Here is one of Neil's training flights before he landed on the moon:
Apollo 11: Neil Armstrong Lunar Landing Test Vehicle (LLTV) Crash (May 6, 1968)
Thanks.
That’s one weird bird.
That was “The Flying Bedstead.”
It had controls similar to what they had planned for the lunar lander.
It also had a big jet engine on a gimbal; the jet engine was sized to overcome Earth’s gravity in the vertical direction. Its thrust vector was aimed by slaving it to a gyro-stabilized platform.
Then there were a bunch of thrusters that were laid out in a manner similar to that planned for the lunar lander. The whole system was tuned to have a dynamic response similar to that of the actual lander.
The idea was that Apollo lander pilots could practice on Earth. The whole thing was a kind of simulator, built long before computer power was sufficient to build a software-only simulator.
It would appear (from that video) that one of the control loops didn’t respond well to a transient. It looked like when the pilot (Armstrong?) “gunned it” to try another approach, the main engine control loop slowly “walked” off vertical. I’d like to know what actually happened. Perhaps the documentation is on the internet.
Oh, the answer is much simpler than I thought.
The investigation board determined that the fuel for the attitude rockets ran out, which is what caused the crash.
Perhaps the pilot realized he was out of thruster fuel and hit the throttle to gain altitude before ejecting.
It started to flip on him, he bailed out one second from death, was unhurt upon landing, and went back to the office and started his report. “Heard you bailed out.” “Yup.” ;’) There’s a reason he was picked for the first lunar landing. :’)