Unsolved Mysteries of Flight: Rudder Pedals

[Scudrunner]

Episode 1 or 2, whatever another fine example

The Rudder pedals must have been broken and the the throttle stuck at 75% power for sure

I haven't flown a 172 in awhile so I had to look at the ASI and this guy must have been doing at least 80knots crossing the threshold.

[vanNostrum]

Probably the two of them have the same instructor

[mcrit]

if there is a mechanical aspect

Quite correct. I am certain that if no one had given him
an airplane, he wouldn't have crashed it

Good point. I just find it difficult to figure out how someone could do that with serviceable nose wheel steering and brakes. The natural instinct when you see a windshield full of hangar and grass is to stop, and at the speed he was going he should have been able to. Scratching my head on this one

[Slick Goodlin]

The natural instinct when you see a windshield full of hangar and grass is to stop, and at the speed he was going he should have been able to. Scratching my head on this one

People do weird things. I used to play safety pilot for this one fellow and earned all the lunches he ever bought me one day by stopping him from driving his 172 into a hangar. It wasn’t on takeoff or landing or anything so dramatic but we had a ton of power on and he wasn’t doing anything to change that. I yanked the mixture and probably pressed dimples into the firewall with how hard I got on the brakes...

[Colonel]

The only use I ever found for a heavy metal fire extinguisher in an airplane,
was to use it to disable a very strong student that froze the controls.

Some people's reaction to life-threatening fear is "deer in the headlights". I
saw that sometimes, during spin training, esp inverted and accelerated.

Most people think that the normal reaction to life-threatening stress is to
rise to the occasion. That's Hollywood bullshit. Most people sink, to their
lowest level of training under stress.

If you don't believe me, waste three hours of your life and watch the hero
that tied himself to some weather balloons recently.


Back on topic ... people's instincts are wrong. The thing in front of them
looks like a steering wheel, and they've driven cars for many years, so they
have a pretty good idea how to use a steering wheel.

Except a control column is not a steering wheel. I hate the fucking things,
give me a stick in my right hand and the throttle in my left.



That Canadian pilot that drove into a hangar in Toronto recently, probably
could log the time he spent in slow flight in seconds.

As a tailwheel instructor, you learn to teach people new instincts. It takes
time. More than the few seconds that a Transport Canada approved FTU
instructor spent with that student in slow flight.

No one gives a shit about actually flying an airplane, but at slow speeds,
rudder becomes the primary directional control. Aileron - with adverse
yaw - only makes the problem worse.

And no one gives a shit, because they have paper, which is the most important
thing in aviation. Skill and knowledge don't matter any more in aviation.

The moron four bars will tell us that they don't need to know about this
sort of thing when you fly jets. What @ssholes.

"In the low-speed regime during a dogfight, the F-4 was prone to what was called adverse yaw- normally when the pilot wanted to turn one direction, he only had to move the stick in that direction.

At low speeds and high angles of attack that were commonplace in a dogfight, however, if a pilot pushed the stick to the left, the downward-deflected aileron on the right wing would produce more drag than lift, causing the Phantom to yaw back to the right even though the pilot wanted to turn left.

As the yaw increases, the effective sweep on the left wing decreases and it starts to produce more left and the F-4 snaps to the right and then into a spin.

All this happened nearly instantly and pilots had to compensate for the adverse yaw when rolling left or right by using the rudder aggressively during close air combat- instead of moving the stick into the direction of the turn, the rudder was deflected.

So a left turn meant keeping the stick centered and pushing the left rudder pedal down. This causes the Phantom to yaw to the left and this decreases the effective sweep on the right wing- it therefore creates more lift and the plane now snap rolls into the direction of the turn.

This took a lot of practice and it was suspected that a significant number of Phantom combat losses were due to adverse yaw conditions."

The @ssholes in Toronto haven't learned yet, that there will be
no new causes of accidents in aviation in 2020.

Now, the @sshole four bars will come on here and tell you that
skills learned on an F-4 are totally useless to a four bar.

I might mention that there was once a pilot called Sully that
put EuroTrash into the Hudson River after a double engine failure
after takeoff with no casualties.

Sully flew F-4's.

Four bars are such total, completely ignorant @ssholes. Their pitot
tube ices up in straight and level flight, they kill everyone on board.

[mcrit]

The natural instinct when you see a windshield full of hangar and grass is to stop, and at the speed he was going he should have been able to. Scratching my head on this one

People do weird things. I used to play safety pilot for this one fellow and earned all the lunches he ever bought me one day by stopping him from driving his 172 into a hangar. It wasn’t on takeoff or landing or anything so dramatic but we had a ton of power on and he wasn’t doing anything to change that. I yanked the mixture and probably pressed dimples into the firewall with how hard I got on the brakes...

I guess I've been lucky. I've done a fair bit of instruction at different levels and different skills and I've never had a student do a mental ram-dump of that magnitude.

With regard to the incident, kind of a shame. I had that airplane in my log book. I used to work at that school way back in the early 2000's. It was interesting.....

[David MacRay]

I know what you mean. I get kind of sad, every time I think about how someone taxied the wing of one of my favorite C-172s into the fuel tank at the club.

All the talk about India made me look up the rental cost of C-172s.

India. Can a guy rent a 172 for cheap?

Pretty expensive, I think. It's 1000 rupees for an hour on
the 172 but fortunately you can get an ATP for 100 rupees.

It seems to be about 10000 rupees an hour. I don't know what the maintanence is like there. I don't know if I would be confident jumping in one.