115:02:00 Lunney on the LM jettison plan "don't argue with me"

[bfeist]

https://apolloinrealtime.org/13/?t=115:02:00&ch=50

[MadDogBV]

Best part about that is when he effectively pulls rank and says he was there "when we did it on Apollo 10".

[Naraht]

Man, he's the flight director - that's all the rank he needs to pull.

Though he was also clearly the Trench's flight director. During the Mercury years, he was only the second Flight Dynamics Officer ever. For a good part of the 60s he was also Chief of the Flight Dynamics Branch, so the direct boss or boss's boss of these guys. He knew his stuff and they knew he knew it too.

I love Glynn Lunney getting testy. This is a great find.

[MadDogBV]

I love it when Lunney gets testy with the flight controllers too - which is just about all the time, usually. He tends to be polite with the CAPCOM though, probably because they're astronauts and ultimately his voice link between the ground and the spacecraft.

I particularly enjoyed a sequence of the flight director loop (one that wasn't in the original 8 hours posted to YouTube, but came immediately after the free-return course correction burn at ~62 hours), where he was trying to come up with a PTC procedure but SPAN was making him wait for a preferred procedure of their own.

"I'm not getting anybody to come out and agree with me, so I guess we're about to press on here with what we're gonna do... And I'm getting tired of waiting... -forced laughter-"

https://apolloinrealtime.org/13/?t=062:09:04&ch=50

[Naraht]

I love it when Lunney gets testy with the flight controllers too - which is just about all the time, usually.

It's so true! Although I think it's not anger so much as impatience. As Jay Greene said years later, "Glynn would drive you crazy, because his mind would race so fast that he could churn out action items quicker than you could absorb, much less answer."

He tends to be polite with the CAPCOM though, probably because they're astronauts and ultimately his voice link between the ground and the spacecraft.

The CAPCOM is presumably also less likely to argue with him or to keep him waiting for an answer! There were certainly times when he was no respecter of astronauts. I would love to hear the Flight Director's loop on Apollo 7, when Wally Schirra's insubordination (as he saw it) left him absolutely incandescent with rage.

I am going to go through my notes on these recordings and see if I can pull out some more Lunney moments to share with the class. In the mean time I can recommend one I've already posted, where he (jokingly) berates Jay Greene for taking a checkpoint at the wrong time and losing 40 minutes of data as a result: https://forum.apolloinrealtime.org/index.php?topic=225.0