NASA Shuttle Specific Sections > Shuttle History - Pre-RTF
Columbia STS-28 – Called Back to Duty
psloss:
--- Quote from: Ares67 on 09/05/2012 09:49 pm ---Brewster Shaw later referred to this landing as demonstrating that he “wasn’t such a hot pilot. When I landed 61-B, it was on the concrete runway at Edwards that’s got defined boundaries and it’s easy to judge sink rate and your height. On STS-28 we landed on the lakebed, which has stripes painted on it. It’s like oil that they put down there so it outlines the runway, but it’s not a well-defined thing and you don’t have the same kind of depth perception. So when we came down and I flared the orbiter, I didn’t know how high we were. Looking at the photographs, we weren’t very high, but I basically leveled the vehicle off and then it loated. So instead of landing at 195 knots, the way we were supposed to, we landed at 155. This was Columbia again and so here we are on the main gear, decelerating fast and I’ve got to get the nose on the ground. The same thing that happened to John Young on STS-9 happened to me and the nose went ‘bam’ on the ground. I felt terrible because I let the thing float for 40 knots’ worth of deceleration. We got a lot of great data about low-speed flying qualities on the orbiter, but it wasn’t supposed to work out that way.” (JSC Oral History Project, Jan. 2006, and Ben Evans: “Space Shuttle Columbia,” 2005)
--- End quote ---
(Double-posted to connect stories.) Wayne Hale posted about this landing in his blog; I don't know if this is in the public record elsewhere, but it adds some interesting context to the story:
https://waynehale.wordpress.com/2015/07/29/pilot-error-is-never-root-cause/
A little excerpt, but I recommend the whole thing:
--- Quote ---But I never blamed Brewster. We had set him up.
--- End quote ---
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