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[i]YOUNG: I think the LPD was perfect. I don't have any gripes there whatsoever. When we pitched over, we were north and long and you could see that. I was just letting the LM float in there until I could see where it was going. I took out the north because according to our preflight maps, the north country was a little rougher. There were more contour lines up north than down south, so we took those out and when we got in close, we backed up a little and put in some rear updates. I don't remember how many there were. But at pitchover, you could see (just like preflight) Gator, Palmetto, and Spook, and the inverted deep shadow pattern through Stubby, Wreck, Trap, Eden Valley, and Cove right into Spook, although at 15-degrees Sun angle, it wasn't as apparent. Of course, we had already seen the landing site on two other occasions when we were flying over it because of the three-rev slip. There's just no doubt in your mind when your at pitchover, and the first thing you see was South Ray. There was some question about whether we'd see the ray patterns at the low Sun angle, but there's no doubt that we were seeing the ray patterns from South Ray at pitchover, and there's no doubt, at least in my mind, as to where that machine was flying to. And it was a simple matter to redesignate to the south and back up a hair. DUKE: We'd agreed that I was going to look out since I had two good craters on my side, and it looked just like the L and A. YOUNG: In fact, it was working so well I was tempted to let it do the thing all by itself, but the trouble is we got down low, and I could see that we were going to land in that pothole down there. We took over, I guess at about 300 feet, and pitched forward a little, and we could see the surface all the way to the ground. Right close in there out of my window, I could see that crater down there, so I went forward a little bit and landed. I counted one-potato after we got the contact light and shut the engine down; even so, I think that we fell about 3 feet. I think we're very fortunate that the landing was so flat because I really couldn't judge the slopes. We just lucked into almost zero roll and a couple of degrees or 3 degrees pitchup, and of course we'd taken the yaw out. When we redesignated to the south, we must have had 30 degrees of yaw and took it back out. Like I say, at that Sun angle, we could see the rocks all the way to the ground and I think that was a great help. From 200 feet on down, I never looked in the cockpit. It was just like flying the LLTV; your reference is to the ground outside. You had another thing that nobody has ever remarked about before, and that was the shadow. I really didn't have any doubt in my mind how far above the ground we were with that shadow coming down. I had no scale of reference to the holes but with the shadow out there in front of you and coming down, it really takes all the guesswork out of it. For that kind of a Sun angle, if the radar had crumped, I don't think you'd have had a bit of trouble in just going right in and landing just like a helicopter. First, we could see the thing up all the way to the ground; second, the shadow was right there to help you with the rate of descent. When Charlie says you stopped and you're hovering, there wasn't any doubt in my mind that I was hovering. I could look out the window and see that we're hovering just like a helicopter. We were well into the dust, maybe 40 or 50 feet off the ground. when we're doing that.[/i]
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