> bank occurred...com'n guys...it stalls? (Simon Van Leeuwen) It looked like a climbing left turn to me -- steep turn with the nose up away from the wind direction. Left (inside) wing stalls, drops, plane goes into a spin, no height to recover. Splat.
I've done this with a sailplane more times than I'd like to admit. Its not a problem with a smaller TD ship or slope plane, its got a lot of control authority, its relatively lightweight and a light wing loading so you recover almost without thinking about it (losing height in the process). I have a larger ship, a Stork 1, which I'm careful to not get into this situation because getting out would be difficult -- its got a large span and its relatively heavy -- quite a lot of rotational inertia -- and a V-tail -- comparatively weak rudder authority to counter the spin and get the wing flying again. (Come to think of it, I augered a similar sized plane in some years ago, I don't know what happened, one minute it was circling, then suddenly it was spinning in just like that B-52. It mostly got destroyed on impact so the only cause we could think of at the time was "a radio hit" -- now I'm not so sure.) I'm not sure that very many of us could input the correct surface deflections to recover from such a spin, much less do so in the few seconds we have between realizing what the plane's doing and it hitting the ground. There's a bit of a knack to spin recovery, and I'm told that a big part of getting a multiengine licence is learning how to avoid them because even a light multi is really easy to get into a spin and very difficult to get out. That B-52 must have taken some real skill to fly, or maybe the pilot has just been lucky up to now. Its still a sad loss. Maybe its time to investigate ballistic chutes for larger models? Martin Usher RCSE-List facilities provided by Model Airplane News. Send "subscribe" and "unsubscribe" requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Please note that subscribe and unsubscribe messages must be sent in text only format with MIME turned off.
