Piling Up Smash
Nov 24, 00 | 6:37 pm by admin
So, it happened that I handed J.W. the airplane at about 750′ AGL
(”Above Ground Level”)—him, me, and a hundred pounds of fuel
roaring up at over eleven hundred feet per minute after the first turn
away from the airport. All green gauges, flight performance dead-on, and
the 150hp Lycoming at full song in the particular throat of aircraft
engines: sharp and stout. Airspeed was steady at Vy (”Best Rate of
Climb”—70mph in this airplane), with the nose pitched high over the
horizon. The only fairly useful view was out the side windows under the
wings, and I knew he couldn’t see the airspeed indicator over my
shoulder from his back seat, but it was J.W., after all.
"Hey, hold this climbout for a minute.” Instantly, the stick in my hand shook just a tad, at the top of the slight mechanical play in the pushrod linkages. It wasn�t enough to actuate the ailerons (the �little wings,� which is what the archaic French word literally means, but in modern airplanes refers to small hinged sections of the wings that modify airflow to make the airplane roll). It was just enough to send tactile confirmation of positive flight control transfer, and simply reeked of sharp cockpit teamwork. He followed-up with voice in the intercom, “My airplane.”
I’d spotted the tape machine and sticky-cup microphone where I’d left them lying on the dashboard when we saddled up. This is a trick that I picked up from Col. Jack Broughton�s excellent Vietnam air combat memoir �Thud Ridge,� and it has definitely paid its way. Tape recordings of cockpit intercom and radio chatter are terrific study aids for flight review, and my collection of about sixty-five hours includes moments of considerable comedy, as well. (One �Radio Mystery Theater� segment is a riotous airport tower controller�s misapprehension of traffic in his airspace: for about three minutes he didn�t know who was who, in what airplane, or where. That’s not good, but we had ourselves sorted out in the air, so it came off funny.)
In my own strict terms, it was disconcerting to see that gear still on the dashboard after takeoff: I don�t keep it as an actual checklist item, but I do always manage to set up my recorder before I taxi off the parking ramp. I had missed that, this time, and it bugged me.
We had only been in the air less than a minute, though, and I figured I would get the tape started right away. Both hands free now, I reached up and took both items just before they would have started dancing around, because J.W. wasn’t more than ten seconds into it before I was looking out the side window at the bright green ground.
He started with a smooth roll into something less than a steep turn to the right, but brought it right back left again, with more emphasis… nose pitched up, to the left, pulling a bit harder and higher, and then a touch of left rudder, and the nose arced into a slide down through the horizon (for the first time since takeoff), with ailerons rolling wings back to the right as the bright green appeared level out there at twelve o’clock.
Throttle-push when level, to pile-up smash (energy) at the bottom of the descent, and then pulling up and rolling right: a steady arcing turn up and to the right, but higher this time and steeper in both nose pitch and bank. As the energy drains at the top, we’re rolled over so far right that the wing points straight down at the daylight trees and tiny houses far below, the picture in the window-frame is sliding backwards as the nose falls through again, and then all the colors and objects smear downward and backward when J.W. starts rolling the wings level, anticipating the horizon off the nose.
He got through about three cycles of this before I hit the ‘record’ button and then asked him, “Are you having fun back there?”
“I can’t hold a climbout in this thing.”
I laughed, and he didn’t stop. Well, not right away, at least. He smoothed out the rolling cycles, to re-establish the Vy climb (not being able to see the airspeed indicator over my shoulder) at 70mph. All his time in that back seat enabled him to pitch for airspeeds merely by looking out at the wing’s angle over the horizon. I just had time to observe that before he pitched nose-up through Vy at full power, on his way to Vx (”Best Angle of Climb” - 58mph in the Citabria), and kept going up. Airspeed was drifting down toward 55 or so, and both of us waited for the stall break, but it didn’t happen. The vertical speed indicator just sort of wobbled down toward a descent rate and J.W. let the airplane do what it wanted to do: a touch of stick-forward, and the wings bit the air enough to fly again, still nose over the horizon, with VSI back in a positive climb rate.
“What a good airplane,” he said quietly.
“It just won’t stop flying,” I said.
“You’d have to do something really stupid…” as he watched out the side window for 70mph (because he can’t see the ASI from back there).
Since leaving flight instruction to go train as First Officer in Boeing 737 jets, J.W. has been a while away from stick & rudder taildraggers. There are only so many opportunities that one can fit into a life, and logging air transport time with one’s own father as Captain in the left seat must rate as one of the best, especially if the father and son mesh is so good as the case of these two. On any given afternoon, though, when he’s got time off around the airport, I’m pretty sure his arm can be bent until he surrenders to a hop in this Citabria. He taught taildragging in it. J.W. is anomalous, almost anachronous: he’s got a 1950’s American feel to him as a young man who it seems shouldn’t be in touch with any of that, except that he’s been reared in a lot of it in north Georgia. Clean cut, crisp, bright and friendly, he fits right into this airplane of clean clear essentials. It’s strong and friendly in simple aspects, honest, with nothing hidden. It’s a good time, and so is he.
When Terri, my primary instructor, moved the airplane elsewhere on the base, J.W. wasn’t flying it anymore. He went away to learn 737’s, and then came back to give primary, instrument, and multi-engine instruction in his off-time, and in all the regular (not to say, “boring”) types: Cessna 172’s, Piper Warriors, with a smattering of twins and complex airplanes.
(He checked out in a Debonair, with retractable landing gear and constant-speed propeller, because one of his students had bought one to learn in.) Terri, herself, has lately been off at First Officer training in one of the European regional airline types. When the solo endorsement in my logbook expired at ninety days, I was legally grounded without an instructor. I’d heard J.W. was around, and that was that… except for jumping a few political hoops between offices in order that J.W. could fly as instructor in another flight school’s airplane.
We got it squared-away, though, and it was worth it.
The main thing was simply two guys off in an airplane for a while in the afternoon, but it had a special wrinkle to it in the student/instructor hook-up. We used each other shamelessly, over mutual delight in this particular airplane: the Citabria. Giuseppe Bellanca’s extension of his Champ series of light aircraft, the Citabria is his present to sport aerobats. Able to cavort about with its welded steel-tube and fabric-covered airframe sustaining five times the positive load of gravity (”5 G’s”), it’s just the thing for boring holes in the sky with a bit of an attitude on. There is nothing sumptuous about the cockpit: it’s not designed for cruising. It’s got flight controls like a fighter: a stick between one’s legs and the throttle at the left hand, for both seats, and the tandem seating (front and back) makes for a good mind game between pilots who can’t look each other in the eye.
Best of all, the Citabria goes back to a time when virtually all airplanes sat on a tailwheel. Go look at ‘em in the photographs, parked with their noses pointed at the sky. Taildraggers are thoroughbreds, to include the skittish character that the word implies. They like to spin like tops when rolling on the ground. They’ll do it (”ground loop”) the instant that the pilot isn’t paying attention to the nature of the beast, but the nature of the beast is the thing that makes them so compelling. The way it plays in the Citabria is that all the aviator’s qualities that can best exploit its essential sport nature are the same ones that keep rein on the taildragger’s worst impulses. They work together, from the earliest instruction in the type.
At its best, primary instruction takes place in taildraggers, because that pilot is learning actual stick & rudder maneuvering skills that generally languish in nosewheel students. Nosewheeled airplanes—lacking the ground-loop impulse—rarely demand the attention during landing and taxiing that taildraggers do, and they show it on short final approach to landing. Those people can be out of shape on landing in all kinds of ways in their directional stability and speeds, and get away with it where taildraggers would be balled-up all over the runway: the airplane goes *plop!* on the wheels, the nosewheel pulls everything along and points it straight while the pilot is along for the ride. Done flying. The last twenty-five feet above the runway is where most of the flying is for taildragger pilots, and they’re doing things with controls that others are not. Since this happens on every landing, these skills are sharp and handy when an airplane like the Citabria is between takeoff and landing.
The tip-top, though, is having logged one�s first hour in the Citabria, and flown almost nothing else since. I did go ahead and log those four Cessna 172 hours in my book, but I don�t think about them often because I get to fly Terri�s marvelous “Sky Goddess” Citabria. One usually needs to go out of one�s way to be able to do this, but I don�t have to. Taildraggers, and the people who fly them, are unusual these days. They�ve been in something of a popular resurgence in recent years, but it�s not as if one can find one available at just any airport. I could be driving a hundred miles to fly one, and I surely would, but this one is about ten minutes from my house.
J.W. has found it pretty easy, too.
We understand the airplane, and for two guys like that, the trip from one airport to another (for landing circuits—what else?) is for maneuvering in order to keep the understanding in touch. This is a tactile matter as much as all the headwork that goes into aviating. If you go out and find someone who’s into race cars, you won’t go long before hearing all kinds of talk about the “feel” of the machine, and if you’re around race cars, you’re around people who feel the machine at its limits. So, when we talk about “maneuvering” with people in a Citabria, it’s about things like getting the airplane to stop flying.
Along the way toward the uncontrolled airport where we’ll shoot landings, we’ll note the altitude and then pull the power to idle. With back-pressure on the stick in order to hold nose up and the maneuver’s entry-altitude as long as possible, what happens is “high Alpha”: the air is no longer meeting the front edge of the wing head-on. As the nose points up, the air begins to hit the wing on the flat underside, which is exactly wrong. If the wing is going to work (fly) the air is supposed to curve smoothly over the top of the wing as the leading-edge slices through it. When that’s happening, that’s low-Alpha: a low “angle of attack” between the leading edge and the airflow. When Alpha gets high—like when the pilot is pitching the nose up without power to make the airplane climb—the airflow burbles off the top of the wing and wrecks the whole mechanism of lift.
Naturally, people who fly airplanes like the Citabria will get into high-Alpha to see what it feels like just before it wants to stop flying. It’s called a “stall” when that happens, and all pilots do them in their training. Some people make sport of high-Alpha maneuvering, however, and a sport airplane is great fun for hanging the nose up right at the edge of the stall. Rudder-skills come fore: when the airplane is reared up like that, it’s moving very slowly through the air (this one indicates about 55mph) but the pilot is very busy watching airspeed and altitude in constant tick-tock scan over flight instruments, holding the stick back steadily, and all the wing-leveling taking place with constant action on the floor pedals. They look like the pedals from a go-cart, up near the firewall with their welded-tube construction and push-rod connections back to the rudder at the tail, and the feel of air on the whole thing as it moves centers on dancing them precisely…
…for as long as one can stand the exercise before putting the power back on and letting the nose down to an angle where the flight controls work in ordinary concert, or until the airplane falls off in a spin.
Naturally, we want to know what it feels like to hang the airplane at the edge like that, and so we do.
Flying landing circuits around an uncontrolled airport is a study in meeting other pilots at work and sharing the workspace measured in miles or feet, depending on the action. Five to ten miles away, each pilot calls the airspace on a published frequency and announces his aircraft type, position, and intentions, and asks for an advisory on local conditions. If there is anyone present and listening, they’ll reply with announcement of conditions like wind direction and speed, and the runway currently in use… which are always nice things to have in physical circumstances where wind makes crucial difference between rolling-out sweetly and smoothly and burning to smithereens unconscious in a crumpled tangle. Nor would it do to set up a landing opposite to traffic on the field: fifty feet above the runway would be no place or time to be looking at someone coming straight at you with full takeoff power.
It’s nice to get in line.
With the runway in clear view, it’s time to get in line—whether anyone is seen or heard—by flying along the runway some distance apart from it and in the opposite direction from landing. After that, every turn happens in the same direction (usually to the left, but sometimes to the right), and is announced on the radio, whether anyone is seen or heard.
We like to fly our landing patterns close to the runway in the Citabria. It’s a good idea in general, just because of the safety consideration in case of an engine failure: landing patterns are flown at altitudes that don’t allow a long time in which to manage emergencies, so why not stay near where the wheels could be handy in that case? The sport nature of the airplane makes tight maneuvering easy, and people who fly this thing like it that way, so that’s the way it goes. While the flying-SUV types are working their downwind legs (parallel to runway, opposite to landing) out there a mile away, we’re looking pretty much down at the runway out the window, just on our left. When we get to the end of the downwind leg, where most others turn a nice square ninety degrees to base-leg (looking to the side for their final approach), we’re tipped up in a tight bank like a dirt-track racer skidding through a turn on the oval, with high-tension pressure on the controls: the airplane goes sideways against the airflow, killing lift and falling, with its motion through the air eventually aimed at the runway, but the nose pointing off somewhere else.
Airplanes are wind-vanes, except that the wind doesn’t point them: pilots point them at the wind. The wind, here, isn’t the one that swells through the sky by the chaos of myriad pressure differentials in the atmosphere. It’s the wind that happens when the airplane positively moves through the air. That’s called “relative wind," and the airplane will ordinarily point directly at this wind, if left to its basic aerodynamic characteristics, but it’s often useful to point away from it, too.
In the landing pattern, we do it to make the airplane go quickly down without pointing the nose at the ground (and thereby going too fast). There is a way of holding the controls so that the whole thing is cocked sideways and tilted to one side, still looking like it’s hanging in the air, but actually falling and doing it in such a way that it can be made right (flying again) just by relaxing tension out of the controls and letting that wind-vane thing happen naturally. It’s called a “forward slip”.
J.W. wanted a landing. “You mind if I try one?”
“Go for it, mate.”
(Stick-shake) “Okay, my airplane,” from the back seat. We were just about to turn toward the runway. “Here’s your basic turning slip. Put it in a slip on downwind and slip it all the way around and down.”
J.W. hit the radio and announced his “short approach," which meant that he would turn toward the runway without meticulous care for the usual series of square right-angle pattern turns. He would simply carve one continuous curve around to the left until his nose was pointed down the runway, and lose a thousand feet of altitude in the process.
He pulled the power to idle. “Okay, right rudder…” and I felt the pedal go all the way forward, the nose pointing to the right. “Lots of aileron…” The stick went hard left, and the wings rolled that way. So, now, we were tipped into the relative wind so that it was coming at us from the left front, with our left wing dipped down into it. "…And just drive it around. It feels pretty uncomfortable…”
And it does feel that way. It must look sick from the ground.
We’re now “cross-controlled.” Once the basic stance is achieved, the turn itself is muscled into action with more or less pressure on the ailerons: if the airplane rolls over more into the way it’s tipped, it turns that way. If not, it turns the other way: the way the nose is pointed. This kind of thing is about feeling one’s way into the setup. Once it’s set up, it’s about pressing or relaxing the setup to make it go one way or the other.
The Citabria is a “high-wing” type. The wing is attached to the top of the fuselage, and that makes it impossible to see the inside of a turn: the pilot can’t look through a wing that’s banked into the turn. When the airplane is slipping through a turn like this, all the normal cues to turn-rate are screwy because the nose isn’t pointed the way things are actually moving. So, it’s all about feel and timing in holding the controls through a process that doesn’t match what one sees, and it’s very contrary to what the airplane/wind-vane naturally wants to do.
"…Lots of aileron here…” J.W. muscles as he figures the turn needs a faster rate.
In forty-five seconds, we drop a thousand feet and turn 180 degrees to end up rolling on the asphalt at about 65mph.
“That was a man-sized slip you had goin’ on there, J.W.”
We roll-out, put power on, and takeoff again.
“A lot of people might freak out if they see you doing that, and the reason is that everybody thinks you’re gonna stall and spin the airplane. But if you’re not pulling back on the stick, the airplane’s not going to stall. It’s just gonna fall really fast. So, be careful about doing it, but I like people to be aware of it. If the damned thing’s ever on fire and you have to put it into a field somewhere, that’s the only way to do it.”
"…Right, which is not the time to be experimenting with it.”
“Right. It’s procedural.”
And, it’s fun to work on with someone with a taste for unusual attitudes. We went around several times trading the controls and dropping out of the sky sideways, flexing the sport impulse with the excuse of "procedure," chatting-up theory while flying downwind until the next drop.
“I was seeing eighty to eighty-five indicated airspeed all the way through that last one, but you need to figure error in that because of the way the air’s sideways…”
“Yeah, I’ve looked and seen fifty sometimes and ninety other times. Seventy indicated would average about perfect, but like I said, if you’re not pulling the stick back…” (while holding the bank angle over) “…it’s not gonna stall on you.”
“Yeah, right. The critical thing is the pitch.”
“Yeah. Well, actually, angle-of-attack.”
“Right… which is what it’s all about.”
“The bad thing is, if you do stall it, you’re dead.”
“Well, yeah.”
Around, again.
“A little hotter in airspeed than I saw in your approach, but that’s okay.”
“Yup. Just keep it turning… let it fall… now, start taking everything out in moderation—you want to keep it sideways so we can kill the airspeed. Just keep it slipping…right here… a little more rudder… now, let it out…”
(touchdown)
“Outstanding. And, see, you can get a lot more landings per hour.”
On the way home, J.W. took the airplane again and started a set of turns that looked like more play, but had a purpose. During each one, he cleared the whole sky of traffic with hard looks out every window and the clear overhead greenhouse when it was tipped over toward the horizon.
“I don’t see anybody hanging around… mind if I do something that Terri doesn’t like us doing?”
“Carry on,” I said. I’m aware of where the lines are and how sternly her disapprovals run, in which directions. “Whaddya got in mind?”
“Oh, I’m just gonna do one little aileron roll.”
Ah, yes. Just one little roll: tipping the wings over through upside-down, and around to upright again. Just one little violation of FAA constraints against aerobatic flight without a parachute, if somebody wanted to play it that way against us. I didn’t think Terri would, of course, but this can get pretty serious pretty quickly, starting in the cockpit of an airplane out of control, which is a place easy to get to for anyone who thinks it’s as easy to roll an airplane as slapping the stick to one side or the other.
“…One little roll.”
“Ah…” I said from the front seat, “…Keep a bit of positive-G on the airplane, because my bag is in the cargo space behind you.”
“Oh, it is? Okay, I’ll keep it loaded up all the way through.” J.W. would take care to keep the force of gravity running through the floor of the airplane, even when the floor was sky-up. That way, my leather bag would not come floating through the cockpit in zero-G, only to come down who-knows-where when the airplane loaded up again. An item like that can beat you senseless before you know it.
“Call one-twenty airspeed for me.” (He can’t see it back there, and it’s an unusual speed to pitch for by looking out at the wing.)
“Uh, one twenty-five.”
“Good deal,” and with my hand gently on the grip, I felt him haul the stick back just enough to get the nose going up before the hard left pressure and the airplane started turning over. As it went, the left rudder pedal went down in a practiced-touch, just enough, relaxed as the wing was pointed straight down, tensed again as the wing leveled inverted and kept the tension as it all went around to right-side up. The whole thing packed into about five seconds before we were flying along level again.
I laughed low & quiet, before reading out flight data: “2G, one thirty-four exit speed, three hundred feet down. Not bad, pal. I’ll bet you’re not doing that every day in the 737.”
“Nah, actually, it’s been since I last flew this thing… about six months. Kinda sloppy, actually.”
He hadn’t floated the inverted section properly: a touch too much back-stick had us headed slightly nose down through that part, which accounted for the altitude loss and airspeed hike. On the other hand, we didn’t see my bag floating through the cockpit, so the positive G-load worked out.
Nobody knew.
There was nobody there with us. It was just two guys in an airplane, rolling through the feel of it: all hard reality between us and the hard earth, where failure of the test would meet with hard penalty, permanent and without appeal. Such a trivial thing, “one little roll," but with such deep implication. Five seconds around and back to upright… what could be more simple?
Well, for one thing, we both knew that it might not be appreciated by “powers that be." Anyone interested could go look up the pertinent Federal Air Regulations. I know them, but I’m not going to do anyone’s homework about it, here. All the “sanctions” are spelled out, too. It could be just that trivial.
There is something far more glorious, though, to “one little roll” through the great big sky. It’s about being a live human strapped to extensions of one’s mind running out through the stick, rudder, and throttle, powerful enough to play where no other species can, except those immediately ordained to it without artifacts to make it happen. Having apprehended all the necessary principles strictly as they are in reality, we then exploit the entire complex of mind, body, and machine, for the purpose of a joy not bound in just five seconds around. Done once, it lives as long as we do.
That day under the implacable eye of nature, we must have done it right, because she obviously approved us without penalty, and we just flew away.
"Hey, hold this climbout for a minute.” Instantly, the stick in my hand shook just a tad, at the top of the slight mechanical play in the pushrod linkages. It wasn�t enough to actuate the ailerons (the �little wings,� which is what the archaic French word literally means, but in modern airplanes refers to small hinged sections of the wings that modify airflow to make the airplane roll). It was just enough to send tactile confirmation of positive flight control transfer, and simply reeked of sharp cockpit teamwork. He followed-up with voice in the intercom, “My airplane.”
I’d spotted the tape machine and sticky-cup microphone where I’d left them lying on the dashboard when we saddled up. This is a trick that I picked up from Col. Jack Broughton�s excellent Vietnam air combat memoir �Thud Ridge,� and it has definitely paid its way. Tape recordings of cockpit intercom and radio chatter are terrific study aids for flight review, and my collection of about sixty-five hours includes moments of considerable comedy, as well. (One �Radio Mystery Theater� segment is a riotous airport tower controller�s misapprehension of traffic in his airspace: for about three minutes he didn�t know who was who, in what airplane, or where. That’s not good, but we had ourselves sorted out in the air, so it came off funny.)
In my own strict terms, it was disconcerting to see that gear still on the dashboard after takeoff: I don�t keep it as an actual checklist item, but I do always manage to set up my recorder before I taxi off the parking ramp. I had missed that, this time, and it bugged me.
We had only been in the air less than a minute, though, and I figured I would get the tape started right away. Both hands free now, I reached up and took both items just before they would have started dancing around, because J.W. wasn’t more than ten seconds into it before I was looking out the side window at the bright green ground.
He started with a smooth roll into something less than a steep turn to the right, but brought it right back left again, with more emphasis… nose pitched up, to the left, pulling a bit harder and higher, and then a touch of left rudder, and the nose arced into a slide down through the horizon (for the first time since takeoff), with ailerons rolling wings back to the right as the bright green appeared level out there at twelve o’clock.
Throttle-push when level, to pile-up smash (energy) at the bottom of the descent, and then pulling up and rolling right: a steady arcing turn up and to the right, but higher this time and steeper in both nose pitch and bank. As the energy drains at the top, we’re rolled over so far right that the wing points straight down at the daylight trees and tiny houses far below, the picture in the window-frame is sliding backwards as the nose falls through again, and then all the colors and objects smear downward and backward when J.W. starts rolling the wings level, anticipating the horizon off the nose.
He got through about three cycles of this before I hit the ‘record’ button and then asked him, “Are you having fun back there?”
“I can’t hold a climbout in this thing.”
I laughed, and he didn’t stop. Well, not right away, at least. He smoothed out the rolling cycles, to re-establish the Vy climb (not being able to see the airspeed indicator over my shoulder) at 70mph. All his time in that back seat enabled him to pitch for airspeeds merely by looking out at the wing’s angle over the horizon. I just had time to observe that before he pitched nose-up through Vy at full power, on his way to Vx (”Best Angle of Climb” - 58mph in the Citabria), and kept going up. Airspeed was drifting down toward 55 or so, and both of us waited for the stall break, but it didn’t happen. The vertical speed indicator just sort of wobbled down toward a descent rate and J.W. let the airplane do what it wanted to do: a touch of stick-forward, and the wings bit the air enough to fly again, still nose over the horizon, with VSI back in a positive climb rate.
“What a good airplane,” he said quietly.
“It just won’t stop flying,” I said.
“You’d have to do something really stupid…” as he watched out the side window for 70mph (because he can’t see the ASI from back there).
Since leaving flight instruction to go train as First Officer in Boeing 737 jets, J.W. has been a while away from stick & rudder taildraggers. There are only so many opportunities that one can fit into a life, and logging air transport time with one’s own father as Captain in the left seat must rate as one of the best, especially if the father and son mesh is so good as the case of these two. On any given afternoon, though, when he’s got time off around the airport, I’m pretty sure his arm can be bent until he surrenders to a hop in this Citabria. He taught taildragging in it. J.W. is anomalous, almost anachronous: he’s got a 1950’s American feel to him as a young man who it seems shouldn’t be in touch with any of that, except that he’s been reared in a lot of it in north Georgia. Clean cut, crisp, bright and friendly, he fits right into this airplane of clean clear essentials. It’s strong and friendly in simple aspects, honest, with nothing hidden. It’s a good time, and so is he.
When Terri, my primary instructor, moved the airplane elsewhere on the base, J.W. wasn’t flying it anymore. He went away to learn 737’s, and then came back to give primary, instrument, and multi-engine instruction in his off-time, and in all the regular (not to say, “boring”) types: Cessna 172’s, Piper Warriors, with a smattering of twins and complex airplanes.
(He checked out in a Debonair, with retractable landing gear and constant-speed propeller, because one of his students had bought one to learn in.) Terri, herself, has lately been off at First Officer training in one of the European regional airline types. When the solo endorsement in my logbook expired at ninety days, I was legally grounded without an instructor. I’d heard J.W. was around, and that was that… except for jumping a few political hoops between offices in order that J.W. could fly as instructor in another flight school’s airplane.
We got it squared-away, though, and it was worth it.
The main thing was simply two guys off in an airplane for a while in the afternoon, but it had a special wrinkle to it in the student/instructor hook-up. We used each other shamelessly, over mutual delight in this particular airplane: the Citabria. Giuseppe Bellanca’s extension of his Champ series of light aircraft, the Citabria is his present to sport aerobats. Able to cavort about with its welded steel-tube and fabric-covered airframe sustaining five times the positive load of gravity (”5 G’s”), it’s just the thing for boring holes in the sky with a bit of an attitude on. There is nothing sumptuous about the cockpit: it’s not designed for cruising. It’s got flight controls like a fighter: a stick between one’s legs and the throttle at the left hand, for both seats, and the tandem seating (front and back) makes for a good mind game between pilots who can’t look each other in the eye.
Best of all, the Citabria goes back to a time when virtually all airplanes sat on a tailwheel. Go look at ‘em in the photographs, parked with their noses pointed at the sky. Taildraggers are thoroughbreds, to include the skittish character that the word implies. They like to spin like tops when rolling on the ground. They’ll do it (”ground loop”) the instant that the pilot isn’t paying attention to the nature of the beast, but the nature of the beast is the thing that makes them so compelling. The way it plays in the Citabria is that all the aviator’s qualities that can best exploit its essential sport nature are the same ones that keep rein on the taildragger’s worst impulses. They work together, from the earliest instruction in the type.
At its best, primary instruction takes place in taildraggers, because that pilot is learning actual stick & rudder maneuvering skills that generally languish in nosewheel students. Nosewheeled airplanes—lacking the ground-loop impulse—rarely demand the attention during landing and taxiing that taildraggers do, and they show it on short final approach to landing. Those people can be out of shape on landing in all kinds of ways in their directional stability and speeds, and get away with it where taildraggers would be balled-up all over the runway: the airplane goes *plop!* on the wheels, the nosewheel pulls everything along and points it straight while the pilot is along for the ride. Done flying. The last twenty-five feet above the runway is where most of the flying is for taildragger pilots, and they’re doing things with controls that others are not. Since this happens on every landing, these skills are sharp and handy when an airplane like the Citabria is between takeoff and landing.
The tip-top, though, is having logged one�s first hour in the Citabria, and flown almost nothing else since. I did go ahead and log those four Cessna 172 hours in my book, but I don�t think about them often because I get to fly Terri�s marvelous “Sky Goddess” Citabria. One usually needs to go out of one�s way to be able to do this, but I don�t have to. Taildraggers, and the people who fly them, are unusual these days. They�ve been in something of a popular resurgence in recent years, but it�s not as if one can find one available at just any airport. I could be driving a hundred miles to fly one, and I surely would, but this one is about ten minutes from my house.
J.W. has found it pretty easy, too.
We understand the airplane, and for two guys like that, the trip from one airport to another (for landing circuits—what else?) is for maneuvering in order to keep the understanding in touch. This is a tactile matter as much as all the headwork that goes into aviating. If you go out and find someone who’s into race cars, you won’t go long before hearing all kinds of talk about the “feel” of the machine, and if you’re around race cars, you’re around people who feel the machine at its limits. So, when we talk about “maneuvering” with people in a Citabria, it’s about things like getting the airplane to stop flying.
Along the way toward the uncontrolled airport where we’ll shoot landings, we’ll note the altitude and then pull the power to idle. With back-pressure on the stick in order to hold nose up and the maneuver’s entry-altitude as long as possible, what happens is “high Alpha”: the air is no longer meeting the front edge of the wing head-on. As the nose points up, the air begins to hit the wing on the flat underside, which is exactly wrong. If the wing is going to work (fly) the air is supposed to curve smoothly over the top of the wing as the leading-edge slices through it. When that’s happening, that’s low-Alpha: a low “angle of attack” between the leading edge and the airflow. When Alpha gets high—like when the pilot is pitching the nose up without power to make the airplane climb—the airflow burbles off the top of the wing and wrecks the whole mechanism of lift.
Naturally, people who fly airplanes like the Citabria will get into high-Alpha to see what it feels like just before it wants to stop flying. It’s called a “stall” when that happens, and all pilots do them in their training. Some people make sport of high-Alpha maneuvering, however, and a sport airplane is great fun for hanging the nose up right at the edge of the stall. Rudder-skills come fore: when the airplane is reared up like that, it’s moving very slowly through the air (this one indicates about 55mph) but the pilot is very busy watching airspeed and altitude in constant tick-tock scan over flight instruments, holding the stick back steadily, and all the wing-leveling taking place with constant action on the floor pedals. They look like the pedals from a go-cart, up near the firewall with their welded-tube construction and push-rod connections back to the rudder at the tail, and the feel of air on the whole thing as it moves centers on dancing them precisely…
…for as long as one can stand the exercise before putting the power back on and letting the nose down to an angle where the flight controls work in ordinary concert, or until the airplane falls off in a spin.
Naturally, we want to know what it feels like to hang the airplane at the edge like that, and so we do.
Flying landing circuits around an uncontrolled airport is a study in meeting other pilots at work and sharing the workspace measured in miles or feet, depending on the action. Five to ten miles away, each pilot calls the airspace on a published frequency and announces his aircraft type, position, and intentions, and asks for an advisory on local conditions. If there is anyone present and listening, they’ll reply with announcement of conditions like wind direction and speed, and the runway currently in use… which are always nice things to have in physical circumstances where wind makes crucial difference between rolling-out sweetly and smoothly and burning to smithereens unconscious in a crumpled tangle. Nor would it do to set up a landing opposite to traffic on the field: fifty feet above the runway would be no place or time to be looking at someone coming straight at you with full takeoff power.
It’s nice to get in line.
With the runway in clear view, it’s time to get in line—whether anyone is seen or heard—by flying along the runway some distance apart from it and in the opposite direction from landing. After that, every turn happens in the same direction (usually to the left, but sometimes to the right), and is announced on the radio, whether anyone is seen or heard.
We like to fly our landing patterns close to the runway in the Citabria. It’s a good idea in general, just because of the safety consideration in case of an engine failure: landing patterns are flown at altitudes that don’t allow a long time in which to manage emergencies, so why not stay near where the wheels could be handy in that case? The sport nature of the airplane makes tight maneuvering easy, and people who fly this thing like it that way, so that’s the way it goes. While the flying-SUV types are working their downwind legs (parallel to runway, opposite to landing) out there a mile away, we’re looking pretty much down at the runway out the window, just on our left. When we get to the end of the downwind leg, where most others turn a nice square ninety degrees to base-leg (looking to the side for their final approach), we’re tipped up in a tight bank like a dirt-track racer skidding through a turn on the oval, with high-tension pressure on the controls: the airplane goes sideways against the airflow, killing lift and falling, with its motion through the air eventually aimed at the runway, but the nose pointing off somewhere else.
Airplanes are wind-vanes, except that the wind doesn’t point them: pilots point them at the wind. The wind, here, isn’t the one that swells through the sky by the chaos of myriad pressure differentials in the atmosphere. It’s the wind that happens when the airplane positively moves through the air. That’s called “relative wind," and the airplane will ordinarily point directly at this wind, if left to its basic aerodynamic characteristics, but it’s often useful to point away from it, too.
In the landing pattern, we do it to make the airplane go quickly down without pointing the nose at the ground (and thereby going too fast). There is a way of holding the controls so that the whole thing is cocked sideways and tilted to one side, still looking like it’s hanging in the air, but actually falling and doing it in such a way that it can be made right (flying again) just by relaxing tension out of the controls and letting that wind-vane thing happen naturally. It’s called a “forward slip”.
J.W. wanted a landing. “You mind if I try one?”
“Go for it, mate.”
(Stick-shake) “Okay, my airplane,” from the back seat. We were just about to turn toward the runway. “Here’s your basic turning slip. Put it in a slip on downwind and slip it all the way around and down.”
J.W. hit the radio and announced his “short approach," which meant that he would turn toward the runway without meticulous care for the usual series of square right-angle pattern turns. He would simply carve one continuous curve around to the left until his nose was pointed down the runway, and lose a thousand feet of altitude in the process.
He pulled the power to idle. “Okay, right rudder…” and I felt the pedal go all the way forward, the nose pointing to the right. “Lots of aileron…” The stick went hard left, and the wings rolled that way. So, now, we were tipped into the relative wind so that it was coming at us from the left front, with our left wing dipped down into it. "…And just drive it around. It feels pretty uncomfortable…”
And it does feel that way. It must look sick from the ground.
We’re now “cross-controlled.” Once the basic stance is achieved, the turn itself is muscled into action with more or less pressure on the ailerons: if the airplane rolls over more into the way it’s tipped, it turns that way. If not, it turns the other way: the way the nose is pointed. This kind of thing is about feeling one’s way into the setup. Once it’s set up, it’s about pressing or relaxing the setup to make it go one way or the other.
The Citabria is a “high-wing” type. The wing is attached to the top of the fuselage, and that makes it impossible to see the inside of a turn: the pilot can’t look through a wing that’s banked into the turn. When the airplane is slipping through a turn like this, all the normal cues to turn-rate are screwy because the nose isn’t pointed the way things are actually moving. So, it’s all about feel and timing in holding the controls through a process that doesn’t match what one sees, and it’s very contrary to what the airplane/wind-vane naturally wants to do.
"…Lots of aileron here…” J.W. muscles as he figures the turn needs a faster rate.
In forty-five seconds, we drop a thousand feet and turn 180 degrees to end up rolling on the asphalt at about 65mph.
“That was a man-sized slip you had goin’ on there, J.W.”
We roll-out, put power on, and takeoff again.
“A lot of people might freak out if they see you doing that, and the reason is that everybody thinks you’re gonna stall and spin the airplane. But if you’re not pulling back on the stick, the airplane’s not going to stall. It’s just gonna fall really fast. So, be careful about doing it, but I like people to be aware of it. If the damned thing’s ever on fire and you have to put it into a field somewhere, that’s the only way to do it.”
"…Right, which is not the time to be experimenting with it.”
“Right. It’s procedural.”
And, it’s fun to work on with someone with a taste for unusual attitudes. We went around several times trading the controls and dropping out of the sky sideways, flexing the sport impulse with the excuse of "procedure," chatting-up theory while flying downwind until the next drop.
“I was seeing eighty to eighty-five indicated airspeed all the way through that last one, but you need to figure error in that because of the way the air’s sideways…”
“Yeah, I’ve looked and seen fifty sometimes and ninety other times. Seventy indicated would average about perfect, but like I said, if you’re not pulling the stick back…” (while holding the bank angle over) “…it’s not gonna stall on you.”
“Yeah, right. The critical thing is the pitch.”
“Yeah. Well, actually, angle-of-attack.”
“Right… which is what it’s all about.”
“The bad thing is, if you do stall it, you’re dead.”
“Well, yeah.”
Around, again.
“A little hotter in airspeed than I saw in your approach, but that’s okay.”
“Yup. Just keep it turning… let it fall… now, start taking everything out in moderation—you want to keep it sideways so we can kill the airspeed. Just keep it slipping…right here… a little more rudder… now, let it out…”
(touchdown)
“Outstanding. And, see, you can get a lot more landings per hour.”
On the way home, J.W. took the airplane again and started a set of turns that looked like more play, but had a purpose. During each one, he cleared the whole sky of traffic with hard looks out every window and the clear overhead greenhouse when it was tipped over toward the horizon.
“I don’t see anybody hanging around… mind if I do something that Terri doesn’t like us doing?”
“Carry on,” I said. I’m aware of where the lines are and how sternly her disapprovals run, in which directions. “Whaddya got in mind?”
“Oh, I’m just gonna do one little aileron roll.”
Ah, yes. Just one little roll: tipping the wings over through upside-down, and around to upright again. Just one little violation of FAA constraints against aerobatic flight without a parachute, if somebody wanted to play it that way against us. I didn’t think Terri would, of course, but this can get pretty serious pretty quickly, starting in the cockpit of an airplane out of control, which is a place easy to get to for anyone who thinks it’s as easy to roll an airplane as slapping the stick to one side or the other.
“…One little roll.”
“Ah…” I said from the front seat, “…Keep a bit of positive-G on the airplane, because my bag is in the cargo space behind you.”
“Oh, it is? Okay, I’ll keep it loaded up all the way through.” J.W. would take care to keep the force of gravity running through the floor of the airplane, even when the floor was sky-up. That way, my leather bag would not come floating through the cockpit in zero-G, only to come down who-knows-where when the airplane loaded up again. An item like that can beat you senseless before you know it.
“Call one-twenty airspeed for me.” (He can’t see it back there, and it’s an unusual speed to pitch for by looking out at the wing.)
“Uh, one twenty-five.”
“Good deal,” and with my hand gently on the grip, I felt him haul the stick back just enough to get the nose going up before the hard left pressure and the airplane started turning over. As it went, the left rudder pedal went down in a practiced-touch, just enough, relaxed as the wing was pointed straight down, tensed again as the wing leveled inverted and kept the tension as it all went around to right-side up. The whole thing packed into about five seconds before we were flying along level again.
I laughed low & quiet, before reading out flight data: “2G, one thirty-four exit speed, three hundred feet down. Not bad, pal. I’ll bet you’re not doing that every day in the 737.”
“Nah, actually, it’s been since I last flew this thing… about six months. Kinda sloppy, actually.”
He hadn’t floated the inverted section properly: a touch too much back-stick had us headed slightly nose down through that part, which accounted for the altitude loss and airspeed hike. On the other hand, we didn’t see my bag floating through the cockpit, so the positive G-load worked out.
Nobody knew.
There was nobody there with us. It was just two guys in an airplane, rolling through the feel of it: all hard reality between us and the hard earth, where failure of the test would meet with hard penalty, permanent and without appeal. Such a trivial thing, “one little roll," but with such deep implication. Five seconds around and back to upright… what could be more simple?
Well, for one thing, we both knew that it might not be appreciated by “powers that be." Anyone interested could go look up the pertinent Federal Air Regulations. I know them, but I’m not going to do anyone’s homework about it, here. All the “sanctions” are spelled out, too. It could be just that trivial.
There is something far more glorious, though, to “one little roll” through the great big sky. It’s about being a live human strapped to extensions of one’s mind running out through the stick, rudder, and throttle, powerful enough to play where no other species can, except those immediately ordained to it without artifacts to make it happen. Having apprehended all the necessary principles strictly as they are in reality, we then exploit the entire complex of mind, body, and machine, for the purpose of a joy not bound in just five seconds around. Done once, it lives as long as we do.
That day under the implacable eye of nature, we must have done it right, because she obviously approved us without penalty, and we just flew away.
