Most Difficult Plane to Fly? T6 <== TOTAL BULLSHIT

[Colonel]

um … I was trying to give Bovine Bessie a fighting chance to inflict mortal damage, but whatever makes you feel good about yourself is ok too.

I don’t have success with metaphors so back to the T-6.

Both my father and I had no problem with the T-6. Hell, it was his ab initio training aircraft in the RCAF. He soloed on it after a few hours of dual, and went on to become a nuclear weapons test pilot on the CF-104.

I am told that we are both shitty pilots by smug Canadians, and I believe that.

Therefore no smug Canadian pilot should have a problem with the T-6, which is a gentle old cow of an airplane.

Please point out the fault in my logic above.

If you have not flown a T-6, next time you see one, jump in it and fly surface acro solo
immediately after takeoff. That should be trivial for any smug Canadian pilot.

——

I think we’re all getting distracted by the gentle old T-6, which so reminds me of a 1970's station wagon:



The real fire-breathing dragon is the fearsome 172.



The pride of Canada, right there. TC thinks he is a better pilot than I. I will not dispute that.


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It's important to remember that everything, like station wagons, was shitty in the 1970's.

[Squaretail]

No problem with your logic, only your metaphor. That's ok, we all can't be good at everything.

I haven't flown the T-6 but if its a step from the Stearman, it can't be that difficult. I could see why they made them as trainers. The only reason they arent still used is their propensity to guzzle avgas.

Its said that the cub was the safest airplane because it just barely moved fast enough to kill you, but it can still kill you, like the cow, if you are unwary and unwise enough to be in that bad place (the open field, so to speak) with them.

[Colonel]

It’s important to remember that the T-6 is a flying tank.

You are literally cocooned by tons of metal to protect you.

How on earth one could come to grief in something so doclie and over-built staggers the imagination.

Like that future (or maybe current) Air Canada pilot that tried to kill a hangar in the video above in his fire-breathing 172.

[Squaretail]

Well you have to think that sometimes someone was in the field, with the cow. I mean they didn't just use it for day vfr circuits after all. Sometimes whole flights of the things came to grief because the guy in lead fucked up. Tandem cockpits aren't ideal for a host of training activities with neophytes. The sheer volume of flying taking place and the external factors at play certainly didn't help, especially when the loss rate was deemed "acceptable".

I look at the equation the other way, the fact that more of them didn't perish in the effort was probably a testament to the design of the aircraft. That the "trainer" design evolved from that point, was some rounding off of corners.

[Colonel]

they didn't just use it for day vfr circuits after all

Reminds me. My father is completely different than I - a quiet guy.

But when he was flying Harvards as a teenager, he had a night cross-country to fly,
and there was no radar in those days. You just made radio calls over your reporting
points.

So Dear Old Dad flew a different night cross-country than planned, making bogus
radio calls at the appropriate times over the reporting points he was supposed to
fly over.

Instead he told granny in King City to start a huge bonfire in the back yard of the
house, which the owner of the El Macombo in Toronto eventually bought. There's
a WWI prop in the rafters that my grandfather put there. Gotta get back there
sometime and pull the gable ends and retrieve it.

So Dear Old Dad flies to King City, spots the bonfire, and does a night solo
surface aerobatic demonstration in the Harvard over granny. There were
reports of a fire-breathing dragon in the sky that night. The neighbors had
no fucking idea what was going on.

Dear Old Dad flies back to base, making bogus radio calls over the points
he never flew over. Landed and went back to bed. No one ever figured it out.

At the end of that training segment his instructor - named Bland - commented
that Dear Old Dad needed to "show more initiative". If he had showed any more
initiative, he surely would have died.

Anyways. A teenager that smug Canadians thinks is a really shitty pilot, was able
to fly a Harvard at night in the early 1950's and no nav aids, to a city and fly surface
aerobatics at night in the Harvard.

If a shitty teenage pilot can fly a Harvard, so can you.

All smug Canadian pilots have a moral obligation to climb into a Harvard and
fly solo surface aerobatics for their first flight. Do it at night, smug Canadians.

[Colonel]

Forgot to mention. My kid - another pilot that smug Canadians thinks is shit -
jumped into the hot-rod Harvard (clip wing, geared prop, zoomies) when he was
just a teenager, and had no problem with it.

Didn't get to go solo on the first flight, alas. Owner went along.

So there. Three really shitty Canadian pilots that had no problem with the T-6,
two of them when they were teenagers and the other one did solo surface
aerobatics for his first flight.

Spot the pattern? T-6 is a TRAINER. Not a "fire-breathing dragon". Unless you
were a neighbor of my granny's in King City in 1951, anyways.

[Squaretail]

I suppose i should clarify my position, before people get too wound up.

I fully agree, opinions of Canadian pilots notwithstanding, in the present if you die in a T-6 you were probably a) doing something colossally stupid, or b) were exercising your priviledges of wealth far outside your miniscule piloting ability, or c) both.

But, in the dark days of the 40s, i could see why it happened. Lots of lessons learned in blood in the old days. No judgement. I wasn't there. I know enough about a T-6 that i wouldn't relish using one as a night trainer, much less an instrument one, or flying in a formation with new pilots training how to navigate. Not to say that there weren't capable people or that it can't be done, but the scales of volume increase the probabilities of trouble. All i'm sayin.

[Colonel]

Talk to me about the technique used to land a Harvard at night. From the back seat.

[Squaretail]

Never did it, so i won't hold forth on it.

[cgzro]

My limited experience in the Harvard was that it had an interesting high speed stall, ie if you pull too hard it would neatly snap 15-20 degrees until you relaxed tha back stick but it was quite polite about it. My first loop looked very segmented and crooked as a result.

Landing seemed a bit harder than say a chipmunk but nowhere near as tricky as a Pitts. I suspect however that unlike a Pitts , which you can get straight relatively quickly with some power and fancy footwork the polar moment of enertia of the Harvard would make for a much slower recovery if you did get the tail wheel out from behind you.

Another nice thing about the plane was how light the controls were.. It felt almost Chipmunky to me.