F-15 First Flight at Edwards Air Force Base

I pulled together some F-15 first flight photos. This is F-15A-1-MC-71-0280 in the first flight on July 27, 1972. How can you tell that it is the first flight? Easy! The landing gear is down for the entire flight. This was/is a standard procedure on first flights in case there would be an in-flight emergency. I have also included several photos of all the Flight Test aircraft at EAFB.

Jack Abercrombie wrote in response to this entry: “The gear being down was not intended for the entire flight.  On the first gear retraction attempt, one door jammed.” 

He goes on to say:
"During this time, we in the T/M (Telemetry) room had our eyes glued to the orange graph paper with blue ink strip charts rolling by so fast it was impossible to immediately assimilate all the data. Except for the airplane’s left main gear door which refused to close all the way (resulting in conducting an alternate, gear-down test plan), there were no major surprises in the airplane’s behavior during the first flight."  Thanks, Jack!

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