This also reminds me of a "bag of tricks" item that, I think, Pappy Boyington came up with. It is a sort of emergency angle of attack indicator in case your ASI goes out and you want to land. They say Pappy, after take off and level off, used to roll the canopy back, take a wad of gum and a piece of string and paste them on the outside of his canopy. Then he would pull power to idle and slow the aircraft towards stall speed. At the first burble on the edge of a stall he would make a pencil mark on the inside of the canopy where the position of the string was. Later, when he was engaged in turning air battle, he would pull the maximum G forces just short of or on the position of the string he had marked giving him the maximum G's he could pull his current airspeed and therefore the smallest turning radius for that airspeed. For our purposes, using the string trick, you could come down final somewhat short of the stall position of the string and make a safe landing without an airspeed indicator. Double your pleasure, Double your fun, Try flying with two tails Instead of just one. Bart PS. Good stuff on the pitot static checks below. I went round and round about this same subject with some avionics guys a couple of months ago. In a message dated 8/24/2010 3:21:07 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, [email protected] writes:
This is purely an FYI post, so our archives will contain the research for the next person faced with these issues (and so I don't forget the next time it comes up). Re: pitot-static check I had the formal transponder check done yesterday. The avionics shop seemed to think that a pitot-static check is supposed to be done at the same time. I researched the regs and found that pitot-static checks are only required for IFR operation: FAR 91.411. (However, I was warned by Joe Norris at EAA that some shops have shop manuals which form the agreement between them and the FAA for their operation and may contain requirements different than the FARs. If that is the case, the shop should warn you of that.) Re: Airspeed Indicator allowable error I have not yet done Ed B's recommended flight test of my ASI, however the avionics shop tested my ASI and found it reads 5 knots low at 60 & 80 and 2 knots low at 100 kts. At first, the avionics guy seemed to think that the allowable error for an ASI is only 2%; however I researched the FARs again and found Sec. 27.1323, which gives allowable error of +/- 3% OR 5 KNOTS, whichever is greater. (Of course, Joe Norris also pointed out that the most important thing is for each to know the calibration of his/her own plane, and compensate where necessary.) Again, this is just for our collective memory banks. Linda N3437H (Sky Sprite) L.A.
