the last video, what happened?
Severe cranial-rectal inversion.
If I can teach a student ONE THING:
At high speed, use the ailerons for directional control
At slow speed, use the rudders for directional control
It behooves you to spend lots of time in the practice area on
the back side of the power curve, learning to control the aircraft
as AOA exceeds Clmax and then decreases. Generally not symmetrically.
Flight instructors teach slow flight really badly, because they don't
know how to do it themselves. Rolling (banking) around a point and
the falling leaf are so outside their personal envelope. It's sad, actually.
In the Pitts, we do the
inverted falling leaf, to build character.
TC emphasizes all the wrong things. As expected.
When you are in slow flight, don't worry about maintaining a precise
airspeed or altitude. You actually will slowly descend because you won't
have enough power to maintain altitude, and don't worry about it. There's
a guy in the right seat who's job is to worry about altitude, traffic, navigation,
fuel and time. Just fly the fucking airplane.
Just look outside, and listen to the stall warning horn, which comes on
around 7 mph above the actual stall. Don't spend your time in slow flight
with your head inside the cockpit, staring at the airspeed or the altimeter,
the way TC wants you to, with their stupid "tolerances" which distract you
from learning. Look outside. Observe the yaw. Observe the wing drop.
Learn to control the aircraft at high alpha. Use your feet for directional
control, and learn to lower the nose a degree or two to un-stall when
a wing drops. This is counter-intuitive and will not become instinctive
without significant practice.
Learn to precisely control alpha. It will be different on each wing, and
only one or two degrees makes a difference. See the Cl and Cd curves.
Four bars will tell you this is stupid, but one of those douches killed
everyone on Colgan 3407 when he stalled, and pulled all the way back
on the control column with enormous force, and snap-rolled his way down
down to the ground, killing everyone on board.
The really sad thing about that accident is that instead of learning from
it, to cover up for their incompetence the four bars created this narrative
that he crashed because he was tired, and as a result developed superhuman
strength, the way that everyone gets stronger when they're tired. No, this
guy had failed flight test after flight test with no fatigue.
This is why there will be no new causes of aviation accidents this year.
People are determined to repeat old ones.
See, all my friends are dead. I don't know anyone who's died from the
seasonal flu this year, but almost all of my friends have died in airplanes.
Each of them taught me a lesson that I will never forget.
Here are two of my friends that died in airplanes that taught me lessons:
1) Joe Broeders. Groundloop in homebuilt taildragger. Cracked the spar.
Did not inspect. Took off again, wing separated in flight.
2) Bob Sterling. Cessna came apart in flight. TSB report was a disgrace.
The aircraft had been "totalled" in a previous accident, and I am certain
it had hidden, unrepaired damage that killed Bob and his wife.
They had hangars near me. So many people in our row of hangars had
serious accidents and died, they started calling it "death row".
Somehow, to the great disappointment of TC, I am still alive. Clearly
I know absolutely nothing about aviation, despite the fact that my family
has been doing it for over one hundred years.
Curtis Pitts liked how we fly, though.
Here's what a fourth generation biplane pilot does for fun. Like the delayed opening?
www.pittspecials.com/etc/eric_idaho2.mov