Alex Perry writes:
> I suspect that the big reason the FAA uses 40 degrees for private pilots
> is so they can use 55 degrees for commercial pilots while keeping both
> angles below the 60 degree regulatory limit where parachutes are required.
>
> Both kinds of steep turn are specified with an altitude tolerance,
> a speed tolerance, a bank angle tolerance, heading tolerance (on rollout)
> and must be performed coordinated with obvious scanning for traffic.
> Most people can manage 'any two' on that list and I guess the origin of
> the maneuver would have been a spate of accidents caused by people stalling
> out of the turn into a spin, or flying into the ground, etc etc.
I do a bit of R/C modeling on the side and this spring I got two
aircraft into flying condition that were significantly more aerobatic
than anything I've flown previously. One of them is very quick and
has a lot of elevator authority, I'm able to *easily* stall it out of
a tight loop and sometimes even a steep turn. It's amazing how
quickly things can go to H-E-double toothpicks once a wing or two
loses lift ... especially when you have a lot of torque up front. It
probably happens quicker in a small R/C hotrod than with full scale
C172, but still it's enough to give a person a healthy respect of the
fringes of the flight regime.
http://www.menet.umn.edu/~curt/Models/UltraSport40/
Being that I'm not very good at aerobatic flying, one thing that is
fun/easy to do is to climp the airplane up as high as I can stand to
let it go (you get to the point where you can't see the airplane
orientation any more which is a bad for an R/C pilot standing on the
ground) then cut the throttle (or don't cut the throttle) :-) and pull
full up elevator and help out a little bit with full aileron/rudder
(which isn't needed very long). The puts the aircraft into a spin
which you can hold indefinitely as it gracefully spins groundward from
the upper reaches of the atmosphere. Twenty 360's in a row is kind of
cool ... even if it takes no flying skill to do. You loose altitude
pretty fast, but it's nothing like a full throttle dive. In R/C
flying, spin recovery is a matter of centering the controls until you
gain enough flying speed and then pull the nose up with a little
elevator.
I'm hoping to a get a cheap digital camera in the next few weeks, so
if I can find a photographer, maybe I'll be able to post a few short
movies.
Curt.
--
Curtis Olson IVLab / HumanFIRST Program FlightGear Project
Twin Cities curt 'at' me.umn.edu curt 'at' flightgear.org
Minnesota http://www.menet.umn.edu/~curt http://www.flightgear.org
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