able to match the automatic system, but I found out that when I was reaching for the D ring, the automatic system had already fired. [9]
    This particular vehicle was the first LLRV; it had made 197 test flights at Edwards before it was shipped to Texas, and it had made about fifty flights at Ellington before the day of the crash. This day it fell straight down. The ejection system threw me somewhat east of the landing point of the machine, but the wind was from the east. At the time my chute opened I was a bit concerned that I might be drifting down into the fireball, because by now the vehicle had crashed and was burning. I started thinking about slipping the chute, but the wind was strong and I actually missed the flames by several hundred feet.
    I got up and walked away after I landed. The only damage to me was that I bit my tongue. >>

Notes, page 431:

9.   Neil Armstrong thus joined the Weber Booster Club, organized by Weber Aircraft in 1957. The club is made up of airmen who have been "boosted out of an intolerable situation by a Weber escape system." As of 1969 the club numbered more than 450 members. After his ejection from the LLRV in May 1968, Armstrong was presented with the membership plaque on which was mounted the "ditch" handle from the ejection seat, a membership card and a key chain medallion with the club's insignia, an armchair floating beneath a billowing parachute. NASA test pilot Joseph Algranti also gained membership after his successful ejection from the LLTV in December 1968.

[Peter B]

There's an interesting story here (http://www.nasa.gov/centers/dryden/pdf/88797main_kerosene.pdf) written by a test pilot who flew the LLRV. His account of his experiences with the LLRV starts on page 122.

Amusingly, the link was provided by Turbonium on UM. He claimed:

He didn't consider the LLRV a valid training vehicle for an actual lunar lander

Until he saw the LM (supposedly) land on the moon...

And after the astronauts credited the LLRV as a training vehicle for the LM..

What did he know, right?

Another poster then provided quotes from the chapter showing the pilot thought pretty much the opposite.

[Echnaton]

That is not the same video I am used to seeing attributed to the Armstrong crash.  There are notable differences between them and they are not the same flight from a different camera. First of all there are very few clouds in the one I am used to seeing.     One of them must be wrong.  And the one on Sploid doesn't match the description above, including the lack of attitude control problems that are apparent in the video linked below. 

[Echnaton]

Jesus Diaz on Gizmodo is well know for his post now and get the facts later, if ever, style.  He calls this the Lunar Landing Testing Vehicle rather than the Lunar Landing Training Vehicle.  This might well be an  LLTV in the video. 

Clavius says this "There were two other crashes: two of the LLTVs crashed, one in December 1968 and the other in January 1971. " The Sploid video look more like the Stuart Present 1971 ejection. 

[raven]

Still a pretty neat video.

[tikkitakki]

The crash mistakenly attributed to Armstrong is actually Joe Algranti's crash.
This video has all three crashes:

[Echnaton]

This video attributes the same crash to Armstrong as Sploid.  The second clip is the one I've normally seen attributed to Armstrong, but the video says it is Algranti's.  It is the one with the gyrations and multiple firings of the peroxide engines resulting in big puffs of steam. 

Which video do you think is mistaken, the Gizmodo vid or the link I posted?

[Kiwi]

Which video do you think is mistaken, the Gizmodo vid or the link I posted?

The commentary on the link you posted is done by the silky-smooth voice of Mr David Percy -- one of the enemies of this board and co-writer of his magnum dopus, Dark Moon. The same person who has photos of tree shadows in his book and claims they are parallel, but when one puts straight-edges along them, they meet near the top of the adjacent photo. The same person who, like most hoax-promoters, makes a few mistakes.

Percy's commentary can be seen in part three of his video, What Happened on the Moon, at 56 or 57 minutes in from the start of parts 2 & 3.

I've always understood the original video linked in this thread to be the Armstrong crash, and it is no surprise to me that Percy would claim that the one he is talking about was Armstrong's crash.  It would also be no surprise if Percy thought only one LLRV or LLTV crashed.

Percy at Clavius: http://www.clavius.org/bibcast.html
Percy's Aulis website: http://www.aulis.com/

[Peter B]

Kiwi said:

...magnum dopus...

Ha! Nice one, centurion.

[Echnaton]

The commentary on the link you posted is done by the silky-smooth voice of Mr David Percy

I had not paid attention to the voice at all.  It is just one example of the video I've seen always seen attributed to the Armstrong ejection.   And the one that most represents the description of tilting sharly and showing the puffs of steam in his description.