Be A Better Aerobatic Pilot

[Colonel]

Posted this to the Acro mailing list:

I thought about this for a few minutes, and I might humbly suggest that there are
3.5 things someone needs to work on, to become a better aerobatic pilot.


Let's start with something that at first appears completely unrelated. Riding a
motorcycle. Leo Loudenslager, who probably makes anyone's list of ten best
aerobatic pilots, died on a motorcycle, so stick with me for a moment.

When you start riding a motorcycle, it is technique intensive. There is a clutch,
for God's sake. And where is the gear shift lever again? When you start riding
a motorcycle, 95% of your brain will be required to operate the machine, and only
5% of your brain will be available for other tasks such as traffic threat analysis.

As time goes by, and you develop skill, the percentage of your brain required to
operate the motorcycle will eventually drop to 5%, leaving 95% of your brain available
to watch for traffic that is going to kill you. The left-turner says, "I never saw him".
Andy Grove, ex-CEO of intel, said "Only the paranoid survive", and I believe him.

Back to flying, and the first thing you need to develop as an aerobatic pilot, is similar
skill in flying your airplane. You need to put an awful lot of 100LL through your Lycoming
so that you drop your percentage of your brain required to operate your aerobatic aircraft
precisely at the edges of the Vg diagram - at any attitude, airspeed and G.

You do know what the Vg diagram looks like for your aircraft, right?

This allows you to spend most of your brain looking outside. You know. Closed-loop.

I remember watching the very best pilot of our generation, Rob Holland, playing back
his in-cockpit video after an aerobatic flight, back and forth, in slow motion, to observe
exactly what the aircraft did. Closed-loop.


Ok, onto the second thing. Not practicing your mistakes. You can burn all the 100LL
that you want, but if you are practicing your mistakes, you're not going to get any better -
you are stuck on a plateau. You can do it yourself like Rob with cockpit video, or another
way is to get a cranky old guy on the ground with a name like Fangio or Kalishnakov with
a handheld shouting at you during your sequence.

"Pinched at the top! Shallow! Short after!" You will hear all these things, and many more,
and try really hard to not let your ego get in the way of getting better. This closed-loop
feedback does not need to be formal, merely skilled.


Third thing. The wind. Flying in general would be a lot easier if there was never any wind.
Navigation would be so much simpler, and no one would ever come to grief from a crosswind
landing any more. While it would be nice to live in that world, we don't. The wind is a significant
percentage of an aircraft's speed - especially while it is stopped at the top of a vertical - and
you must learn to deal with it. Wind on the X-axis. Wind on the Y-axis. You must learn what the
wind is doing at altitude and compensate for it. Contest flying is completely different than airshow
flying in this regard. As an airshow pilot, you learn to spiral loops and take angled cuts before
vertical maneuvers.

Now, onto thing 3.5 .... mechanical. Some pilots are mechanical wizards. Lycoming whisperers.
Fuck off, you don't need to read this paragraph. The rest of us will spend our lives struggling with
rough-running Lycomings and misbehaving tailwheels. If I could only give pilots one piece of advice,
it would be to lean the mixture. Lean the mixture immediately after start for max RPM. Lean the
mixture immediately after landing. I do it on the landing roll - don't tell Arlo, I don't need another
602.01 charge. Get someone to show you how to remove your bottom plugs and pick the lead
out with a piece of sharpened lock wire. Run the hotter 40's instead of the cooler 38's. If you can
get past fouled spark plugs, you can move onto fuel injectors and troublesome exhaust valves,
which I could write a goddamned book on, and are the source of most of your woes. A piece of
advice: keep the metal cool. The hotter you run the metal, the shorter it's life. Keep the CHT's
under 400F, well under redline. I am a chicken, I run mixture full rich during acro. There was
once a really smart guy called Dave Schwantz in Florida, that taught 128 different spins and leaned
the mixture during acro. I was horrified, but Dave had a brain the size of Wyoming, and had
calculated that the fuel savings during leaning in acro, paid for his next engine overhaul over
the life of his engine. Sometime, get Dave to show you the elevator trim trick. I won't mention
it, because Arlo fucking hates me enough already. Free advice: get one of those data-logging
engine monitors. One day, I discovered that the condenser (really just a 0.3 uF capacitor) in my
right magneto was failing over 150F and would cause the points to arc. Try diagnosing that
one without three samples a second, Lycoming whisperers!

Oh dear. I've rambled on, far too long. I need to get back to baking my Coronavirus cakes
with the 80 boxes of eggs, 250 lbs of flour, and 50 gallons of whole milk that I purchased at
Safeway yesterday.

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