Scudrunners

Today I went flying. That is unusual by it's self these days.
As that Billy Mays guy used to say, "But wait, there's more!"

SSU said, "Do a power on stall, keep it stalled for a bit and just use the rudder."

I figure, Seems basic enough. I never have a problem flying around in slow flight playing a long note on the stall horn.
Sounds about the same. Let's do it.

We never did a spin or spiral but I held the left rudder pedal against the firewall. The plane happily did a sort of right turn. Shiney changed the throttle and it affected it but at the initial power setting it just went where it wanted. Pretty fun and interesting.

Then I did a fairly sloppy stall recovery and we went on to do something else.

I get told im in slow flight all the time in the Citation  O0

Glad you got up flying!

I am convinced of two things:

1) it is better to fly more

2) spend as much time hand-flying, dash covered up,
looking outside, maneuvering at high alpha (occasionally
exceeding Clmax) as you can arrange.  The trick here is
to spend enough time in this state to teach yourself new
and correct instincts: what to do (and what not to do)
when a wing (or the nose) drops.

Teaching new instincts (which for example is at the core
of tailwheel and aerobatic upset training) has far more to
do with medicine and psychology than it does with physics.


The guy in the left seat of Colgan 3407 could have spent
a little bit more time on #2 above.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colgan_Air_Flight_3407#Crash

the aircraft's speed was a dangerously slow 131 knots ...

The captain continued applying nose-up inputs ...

The captain overrode the stick pusher and continued pulling on
the control yoke which caused the aircraft upset and later loss of control ...

The aircraft went into a yaw and pitched up at an angle of 31 degrees
in its final moments, before pitching down at 25 degrees. It then rolled
to the left at 46 degrees and snapped back to the right at 105 degrees.
Occupants aboard experienced forces estimated at nearly twice that of
gravity.

Snap-rolling a Dash 8.  Wow.  The good news is that they used a
checklist.  The bad news is that the checklist didn't say to not snaproll
on final.

Did three landings. The last one was shamefully bad. I somehow got going sideways. I have not done that since my first cross country solo. Then I even for sure stepped on the brakes.  :-[

I seem pretty good with my use of the foot rests, now I need to fly enough to quit misuse of the yoke, it's not a "steering wheel shaped like a U" The good thing is. I am on track to fly once a month this year since this one was in January instead of October. Last two years I flew once each. October seems to be flying month.

There is talk about taking the kids up for a a ride with a nice American flight instructor on vacation next month. With the canadian dollar plunging we might have to stick to fishing for lunch when we get there. Then fly back here later.

It is my (certainly unpopular) opinion that
the brakes on light trainers ought to have
half of their fluid drained.

This would ensure that the brakes only had
effect at maximum extension, and only minimal
at that.

This would teach students the right thing.

PS  Spend more time in stalls and slow flight,
and your landings will improve.  Formation flight
helps enormously, too, because a landing is
essentially a joinup and formation with the
runway.  I understand formation flight is something
that most people will never attempt, which makes
me sad.

Check out the distance from the tires to the
ground:

[img width=500 height=306][/img]

Formation flying teaches you that you can control
an aircraft +/- one inch in all axes, if you are
sufficiently motivated to do so.

Bonus points for formation flight at high alpha.
Check out the negative AOA:

[img width=500 height=375][/img]

Flip the picture over, and it will become apparent
that I was mushing along in an inverted stall.

I only land 172s on well over 1500' of pavement, so the only time the brakes are being activated is when I perform an, "Oh, you're going to turn." Use them to stop the wheels spinning after lift off. Or I accidentally put my giant size 10 skate shoes in the wrong spot.

Changing venues has messed me up because the runway is close to roads and not lined up with them. Eventually this will be good for me, currently I am fooling around because I am distracted by a bunch of roads that I should be ignoring.

Last place had a grade, upslope one direction, downslope the other and a nearly certain cross wind. I miss that place but it has been subjected to a hostile take over by people that hate other airplanes.

So I am being presented with plenty of good learning opportunities. Life is good.

That reminds me. I experienced a rough mag for the first time. Turned out to be cold icky plugs fixed by some carb heat and running lean for a couple of minutes.

Colonel wrote:
PS  Spend more time in stalls and slow flight,
and your landings will improve. 

This a really excellent piece of advice, that I've taken to heart.  When I bought my Cherokee I had just over 130 hours acquired over 12 years of inconsistent flying almost entirely in Cessna 150s and 172s.  Now the mighty Hershey bar winged Cherokee is hardly a fire breathing dragon, but it does approach and land differently than a Cessna and my landings were generally shit.  Occasionally I would make a decent one, but they were horribly inconsistent right from the approach on down.  I did lots of circuits trying to figure out the magic combination for a precise landing, but it just wasn't clicking for me.  I had read somewhere about better acquainting one's self with the bottom end of the airplane's envelope to improve landings.  I went out and spent a solid 2 hours with the stall warning light on, doing manoeuvres in slow flight, and stalls in all different configurations.  I then returned to the airport for circuits.  The difference was like night and day.  It was like someone had flipped a switch in my brain and all of a sudden I could plant that airplane where I wanted it without coming in hot or having to drag it in.     

I have always enjoyed slow flight. It is a bummer to fly with a young instructor that is afraid you're going to plunge out of the sky.

I have respect for the risk involved in a spin and the danger of over loading or over speeding during a spiral dive. Having said that I believe instructors learned a lot about the flight characteristics of 172s when spins were part of the PPL cariculum.

1) it is better to fly more

Absolutely.

I am starting to feel my age also. Last year or so I have considered giving up the flying. Oddly I feel I might be able to. I spent a lot of time wishing I was flying when I was not able to go. Not a single day went by when I was not thinking about flying.

I am still planning to fly at least monthly in the future but I just don't know for sure anymore.

It's important to learn that a wing-drop is not
a big deal.  It's not really a spin.  A spin is
not actually developed past the incipient stage
until after the first full turn.

Most airplanes, you don't need to be a wizard
to recover from a wing drop.  If you just [b]let go
of the controls[/b], the lack of back pressure will
cause the nose to drop, and the alpha to decrease
below Clmax (both wings).

This assumes you don't trim entirely into the
stall.  Many aircraft will not have enough trim
to do that - depending upon C of G, flap (C of
P), etc.

Doing slow flight/stalls I like to trim for neutral
around 60 mph or thereabouts.  So to recover,
all the student has to do is let go of everything,
the nose drops, alpha decreases and you start
flying again.

This assumes that you let go of the controls soon
enough, before something really nasty winds up,
like a 172 with an aft C of G (eg four people).

Last person that tried that a couple years back,
killed everyone.

I tumble at very low altitude, which results in
an inverted spin most of the time.  At very low
altitude.  It's not a big deal if you instantly
recover from the incipient, before it has a
chance to wind up.

There are plenty of videos on youtube of
newbie airshow pilots who let a low-altitude
spin wind up.  They're all dead now.

Colonel wrote: It's important to learn that a wing-drop is not
a big deal.  It's not really a spin.  A spin is
not actually developed past the incipient stage
until after the first full turn.

I believe that is why they switched to incipient from full spins in the PPL program in Canada, as the US had been doing in their certificate program.

Rather than teach people how to spin a plane teach them recovery before it becomes a big deal.

You have written in the past that a spin is an aerobatic maneuver.

For too many of us the 172 during training, had been so difficult to get an aggressive enough spin that several rotations usually felt like "no big deal." I'm sure that is part of what has lead to many pilots not respecting the dangers of spinning an airplane without having enough altitude or when the center of gravity is outside the utility category.