Presentation Date: August 22, 2002
Col. Joseph F. Joe Cotton USAF
Cotton spoke on Sept 2001 about his experience in WWII. This time, Cotton spoke about his experience in the sixties as Air Force chief test pilot. He flew the first flight of the XB-70 at Edwards Air Force Base. He flew the XB-70A No. 2 at Mach 3.08 at 72,800 feet April 12, 1966.
- Fighter Pilot and Bomber Pilot of B-17 "Mickey Finn".
- Subject of book "Aircraft Down", by Dr. Philip Caine, about B-17 "Mickey Finn" shot down over Greek Island of Corfu and their successful 5-month evasion and escape!
A Test Pilot’s Life Col. Joe Cotton’s flying career spanned 40 years and 80 types of aircraft - - from Tiger Moths to B-58 "Hustler" & XB-70 Valkyrie supersonic bombers.
Joe Cotton speaks in a way befitting a man with a lifetime of extraordinary experiences. In launching his encore talk at the Golden Gate Wing’s August dinner meeting, Cotton cited the fictional Forrest Gump, who quoted his own mother in saying, “Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get.”
Of the valuable lessons 80 years have taught him, Cotton says,“Life is like a roll of toilet paper. The nearer you get to the end the faster it goes.” Cotton is a member of a special test pilot fraternity which has worked in a rarified world of extremes at Edwards Air Force Base - - Scott Crossfield, Bud Anderson, Chuck Yeager, Pete Knight and Joe Walker. Speaking to the Golden Gate Wing last year (Sept. 2001) about a life philosophy based on his flying experiences, Joe’s encore followed his keynote speech at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.
“Don Lopez is a friend. I’ve known him for years. He works up there and is the Deputy Director... and his boss is a four-star Marine General, John Daley,” says Cotton. ”And the more I think about... Bill Kepner and Al Boyd... and the few generals I’ve met, the more I admire those boards who have picked those generals. Because believe me, they know what they’re doing. I’ve been so impressed in my life with the people I worked for.”
Attitude determines altitudeCotton launched his talk with stories from the cockpit of the XB-70, a test bomber built only as two prototypes. Known as the Valkyrie, the XB-70 never went into production, but its test flights generated much information about supersonic flight.
Joe says once the huge white Valkyrie was aloft and cruising, the question became, “How well are you holding altitude? This was never classified information, but we’re not too proud of it.”
Referring to a slide showing altitude deviations for a run at Mach 3 - - a wavy line between 69,500 feet and 72,000 feet - - Joe commented, “You’d say, man alive. You’re shooting for what, 70 or 71,000, or what? And you notice, that’s just a two minute run. Any guy would say turn on the autopilot. And we didn’t have an auto-pilot.”
“When I started flying in Newcastle, Indiana, Bob (Joe’s flight instructor) told me that I’d never have the discipline to be a military pilot. I’d always wondered what he meant by that. I thought he said don’t buzz the cows and the chickens or that sort of thing. But discipline in an airplane is... a guy says, ‘Have you ever rolled a Hustler, a B-58.’ I never rolled a Hustler. The Hustler is not a fighter. The Hustler would roll, no sweat - - might damage the gimbals and the bomb-nav system and what have you. But I’m test pilot and I’m not paid to violate the handbook. What I am paid for is to make that airplane stand still in the air and bring home the data the engineers want. And discipline to me means plus or minus 20, plus or minus 1, plus or minus 2.”
One thing Cotton says did help was a Vernier, an instrument which would show one degree pitch change in the aircraft. “Because you wanted to stay within a quarter or a half a degree. And once we did that, we could do a bit better.”
There’s a deep lesson in that. Joe recalled the day a church member named Earl Walker cited the motto of his church - - attitude determines altitude. Joe says if today’s teens leave home with a good attitude, they can achieve any altitude. “All I want to show you is if you have the proper attitude, you control the airplane and you can control your life.”
Making better pilotsMoving on to a slide of a well known World II fighter, Cotton commented “This plane, convinced me I was not a natural pilot. That’s a P-36 with an Allison V-1710 engine on the front end of it. It did not want you to see the runway you were about to takeoff on. It did not want you to raise the tail real early in the takeoff roll, and it seemed to resent the fact that I did not yet have my license to fly it. And I didn’t. I flew it about ten hours before I got my silver wings. But that airplane (the P-40 Warhawk) made me a better pilot. “
“This airplane... the only reason I got my wings was the fact that i had not ground looped it or augured-in in it. Because I think there were probably twice as many people who lost their lives in training and trying to fly that airplane as were lost in combat. It wasn’t easy. I didn’t know it wasn’t until I flew the P-80. There’s where contrast in your life is so important.”
The next slide was of an RP-63, the Bell Kingcobra. It was painted orange as part of Operation Pinball, the Army Air Force aerial gunnery training program. “This was a Pinball machine, a target airplane we developed so aircrew members could shoot at it, and have lights on it... It’s a long story, but a wonderful story for me especially, because it got me interested in research and development.”
The face of a young Cal Worthington (long before his car sales fame) reflected from the screen as Cotton described his check ride in a B-29. He was in Laredo, Texas, and the instructor pilot had left (been discharged) when Joe went to the hotel where the pilot had been staying.
“Calvin Worthington did me one of the greatest favors of my life. He was going to Corpus Christi, Texas... and he went back out and we flew... You know the King ranch is in Texas, and we actually went out and flew up and down the road in a B-29 so we could line up on a runway. Went in and did a few landings and he signed me off. So I’ve always told Cal I’ve appreciated that more than he would ever believe.”
A fellow Hoosier, Bill Kepner, drew raise from Cotton. The test pilot worked for Kepner at Eglund Field, Florida, with it’s huge climatic laboratory for preparing aircraft for harsh environments such as Alaska’s winters.
“It was a great privilege to work for Bill Kepner. While working for him and enjoying flying airplanes like the P-80 and the Bearcat, I’d fly everything from fighters, to medium bombers, to heavy bombers up to the B-36. Somebody suggested, ‘maybe you ought to go get a test pilot’s certificate.’ So I went off to the Empire test pilot school in England. What an unbelievable group of airplanes and what an unbelievable experience.”
The aircraft types Joe flew there ranged from the Sea Fury, Meteor and Vampire jets, right on down to sailplanes - - all giving Cotton a greater range of knowledge about aircraft, knowledge which could prove invaluable to a test pilot.
Among the handful of airplanes Joe flew which he says made him “a better pilot” was the Boeing B-47.
“You had to fly with good discipline to fly the B-47. The B-47, I thought, was the bomber pilot’s ”Shooting Star”, the P-80. It very much reminded me of the P-80... You cannot fly this airplane like a B-17. If you don’t respect, based on your gross weight, the winds and the runway and everything... if you don’t respect your proper approach speed, you can choose which end of the runway you’d like to burn on. It was not a forgiving machine. I think, if I hadn’t been really exposed to this airplane, that I’d couldn’t have handled a couple of three airplanes after that.” Along the way Joe has made interesting observations about airplane types and capabilities. He notes that the B-47 first flew in 1947 and, “introduced me to 47,000 feet. The B-52 first flew in ‘52, and introduced me to about 52,000 feet.”
That first B-52 was a six-engined prototype (the B-52 later was built with eight engines), followed by an ‘A-model’ B-52 which Joe says he’d fly to,”load it up with all the ice we could bring. Get it home so that engineers could take pictures of it, to prove what you could do... if the systems failed and you had a heavy load of ice... how many knots to add to your approach speed. I absolutely loved that kind of work.”
Cold weather was routine for the test pilot during four winters in Fairbanks, Alaska. He says the challenge was getting off the bombers in minus-50 degree temperatures.
Back to warmer climes in Fort Worth, Texas, Joe moved into testing the delta-winged Hustler, the first supersonic bomber. “You’d say that’s a B-58, so it’s supposed to fly in 1958. No. Remember, about that time we were going fast, doing a lot of things and maybe running ahead of schedule. Because there were 116 of them built and there were 26 lost. That’s a pretty heavy loss. The B-58 introduced you to about 58,000, but it didn’t wait until ‘58 to fly. I wondered a lot about that after being in that program a good while.”
“About this time we were changing to 'all-management'. Instead of one person bossing five people, we were doing a management business where you had about five people bossing one worker. We used to laugh about it , saying if my boss calls, get his name. I’ve often wondered if this excess management had something to do with our loss rate.”
With an image of a shredded tire and shattered landing gear strut on a B-58 as his backdrop, Joe described the hurdle of designing high performance jets.
“You don’t have to be a rocket scientist and a wind tunnel expert to know that the wing is going to have be thinner than the wing on a B-52. And if you make the wing thin, where are you going to put the wheels? Well, if you’re going to put them in there, they have to be small. If they get small and you’re going 200 knots on takeoff, they’re turning up about 4,000 rpm. And if they hit something on the runway or they’re not perfect and they start blowing, and they start getting down on the rims... An outgrowth of this was what was called the non-frangible wheel. So when the wheel starts breaking up you don’t have it going up into the fuel cell, and have fuel start coming down...”
The next series of slides showed a Hustler in flight, piloted by Ray Fitzgerald, then a shot of an aerial fireball - - the Hustler exploding.
“The test pilot was doing exactly what we told him to do. That makes a difference when you say ‘we’. You notice how ‘they’ always make mistakes, but ‘we’ are pretty good. I was a part of that... a part of it in the B-58 program, along with the engineers, along with all the people who have a moral responsibility if they see something’s going on. Sometimes you’re just sharp enough to look ahead. And sometimes if you look ahead and you see it, you don’t have the courage to speak up.”
Cotton turned to the topic of servant leadership. As defined by Robert Greenleaf, the so-called "grandfather of the modern empowerment movement in business leadership", servant leadership begins with conscious choice by an individual who wishes to serve first. That person then aspires to lead, based on his or her conscious choice.
“I have the hope that with servant leadership and quality management, you can accomplish anything,” says Cotton. “A program that just about accomplished anything... at Edwards, was the X-15 program. Ten years... and out to 4.6 Mach number. The day was 3 October, 1967, and 6.7 (Mach), 4,520 miles an hour, with Pete Knight. Flying the mother ship (B-52) and being on that program with NASA...”
Joe Cotton’s down home pride in being a part of the X-15 program filled the room. A slide of the XB-70 Valkyrie rolling out of a hangar next filled the screen. “We didn’t have any problems during rollout... There’s the first takeoff, and that’s when the problems started. (laughter) Well, wait a minute, I didn’t complain. I left home, looking for excitement and adventure. And believe me, that airplane gave us a lot of excitement and adventure.
“On the first flight on that airplane, I couldn’t get the gear up. We were supposed to go supersonic. The contract said go supersonic... the airplane hadn’t heard that. The gear wouldn’t come up, one of the engines ran away because a ball bearing came loose in a fuel control, shut an engine down, and caught fire on landing. And that was the introduction, the start of problems. “And if you’re going to ground loop an airplane like the Valkyrie, choose a lake bed to do it on. And if you want to know why, it’s because one of the bogeys didn’t unfold properly.”
Joe survived some extraordinary events in the XB-70. On one flight, an 18 inch by 10 foot strip of skin came off the wing’s leading edge, at Mach 3.
“And you’d say, could you tell it? And I’d say could you tell if you woke with an elephant in bed with you? That’s how evident it was.”
Another flight, another aerodynamic failure.“This is the apex of the wing, right up where the wing starts (under the fuselage)... A lot of these are things I show as why you have test pilots and why you test airplanes before you put people in ‘em.
“That apex, in the wind tunnel test, showed always an upload, never a download. but when it got out there in the real world, it had a download and that apex came off and shed... and went down the inlet. And you see it there... those are three of the six engines, and one of the dividers there has a piece of it (the apex) the size of a tire iron.
“That’s H-11 steel, I think about 360,000 pounds per square inch tensile strength. And those engines kept going. Had two of them shut down at one time... number four re-lit, and really made the difference in bringing the airplane in. But you can see what that stainless steel hitting the compressor did.”
The test pilot incident for which Joe is probably best known came when the landing gear on the XB-70 failed to come down and lock in place.
“In the junction box on the landing gear bogey, the insulation wore off and it got a short to ground. And really, because of inspecting it too frequently, you might say... and we kind of looked at it that way... take it off, put it back on, take it off, put it back on... to see that everything looked okay in that junction box. But then really didn’t look close enough to see there was frayed insulation, and the result was that just after takeoff the electrical system was lost to the gear.
“And the gear relaxed and went back into the nose... blew the tire and locked up. And therefore, even though you had 4,000 psi hydraulic pressure, you could not get it down because a sleek ??? sequence valve said, ‘do not let the gear operate if there is a door in the way.’ The door has to be open or closed. So the idea was... and here’s why I’m in love with an engineer. I’m just an old farm boy away from home who loved airplanes. I was never an engineer. I only worked in a sorghum factory.”
“But the guys on the ground... we had a lot of fuel, and we had some imagination and we had a lot of time. And they said if we could figure a way to jumper around that sequence valve, we could make it believe the door was in fact out of the way and you could get the handle down, get the hydraulic pressure to it and get the gear.
Cotton says the job might have been easier had they had the right drawings as a guide to finding the electrical contacts. But they didn’t. And to make matters worse, the pin numbers were on the back side of the junction box, inaccessible to Joe and his co-pilot.
“So we went about making our own blueprints, so to speak. Taking a paperclip - - actually the neck of a paperclip - - and taking an insulator off a lap belt, and jumping from dark point one to dark point two. Put the gear handle down and that was the end result. We came in and landed and caught fire, again.”
Joe says the prototype bomber’s brakes had constant modulating anti-skid systems, powered on and off electrically, to be fast enough to stop the airplane. It didn’t have any return springs.
“No manual return springs for this airplane. Not until after the electric ‘super system‘ failed twice and you caught fire. And the next flight, we’re back to manual return springs. That’s a thing a lot of people don’t understand, or the story doesn’t get through, that research and development... often times the new idea won’t work and you go back to the old. And sure, it costs you time and it sometimes costs you equipment and lives.”
According to Cotton the Valkyrie was planned to have the designation RS-70 for reconnaissance and strike. “It would go across and look at a target complex and say, ‘they did well on number one and number two. But on number three they didn’t get on the last sweep through.’ So release the weapon and strike and send him on back... “
The final slides in Joe’s presentation were of the fateful day the Valkyrie took part in a publicity photo of GE-powered aircraft. One of the F-104s struck the bomber’s right wing tip and then its twin vertical stabilizers, severing the hydraulic lines and sending test pilots Joe Walker of NASA and Carl Cross of the Air Force to their deaths. Cotton says he thinks of his dear friends every day of his life.
“I’ve often thought that at my age, the thing I appreciate more than anything is that tremendous level of appreciation.
Joe Cotton will look you straight in the eye when he says, “It’s not what I have done for aviation, but what aviation has done for me. I’ve done nothing for aviation compared to what the airplane and its people - - the crew chief, the engineer and the other guys I’ve flown with - - have done for me. I’ve learned everything from it. What I am today, at 80, I owe so much to the community in Indiana, my mom and dad for my upbringing, and the people I’ve been associated with.”