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PROFILES
Dan Bailey
September 29, 1997
Dan Bailey has two kinds of students. One kind has to practice 1,000
take offs and landings before they ever solo. The other simply has
to master the fine art of tailwheel flying. Both spend part of their
time upside down—one in an aerobatic airplane, the other in
the most complex flying machine every built. One flies strapped to
their seats, yanking and banking over Galveston Bay, while the others
is 200 miles higher, floating over every bay in the world—once
every 90 minutes.
Dan Bailey teaches aerobatics and astronauts. At Harvey and Rihn
Aviation in La Porte, he teaches pilots the intricacies of spinning,
tumbling, snapping and rolling in Decathlons and Pitts. At NASA, he
teaches astronauts the complexities of Space Shuttle flying--rocket
propulsion, orbital maneuvering, ascent, re-entry and that final glide
to landing. The goal, in both cases, is precision, control and oneness
with the machine. But the two kinds of training cover opposite ends
of the aviation spectrum.
The aerobatic pilot is the nerve center of his own airplane. He learns
to make the plane do whatever he can imagine. His training is vivid
and dramatic. The results are immediate. What you see is what you
get.
Dan tells primary aerobatic students, “Look outside and know
where you want the nose to go, and what you want the nose to look
like in the maneuver. Then just make it do that. Don’t think
about all the rudder manipulations that you do, just move the controls
to make the attitude the way you want it.” A pilot can become
an acrobat in a matter of days--not the astronaut.
They are single pieces of a gigantic flying team, and their transformation
from test pilots, engineers and scientists to their team’s “eyes
in the sky” takes years of training. It involves complex team-work,
understanding quadruple-backed up computer systems, cabinets full
of software schematics and a mission geared to a minute by minute
flight plan that is as thick as a textbook.
In the Shuttle Mission Simulator--Motion Based, where Dan trains
them, they get what sounds, looks and feels like real flying experience.
The simulator rotates to vertical after they strap in. The noise,
the vibration and the view out the window, including the specific
star patterns for each flight, look quite authentic. In it, his students
practice every possible ascent and descent scenario. “They spend
quite a lot of time getting proficient on the smallest part of their
flight, which is the most hazardous—the first 8 ½ minutes
and the last hour and a half,” Dan says.
Five computers run the orbiter. The instructors give the crew operational
understanding and specialized knowledge to enable them to recover
from malfunctions. When one of his students asks a question and Dan
doesn’t have the answer, he spends whatever time it takes to
find it. “We have volumes of schematic drawings, all the different
plumbing systems and electrical systems and stuff that make up what
I am responsible for teaching,” he says. He has to tie how the
software is working with the drawings and figure out what’s
happening, then relate that to the crew. Finding an answer can take
days, because there is so much material. “When you finally find
the answer, it’s like completing a jigsaw puzzle,” he
says. “You feel real good about it.”
Even when the search is hard he sticks with it. “You don’t
know how what misunderstanding, or lack of understanding will affect
you in your operations,” he says. “It may seem like a
very small glitch, but it could have huge consequences—like
the temperature being too low around the boosters, when the rocket’s
sitting on the pad. That ultimately had the consequence of blowing
up the Challenger.”
Dan takes instructing seriously. He always has. One of his first
flying jobs was instructing at Easterwood Airport, in College Station,
where he evaluated Corps of Cadets pilot candidates for the Air Force.
His students in the Air Force program had to conform to a rigid program
that required them to train to private pilot standards in traffic
patterns, stalls and upper air work before they soloed at the 12 hour
mark.
Dan was a new instructor, but he quickly learned to hone and evaluate
the affect of his own training technique. “I realized these
guys were making their dream come true. They wanted to be Air Force
pilots and they busted their butts for that. I had to cut out the
crap, basically, in my instruction and get to the meat of it.”
At the time, he was getting a dual Bachelor of Science degree at
A & M in aerospace engineering and technical education. Flying
was always a part of his consciousness, so it was natural that he
would study it.
When he was an infant his father flew control-line, gas-powered model
airplanes. By the time he was in the second grade his brother, who
was a year and a half older was building radio control models that
they both flew. “He also built a hang glider out of bamboo and
plastic,” Dan says. “It didn’t work, of course,
but it was a full-sized glider. We jumped off the roof with it and
hung there. It was barely more than ballistic.”
Later, he and his best friend, Joe Vaughan, rode their bikes to the
Hudson Municipal Airport in Mesquite, Texas. When they were 16 and
could drive, they learned to fly there. They talked maneuver, competed
and inspired each other to perform. At 17, Joe bought a Cessna 150.
“We flew the heck out of it. We were brand new pilots and fairly
conservative, but it didn’t stop us from seeing if we could
take off on a 4,000 foot runway with 40 degrees of flaps. You can
take off and fly five feet above the ground, but you have to retract
the flaps if you want to get any higher,” Dan says.
“We thought we were being smart. We enjoyed flying into little
dirt strips and stuff, getting out teeth shaken out.”
Experimenting and fine tuning his own performance have always motivated
him. In the summers before he graduated he went to summer school and
worked flying jobs. In the summer of 1986 he towed gliders at Caddo
Mills. “Man, I learned how to fly taildraggers that summer,
big time,” he says. “There were times when I was doing
30 flights a day in all kids of weather, crosswinds, strong winds,
everything.” It was also when he learned to do something he
had always wanted to do.
“I got out the tractor. It was a big, triangular, old airfield,”
he says. “It had beautiful grass on either side of the runway
and taxiways that I could land in any time I wanted to, so I mowed
a little aircraft carrier deck on the grass beside the runway. That
Pawnee was like a Corsair to me. I had the stick with the trigger
on it, so I would shoot trains as I was coming back in, pull it in
there and plop onto the carrier deck.” He racked up hundreds
of carrier landings that summer.
The next year he taught himself aerobatics, to the best of his ability,
in a 115hp Citabria. When he got as far as self-instruction would
take him, he headed for Harvey and Rihn’s aerobatic school in
La Porte to learn the fine points that books can’t teach. The
next year, in 1988, he got a summer job instructing there, and soon
started volunteering at NASA as a test subject.
One of the tests monitored his heart rate while he was zipped inside
the rescue ball, a 30-inch diameter sphere. It is not for the claustrophobic.
Dan, however, curled up and went to sleep.
Later he became a part-time test investigator, bringing his experience
as both a pilot and a scuba diver to his job as a Doppler ultrasound
technician in the altitude chamber. “When they do a space walk,
they get in a space suit at a pressure of 4 ½ PSI, so it has
just the effect of a scuba dive,” he says. “I looked for
the bends. When you come up to a low pressure the nitrogen bubbles
in your tissues coagulate into bubbles and go through your blood stream
and can cause problems.”
Later, NASA hired him full-time to help design their Aerospace Technology
Program. It produces a two-year college graduate who is technically
capable and has the knowledge base to walk into an operations job
at NASA in the shuttle operations area or space station operations
area, and to pick up work from day one. It is a great success. After
that he designed instructor material, but when he saw an opportunity
to get closer to flying by teaching in the Shuttle program he chose
that.
One of the things he thought he would do, but never did because of
less than 20/20 eyesight, was to teach pilots to land on aircraft
carriers. He thought he would be in the Navy sending their best pilots
off boats to fly over oceans of water. Instead, he is at NASA, training
their best of the best to launch their flying machines off, even tinier
pads over even bigger oceans.
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