posted 12-29-2007 12:54 PM               

He served as capcom on the tracking ship Rose Knot and at the Carnarvon, Australia tracking station for the early test flights of the Apollo/Saturn (AS202 and 203).

Together with Fitz Fulton, Roy flew as co-pilot of the shuttle carrier aircraft (SCA) on the fifth and final mated inert captive flight of orbiter Enterprise on March 2, 1977.

He was the first to land the shuttle carrier aircraft at White Sands following the landing there of STS-3, as described by manager Grady McCright in a March 2000 oral history:

The 747 had never landed on that lakebed. Of course, neither had an Orbiter. But a few days after [STS-3] landed, A.J. Roy flew the 747 up to El Paso, and he came up in a car. He said, "I want to go out on that lakebed, on the runway. Before we bring the 747 up here, I want to drive it." I said, "Okay." So I got permission to go out on the runway in a car, and I took A.J. and his co-pilot. I don't remember his co-pilot's name. But A.J. was sitting in the front seat with me and we started down the runway and he said, "I want you to go fast. I want you to get up 90 miles an hour or so to see how rough this is."

So in a government car I did, I got up around 85 or 90 miles an hour. A.J. said, "Oh, this will be okay. We can get in on this."

While we were doing that, his co-pilot said, "Hey, A.J., our flights rules say if we take off with the Orbiter and have an engine failure, lose one of the four engines on the 747, at takeoff after they rotate and lose an engine, we have to go around." They go on up around and come back and land immediately. He said, "What are we going to do here? They've got seven miles of runway."

A.J. said, "If we lose an engine on takeoff here, we're just going to set it back down, because we've got seven miles of runway. We're not going around."

So the morning they took off, I went out there and stood about -- I don't remember where I stood, probably less than 5,000 feet from where they started rolling, and they were airborne by the time they got to me. So they still had [30,000] foot of runway.

On March 6, 1992, Roy (as pilot of the KC-135) set the NASA record for the most parabolas in one flight: 101. The decision to extend the flight beyond the planned 72 parabolas was made mid-flight, taking advantage of an abundance of fuel and good weather.

Roy is provided "special thanks" in the credits for the Universal feature film Apollo 13, which filmed scenes aboard the KC-135.

On the occasion of NASA 930 being retired as a display piece at the entrance of Ellington Field, he said of flying the parabolas, "It gets to be routine, but with the different missions and experiments you supported, it never got dull."

Roy retired from NASA in late 1999. He is survived by his wife Diane, four children and grandchildren.