F-22's Dave Ferguson

The chief test pilot of the YF-22 (of Lockeed) what is Dave Ferguson doing now? His bet with Paul Metz (then chief test pilot for Northrop) brought Metz into the F-22 program upon the termination of the YF-23 program. I have seen several interviews with Metz but none, with Ferguson.

Adrian

The following is just supposition and not to be taken as fact, but....

....I believe Dave stopped flying the Raptor after he belly-landed (some would say crashed) the YF-22 #2 at Edwards.

The following is fact:
The official cause was PIO, but he blamed it on the videographer standing at the end of the runway.

The videographer, who I know very well, said Ferg wanted to do some hot-shot move on approach, and porpoised the airplane.

dan1701a wrote:....I believe Dave stopped flying the Raptor after he belly-landed (some would say crashed) the YF-22 #2 at Edwards.

Ferguson wasn't at the controls for the YF accident. It was Tom Morganfeld...

Raptor_claw wrote:

dan1701a wrote:....I believe Dave stopped flying the Raptor after he belly-landed (some would say crashed) the YF-22 #2 at Edwards.

Ferguson wasn't at the controls for the YF accident. It was Tom Morganfeld...

Huh. My bud was just talking about that the other day. I guess he's getting senile. I asked him twice if he was sure it was Ferguson, and he said yeah.

dan1701a wrote:

Raptor_claw wrote:

dan1701a wrote:....I believe Dave stopped flying the Raptor after he belly-landed (some would say crashed) the YF-22 #2 at Edwards.

Ferguson wasn't at the controls for the YF accident. It was Tom Morganfeld...

Huh. My bud was just talking about that the other day. I guess he's getting senile. I asked him twice if he was sure it was Ferguson, and he said yeah.

You can tell him he's wrong. It was Morganfeld. Ferguson retired a long while ago.

Sad news. Dave passed away Aug 10. http://thetartanterror.blogspot.com/200 ... -1938.html

R.I.P.

teflon wrote:Sad news. Dave passed away Aug 10. http://thetartanterror.blogspot.com/200 ... -1938.html

Sad indeed. The aerospace world has suffered a great loss. He has accomplished more in his career than people can imagine.

Godspeed David.



*Photo by Denny Lombard via Code One Magazine Online



*Back row, 4th from the left (blue shirt).

Dave was a super guy. You could just tell by looking at him that he was cool, calm, and a nice guy. He always had a smile on his face and I've never seen him get mad, even though it would have been justified. Now, he was just a bit cocky and looked down on the GD test pilots. Beesley related a story to me one time. He said that Dave told him that Dave was going to get all the glory from the YF-22 flight test (like the first flight) and then he was going to let Jon do all the dangerous stuff. Jon said that was OK, he could handle the dangerous stuff.

I read that Dave flew F-105s in Vietnam as a wild weasel. That would take some incredible guts, so he had already paid his dues. I can't imagine an F-105 being a wild weasel airplane.

teflon wrote:I read that Dave flew F-105s in Vietnam as a wild weasel. That would take some incredible guts, so he had already paid his dues. I can't imagine an F-105 being a wild weasel airplane.

Yeah, he did fly WW missions in the Thud. That was quite an accomplishment as the F-105 was not originally designed to be a WW jet.

Interestingly, Paul Metz (whom he gave Dave a resume after the ATF competition and was hired to be the CTP for the F-22 EMD phase) was also a WW pilot flying F-105s in Vietnam. Part of his bio reads:

...flew operational missions in the F-105G Wild Weasel in the U.S. and Southeast Asia. He flew 68 missions over North Vietnam and took part in the pivotal "12 Days of Christmas" raids in December 1972. His combat day and night missions against surface-to-air missiles and anti-aircraft gun sites in support of strike missions in North Vietnam earned him two Distinguished Flying Crosses and six Air Medals.

I do wonder if they even knew of each other back then?

jiaru wrote:The videographer, who I know very well, said Ferg wanted to do some hot-shot move on approach, and porpoised the airplane.

Porpoise what aircraft?

Ignore him as it is spam (the WOW links).

I think this is what was being talked about the You Tube video crash landing by Tom Morganfeld
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faB5bIdksi8

When Ferguson said in one of several interviews for one of the History Channel program said, the YF-22 entered a flight area in which no one thought to calculate the behavior of the YF-22 during a low altitude fly by.
The original intentions was to make a very low pass over the run way where VIPs were watching. After passing the mid-point of the runway, the pilot raised the wheels. The computer commanded the nose to pitch up quickly because the plane was flying so low. The pilot was shocked by the sudden pitch-up, thinking there was something wrong with the plane's computer -pushed the stick forward to prevent the plane from going vertical with a possible bad computer problem, crash and destroy the entire plane. So he got the plane on the ground. His thinking was the less the damage the quicker the design team could correct the problem.
The computer did what it was supposed to do. It took a great pilot to get that plane on the runway with as little damage as there was.

Well.... kinda.

avon1944 wrote:...the YF-22 entered a flight area in which no one thought to calculate the behavior of the YF-22 during a low altitude fly by.

That's true, with an important caveat. The behavior that had not been calculated was only for flight with thrust vectoring active. Unlike production, the YF had a switch in the cockpit to turn vectoring off or on. The envelope for which vectoring was cleared corresponded to that which had been analyzed (obviously), and did not include the low altitude regime where the incident occurred (i.e. the vectoring switch should not have been on, but it was).

...After passing the mid-point of the runway, the pilot raised the wheels. The computer commanded the nose to pitch up quickly because the plane was flying so low.

The pitch up was not directly related to the altitude. Rather, it relates back to the vectoring switch. The control laws had not been designed to account for a transition directly from gear down mode to gear up mode with vectoring active, as that should never have happened (remember, we're talking about a prototype with a ton of limits and restrictions here, not a fully fleshed-out design). Without getting into the gory details, suffice it to say that that transition was not pretty, and the control law effectively saw a step nose-up command, which it generated.

The pilot was shocked by the sudden pitch-up, thinking there was something wrong with the plane's computer -pushed the stick forward to prevent the plane from going vertical with a possible bad computer problem, crash and destroy the entire plane. So he got the plane on the ground. His thinking was the less the damage the quicker the design team could correct the problem.

Pretty much correct, yeah.

The computer did what it was supposed to do.

Well, not exactly. Problem was it was asked to do something it shouldn't have been.

thanks for the in depth run down on that