Riddle me this....

[Lee White]

Can anyone tell me why the landing gear of an X-15 might be down while mated to an airborne NB-52? As I understand it, the gear was raised by hand, and blown down, but only after release from the mothership.

 

 

 

 

[Oldbaldguy]

Hmmm.  Looks to be early in the program and you can’t tell if the Buff is taking off or landing.  Somebody will know and it will probably be interesting.

[MikeC]

2 hours ago, Oldbaldguy said:

Hmmm.  Looks to be early in the program and you can’t tell if the Buff is taking off or landing.  Somebody will know and it will probably be interesting.

I think it's just taking off - looks as though the B-52's wheels are spinning rapidly, as you can't see any detail - compare with this shot of a stationary example.  https://www.cybermodeler.com/aircraft/b-52/pages/frouch_b-52h_18.shtml

 As to why the undercart on the X-15 is down, I suspect some sort of safety procedure is the reason - raise the wheels when the carrier raises its wheels - but that's just speculation.

[Dave Williams]

I think almost all of the photos I’ve seen of the X-15 attached to the B-52 when on the ground show gear up.  In fact, I’d be very surprised if the X-15 gear had the capability to be retracted with a switch in the cockpit.  Since it was never designed to launch from the ground and you couldn’t really do a missed approach where you might need to clean up the aircraft and go around and try again, there seems no reason to add the weight and complexity of a pilot operated gear retraction mechanism.  I’m betting the gear was manually closed on the ground and only had a one shot system that would deploy the gear at the end of the flight. Might even have simply been released and aerodynamically deployed.

 

I suspect that this was a very early test flight flown with the gear down.  A lot of aircraft were flown on their very first flight with the gear down to prevent losing a valuable prototype to gear failure.  Possibly a glide flight, or a captive flight, with the gear down in the event that the X-15 had to be released in the event of some sort of trouble.

 

ETA: An interesting log of all of the flights.  Very few seemed to be problem free.

 

http://www.mach25media.com/Resources/X15FlightLog.pdf

 

Edited October 22, 2021 by Dave Williams

[Joe Hegedus]

never mind,  I didn't see Dave's post saying the same thing.

Edited October 22, 2021 by Joe Hegedus

[Pete Fleischmann]

1 hour ago, Dave Williams said:

 A lot of aircraft were flown on their very first flight with the gear down to prevent losing a valuable prototype to gear failure.  Possibly a glide flight-

 

 

I think Daves argument here makes the most sense-

P

 

 

[Lee White]

Thanks for your thoughts, guys. I think Dave is onto something too. I noticed after posting that the "scoreboard " on the fuselage of the BUFF is empty, with no mission markings painted on yet. So, maybe this is the very first captive flight?

[Martinnfb]

It was the very first "captive" flight 1-C-1 on March 10th 1959,