In my opinion if you look at his flight test history Bob Hoover has to be one of the best or luckiest stick and rudder men in history.

I searched for 20 minutes and could not find the first hand account by Bob Hoover of the crash where he was testing either a F-86 or F-100 and there was a hydraulics problem on take off. I know he had a hydraulics problem in an F-100 on landing but the take-off failure story was amazing.

There is a short mention of it in the article below and it states it was in an F-86 but I am not sure that is correct because he broke his back on the landing and I believe the incident where he suffered a broken back was in an F-100.

https://www.airspacemag.com/history-o...-the-Best.html

======================long story but hopefully entertaining=======================

Anyway, the story goes like this as best that I can recall...

Shortly after takeoff and as soon as the gear were retracted the stick hydraulics failed and the stick slammed full back with enough force that it broke his thumb! The nose of course pitches violently upward. At full power the aircraft climbs at an ever increasing angle of attack as Bob urgently tries to force the stick forward to get the nose down to avoid the approaching stall. But as hard as he can push the stick refuses to budge! The aircraft inevitably stalls, and the nose pitches violently down while he is still very close to the ground.

Now with horizontal stabilizer stuck full up (pitch) and no aileron (roll) control and dangerously close to the ground most people would call it a day and bail out. But not a test pilot and certainly not Bob.

As soon as the nose pitched down he reduces the power and as the angle of attack decreases and the airspeed increased and the aircraft wings once again produce lift but before the plane levels and starts to climb up again he is just feet above the ground and some hanger building! He adds full power and once again the plane races upward but this time he gets a little higher before the plane once again reaches the critical angle of attack and stalls again, pitches down and eventually starts the process anew, each time pitching back up a little higher above the ground and stalling again at a little higher altitude.

The whole time Bob is trying to fly the plane with any of the controls he can still move - the rudder, the flaps, the air brakes, and primarily the throttle. He continues to wrestle the airplane like a rodeo bull rider in the sinusoidal flight path for 40 minutes! The whole time using the throttle to try and even out the wild pitching and the rudder to circle the dry lake bed. By now he has been advised to bail out by his ground controllers.

But at this point, Bob has the amplitude of the pitching almost nulled out and responds he is going to attempt a wheels up landing. He gets the plane settled into a nice long descending approach and all goes well until he got about a wing length from the ground and an aerodynamic affect known as ground affect kicked in and through off the delicate balance he had struggled to attain. The aircraft failed to flare and Bob thought "Oh my, this is gonna hurt", as the plane pancaked into the lake bed.

Even though it was a very hard impact and as a result Bob broke his back the plane was relatively undamaged.

Bob recovered from his back injury and went on to fly for many years. When asked why he did not bail out when he had the chance he responded the he felt he had a good chance to get the plane down in relatively good shape and if he bailed out the plane would have certainly been completely destroyed and then he or someone else would have to climb into another one and go through the whole process again! This way the engineers were able to discover a flaw in the landing gear system that caused the hydraulics for the stick to fail when the gear reached the full up position and fix it.

Ironically, if Bob had simply put the gear down he would have regained control of the stick. But he did not want to do that as it would have thrown the delicate balance he had attained out of whack had it not corrected the problem.

I wish I could find the official first hand account from Bob because it is much better then mine. I just cannot imagine how anyone can manage to walk with a pair of 15lb brass huevos!