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Thanks!
Great interview. Looking forward to the rest.
It's moments such as that at 07:14 in the video where Armstrong gives an account of
the B-29 propeller incident resulting in the loss of three engines plus fuselage
damage, which he euphemistically describes as "an uncomfortable position", that
re-enforces the decision that he was exactly the right person to pilot the first lunar
module to land on the Moon.
By way of further example, during the Korean conflict, his F9F-2B Panther was hit by
anti-aircraft fire, the aircraft went down to 20m off the deck and he sliced
a meter of the right wing off when he hit a pole, but still managed to regain
control and fly the aircraft back to friendly territory before ejecting.
He crashed landed the Bell X-1 rocket plane, had some narrow escapes in the X-15,
wrestled with the attitude controls of Gemini 8 spacecraft when it began rolling at a
rate of once-per-second and as depicted in the video, ejected from the infamous
Flying Bedstead.
So come July 1969 with 1201 and 1202 Apollo Guidance Computer alarms going
off plus with the Eagle heading toward a crater, that re-action of Armstrong to
take control and fly the vehicle manually is in my mind, not only the culmination
of years of experience as an aeronautical engineer, fighter pilot, test pilot
and astronaut, but a high point in the evolutionary descent and intellectual
ascent of man.
As that brain guided that hand to a prefect landing, it was an event that was
several million years in the making.
A pretty neat trick for the descendants of hominids who only 2.6 million years earlier
had first learned how to break some chips off some rocks.
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