![]() To see that massive thing in flight and be right there in the air with it-you can imagine the exhilaration.”įor nearly four decades of service in the U.S. ![]() Of pacing a Titan II in a two-seat fighter, Petry says: “Absolutely beautiful. Matching velocity with a Titan rocket for 90 extreme seconds, the Phantom powered through the missile’s thundering wash, then broke away as the rocket surged toward space. After a Mach 1.2 dive synched to the launch countdown, he “walked the contrail” up to the intercept, tweaking closing speed and updating mission control while camera pods mounted under each wing shot film at 900 frames per second. “Those two J79 engines made all the difference,” says Petry. And the preferred chase airplane was the McDonnell F-4 Phantom. When NASA engineers were launching rockets at Florida’s Cape Canaveral in the 1960s, they needed pilots to fly close enough to film the missiles as they accelerated through Mach 1 at 35,000 feet. “Not enough wing or thrust,” recalls Jack Petry, a retired U.S.
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