Scariest Thing You Every Flew?

[digits]

I am still scared when landing my Pitts

Respect keeps you alive.

You have started the journey. Get 10,000 Pitts landings in as soon as you can.

The amazing thing about the human brain - the most essential component of
any aircraft - is it's incredible ability to normalize. What was scary last year, is
do-able now. We only perceive deltas.

That's true. I went from mortified to scared, so that's progress!

[Slick Goodlin]

Scariest airplane? Well, there are a few, but my vote would be the Gee Bee.

Quite the story there. Racer in the 1930s, not much engineering, a lot of crashes and
dead pilots.

I had long heard the same but it turns out the Gee Bee Super Sportsters were exceptionally well engineered at the time. Lots of structural analysis and hundreds of hours of wind tunnel testing.

Jimmy Doolittle really liked them up until it was more in vogue to call them awful. Take a look at period pilot reports versus what he had to say in later years, it makes for interesting reading. I believe it was Delmar Banjamin who compared his R-2’s manners to being a lot like a modern composite hot rod, like a Glasiair. The trouble is the Glasair has mile-long paved runways all over the place while the Gee Bee had to contend with a couple thousand feet of turf paved by gophers.

Beyond that there were few, if any fatal accidents when they were still in the Granvilles’ control. IIRC there were issues later with bigger engines installed that got them going fast enough for flutter to be a problem, and one had an auxiliary fuel tank installed behind the pilot with no other changes made in respect of CG. That one was said to take off with full forward stick and climb until that tank had burned down a bunch. Now that’s scary. I think there was also one that stalled on final and cartwheeled to a stop, shedding pieces along the way but protecting the pilot.

All this to say I don’t think they were as vicious as history has made them out to be. I’d hop in a Model X, Y, D or E and take it up without a second thought. Maybe also the QED (the original. That replica is a mountain of an airplane). I’d probably want a little Pitts time before tackling a Z or R Model.

[Big Pistons Forever]

For the record, a T-craft lands so slowly, you can step outside it and walk alongside it after
touchdown. There is no possible way on earth that any pilot could ever get behind it, at least
on grass.

I once checked out a friend when he bought a T-Cart with no tail wheel time. The wind was a steady 15 kts right down the runway. I told him to flare to the 3 point attitude he saw sitting in the airplane on the ground. How will I know when to touchdown, he asked. “ when the runway stripes stop moving” was my reply. A slight exaggeration but I bet our ground speed was less than 15 kts when we touched.

I guess that would still be scary for Pork Chops because on one of his videos he advised that pilots should monitor the GPS ground speed when taxiing and never exceed 12 kts