ttitude” is one of those words that pilots use in a special sense. These days, the word most commonly means a person’s manner of dealing with his fellow inmates in our mutual zoo, and it usually connotes an aggressive or hostile stance. In aviation, it just means the airplane’s position, usually relative to the horizon. When aviators speak of a nose-high attitude, we mean that the plane is pointing skyward, not that the pilot is being snotty.
Part of every aviator’s training is called “recovery from unusual attitudes.” The instructor makes you close your eyes while he does something unspeakable to the airplane. Usually this involves some swoops and swirls that leave you a bit dizzy and the airplane a bit cockeyed in the sky. Then he says, “your airplane!” and folds his arms while you sweat and recover to level flight. This is part of the flight test for your license, too, and you have to do it while wearing a hood that blocks your view of everything but the instrument panel.
All this jolly stuff is meant to teach the novice to cope with real-world emergencies. The point is that you are never supposed to get into these attitudes deliberately, and if you do find yourself askew, you are supposed to right yourself immediately. All pretty sensible.
At the opposite extreme is acrobatic flight, or aerobatics. This is the air-show craziness of loops and rolls and spins and such. Here the pilot deliberately performs unnatural acts with the plane. You’ve seen these shows. As you watched, you wondered at least two things: (1) How could anyone be nuts enough to do that, and (2) How can I get a ride in one of those things?
Well, as to the first question, I managed to convince myself that aerobatics was a perfectly sane extension of my training in unusual flight attitudes, and a good, sensible way to enhance my abilities as an aviator. As to the second question, I did what practically every American does when he wants to push back his horizon a little f urther: I signed up for a course.
One of the flight schools in my area taught a short aerobatics course under the guise of a pilot safety seminar. I was due for my biennial flight review anyway-the FAA makes us renew our license every two years with some formal flight instruction-and this seemed like an interesting way to get my ticket punched. I called them up and asked what we’d cover in the course. “Oh, the basics,” the man said. “Rolls, loops, hammerheads, split-Ss. Spins, of course. And then we’ll do some unusual attitudes.” His tone of voice made it clear that he didn’t think rolls, spins and the rest were unusual. “Sign me up,” I said.
I was less than candid with my wife in describing the syllabus, but she saw through the smokescreen. “Is this dangerous?" she asked. “No,” I said. “Just foolish.” She sighed and asked no more. The woman is a saint.
So off I went to risk my neck in the name of safety.
Nine or ten of us novice daredevils took the course, all low-time private pilots. At a bit over 300 hours, I was in the middle of our experience range. All were men, most were under 30, a couple looked barely 20. I was conspicuously the oldest. The instructors were thirtyish. By now I’m used to having instructors half my age.
The course involved two hours of lectures followed by two flights totaling an hour and a half. I should interject that at the price of $199 this was a heck of a deal, even then; current readers will also recognize that you won’t see those rates again. Specialized flight instruction is expensive. The management also provided coffee and donuts, probably both more dangerous to our health than stunt flying.
Our lecturer was an ex-U.S. Air Force fighter pilot named Gary Hoff. He used to fly the F-15, a huge jet fighter known as the Eagle. Now he was flying as a copilot on an MD-80 for an airline and reliving his fighter-jock days instructing aerobatics.
His lecture was peppered with military jargon, most of it understandable. He gave the impression that fighter planes run on a mixture of kerosene and testosterone. I refrained from pointing out that one of America’s premier aerobatic pilots is a young woman named Patty Wagstaff. Gary used a little jet fighter on a stick to demonstrate the maneuvers we would be doing. We all scribbled busily as he outlined the stick-and-rudder moves we would try to make. (The instructor, Gary reminded us, would be there only as a safety backup; we would be pilot in command.)
Most of the techniques were easy to explain. An airplane has, after all, only a few controls: stick, rudder, throttle and trim. And there are only four forces at work on the airplane: lift, thrust, weight and drag. All these are familiar to every pilot before he is allowed to solo. The truly new thing about this kind of flying would be the effect on our bodies, not just on the plane.
Aerobatic maneuvers involve high G forces. G stands for the effect of gravity on any body. Right now, you weigh one G, and so do your faster and skinniest friends. Fly an airplane on a level course and you still weigh one G. But pull the plane around into a steep turn and feel the difference. At 60 degrees of bank, your weight is doubled, and as you bank more steeply, it increases rapidly to three or four or more Gs. You can reverse this effect by dropping the plane’s nose suddenly; then you weigh less than one G, and may even be weightless at minus one G.
A good roller coaster will slam you from positive to negative Gs pretty unmistakably. The train whizzes over a hill and negative Gs lift you free of your seat; it shrieks around a violent turn at the bottom of a dip and you are squashed back into a corner of the seat by positive Gs. On a roller coaster, you have the distinct advantage of being able to let it all happen with a perfectly clear conscience. If, on the other hand, you are piloting an airplane while pulling heavy G loads, you have the serious obligation of remaining in control of a fairly complicated machine at a considerable distance from the ground.
Now, it’s bad enough that the G forces are tugging at your hands and feet, making it awkward to work the controls. The same forces are pulling at the blood in your veins and arteries, forcing it downward, away from your brain. Three Gs-not a great force in aerobatic flight-can cause you to black out. Many maneuvers require four or more Gs to complete.
Gary ticked off the dreaded stages of high-G black-out: color vision goes first; then tunnel vision sets in as the periphery fades away; the gray-out and then black-out. At that point you are as good as dead. Even assuming that you dropped the controls (which is pretty likely0, and thereby relaxed the pressures on the plane and returned to our normal one G, you would be unconscious for as much as 30 seconds. By that time the airplane would have become a very large lawn dart.
High-performance airplanes like fighters have systems to counteract all this mechanically. The pilot wears a “G-suit,” a coverall with inflatable trousers. When the airplane’s sensors detect high G loads, the pants inflate, squeezing the pilot’s legs and forcing his blood back up to his head. Our tax dollars at work.
We civilians have to get by with simpler precautions. Gary demonstrated, and we all faithfully mimicked, something called the Anti-G Straining Maneuver (AGSM). I call it the Great Gorilla Grunt. Before you enter a high-G maneuver, you take a good big breath and tighten all the muscles you can, especially in your legs, butt, and belly, then grunt as loudly as you can. Make it a prolonged grunt, so you don’t run out of breath. The main thing is to start all this before you need it. Once your brain begins to drain, it’s too late.
We came away from the lecture determined to grunt like constipated apes. Whatever or deficiencies as pilots, we would at least show the world how to grunt.
The flying sessions had to be postponed because of bad weather. I didn’t get into the air until the following weekend. By then, I had had plenty of time to review my notes and hand-fly all the maneuvers. Hand-flying is the pilot’s equivalent of playing air guitar. We zoom our hands through the air in imitation of the airplane’s path. It helps us to visualize what we want the plane to do. It also makes us look like utter goofs. (We don’t care.)
My instructor for the actual flying was Udo Schmidt-Sinns, who used to fly fighters for the German Air Force. He’s about 30, another in the parade of my teachers who are young enough to be my children. In my next life I intend to learn to fly before my 15th birthday. He briefed me on the plane and the tasks we would do, and we went out to the flight line.
The airplane was a Bellanca Decathlon, an American-made aerobatic ship that has a long lineage. It is descended from the venerable Aeronca Champion, once one of the most widely used trainers, a delight to fly and now a prized antique. The old Champs had little engines, less than 100 horsepower, that you started by spinning the propeller by hand. The Decathlon is pulled by 150 horses, started electrically. It is still a delight to fly.
The company that made the Decathlon filed for bankruptcy in 1980; light plane manufacture is an extremely risky business. A new company, American Champion Aircraft, revived the basic design since then; pray for them.
Like its Aeronca forebears, the Decathlon has a skeleton of steel tubes covered by a fabric skin. Even the wings are made this way. And it has a “conventional” landing gear, a tail wheel instead of a tricycle arrangement with a nose wheel. The wings are on top, also an old design, and one apparently favored by God, since all birds are high-wing monoplanes. Ragwing taildraggers are, many of us feel, what airplanes were meant to be.
There is no fragility about the Decathlon’s cloth-covered wings. They are built to withstand more than 6 Gs of force, and they are shaped to fly upside down as easily as rightside up. The engine’s fuel and oil systems are able to feed fluids properly when inverted, too. Ordinary engines starve when you tip them over.
The Decathlon is designed specifically for aerobatics. The seat belts, for instance, include not only shoulder harnesses but a crotch strap. The idea is to hold you tight in your seat no matter what the position of the plane. A second, more conventional belt and shoulder strap go over this. All these have quick-release hardware. You are also wearing a parachute, required by the FAA for aerobatic flight. And in case you need the parachute, there is a red handle near the door. Yank it and the door falls off. Udo explained the procedure: “If a wing collapses or something, I will say, ’Bail out, bail out, bail out.’ By the third time I say it I will be outside the airplane.”
Like all taildraggers, the Decathlon is unhandy on the ground. I crept along the taxiway, swerving a little; it’s hard to get it to track a straight line. Once in the air, however, it runs like it’s on rails.
We roared off to the practice area. A mile-square patch with no houses. It’s against the law to do aerobatics over built-up areas. Udo had me do a couple of steep turns to get the feel of the plane and then we were into it.
The first maneuver seems easy enough, but like virtually all beginners, I did it poorly. It’s called an acceleration maneuver. All you do is level off at about 100 miles an hour and shove the nose down abruptly, pulling up when you reach 140 MPH. If you do it right, you reach minus one G, weightlessness, when you pitch down. There’s a special meter on the panel to register G forces. I pushed the stick forward into what looked like a very steep dive, but I was too timid, and the G meter showed only half a negative G. Rats!
I did better on the next one, full aft-stick stalls. Level again at 100 MPH, I chopped the throttle to idle and pulled the nose up to 45 degrees, until my feet were on the horizon. I held the control stick back in my bellybutton while the airplane lost its speed and stalled profoundly. The trick is to keep the wings level with the smallest possible control inputs. My old glider training helped; we fly gliders pretty close to a stall when we climb in thermals.
Now we got serious. Ask any number of people to name a fancy flight maneuver and they’ll say loop. The sight of an airplane zooming upward, past the vertical, over on its back, and then around in a complete circle to level flight is so dramatic that no one sees it without emotion. And every pilot who has seen a loop performed has wondered what it’s like to fly it. I’ll try to tell you.
The first thing you do is level your wings and set up a shallow dive to get up enough speed. In the Decathlon, 140 MPH is enough. Then you grunt and keep on grunting as you pull the stick back hard enough to shove your body down in the seat at four Gs. As the plane passes through the vertical and begins to turn over on its back, you release just a little of the back pressure on the stick. This allows the ship to float over the top of the loop and start down the other side. Then, still inverted and picking up speed, you grunt anew and pull hard-four Gs worth-all through the back side of the loop until you’re level and rightside up again. Then release the pressure and fly away.
The first new sensation is the shocking power of a four G pull. It is, of course, irresistible. I remember being pleasantly surprised that I could move the controls correctly in spite of it. (Besides holding the stick back and easing it off at the proper moment, you have to work the rudder pedals to keep the plane’s vertical path straight, and you have to correct any tendency of the wings to depart from level.) I can also remember being very conscious of squeezing my muscles and grunting; some part of my mind was remarking on how well it worked.
But of course the most astonishing sensation was watching the horizon disappear under the nose, and then reappear “above” us as we pulled over the top of the loop. I could hear Udo’s encouraging voice in my headphones, reminding me to pull hard as we came around. I pulled the stick into my belly again, grunting for all I was worth, and down we came, straight at the ground and then up, up, up to level flight.
With virtually no interval, Udo coached me into the next maneuver, a slow-speed loop. Starting level at a mere 110 MPH, I pulled as hard as I could into vertical flight and around. At this lower speed, we would be virtually stalled at the top-and, of course, inverted. If I didn’t pull hard enough, I’d stall out, upside down, nose high. I pulled hard enough and we were over, screaming down the backside of the loop again. Another four-G pullout and we were ready for the next little challenge.
The split-S is “scary,” according to Gary’s lecture. It’s a fighter pilot’s desperate evasive maneuver, and it looks a great deal simpler than it turns out to be. First, you fly level at 90 MPH or so, then roll the airplane over and fly upside down and level. Then you pull the stick back hard and fly the backside of a loop, ending up level, upright and headed in the other direction.
The first problem is rolling over on your back. You push the stick all the way to the side and hold it there. The plane banks and continues to bank until your wings are pointing at the sky and ground, respectively. As you reach this point, you step hard on the rudder pedal on the sky side, then release it as you continue to roll over to inverted flight. This is a nice bit of coordination that goes against all your previous training; ordinarily you never apply rudder except in the same direction you are banking.
Now you are flat on your back, and your controls are reversed. To raise the nose, you push the stick forward and vice versa. Banking is backward, too. The rudder pedals, oddly, work the same as always.
I got the plane stabilized in level but inverted flight> I didn’t like it. I was hanging from my various straps, my feet were loose on the pedals, I had to think hard before I applied a control movement. With Udo coaching, I entered a split-S: throttle to idle, wings level, grunt hard, stick back hard to four Gs.
Around we came. This was a lot hairier than the mere loop, where you are moving quite slowly at the top. This time we began our descent with an airspeed of at least 90 MPH. This means we were screaming by the time we reached the bottom.
Next came the sliceback, a tamer version of the split-S. Here you roll over past the vertical, but not all the way on your back. Then you pull back on the stick and fly downward as steeply as you like, able to roll out level at any time. I rolled too far on my first try and did another split-S; the second was better. It’s really a pretty maneuver, and felt quite gentle after the loops and split-Ss.
Next test was the hammerhead stall. I roared into a dive at 145 MPH and pulled up at four Gs, just like the beginning of a loop. But as we came vertical, nose straight up to the sky, I let off on the stick and kept climbing straight up. Just before we ran out of momentum, Udo gave the signal and I kicked hard left rudder. Over we went, falling out of the sky onto our left wing. I added right aileron as instructed to keep our turn straight, but I was late with it and we twisted a bit as the nose dropped past the horizon. Then it didn’t matter; we were pointed straight down. A grunt and a hard pull-up, and we were level and ready for the next step. We would do a few spins.
Spins are the great goblin. Everyone is taught to avoid spinning, and most pilots dread spinning more than any other problem. In fact, a fair number of fatal accidents involve spins, usually in the landing pattern, where the airplane is too close to the ground to recover.
But spins are actually fairly benign maneuvers, if you do them intentionally at high enough altitudes. The put very little stress on the airplane and they are easy to control. I had already done several spins in gliders, and I was looking forward to this pert of the course.
I was not disappointed. The Decathlon loves to spin. I slowed to 90 MPH, raised to nose until I could feel the edge of a stall, and kicked full left rudder. The plane broke cleanly into a classic spin, dropping its left wing dramatically and nosing down into a rapid series of turns. I held the stick back to keep the pin going, then recovered in the approved manner: throttle to idle, full opposite rudder, stick to neutral to level the wings and then forward to break the stall, and finally a brisk pull-up to level flight. I climbed back to altitude and did it again the opposite direction. This time I tested the plane by letting go of the controls entirely. Just as promised, it made another turn and stopped spinning. I revered and climbed again.
Now we were ready for unusual attitudes.
I had been warned in the lecture that we would see some truly unusual attitudes in this segment. We would be told to close our eyes and the instructor would get us into trouble. We would be responsible for getting us out of it.
The first outrage Udo perpetrated was a nose-high mess. We were nearly stalled and deeply banked with the engine nearly at idle. First things first: I slammed on full power. Then I pushed the nose over and rolled level. Not too bad. “Okay, close your eyes again,” Udo said, and ever the good student, I did as I was told.
Never again. I am not much prone to motion sickness, partly because I know a few simple precautions to take in planes or boats. The simplest trick is to keep track of the horizon. If you can’t see it, the confusing motion can fool your inner ear and you can have an awful time overcoming the swimmy sensation.
But there I was, eyes glued shut, while Udo did some steep turns and rolls. When he told me to look, we were upside down, nose down, steeply banked.
The proper thing to do (and I knew this, and tried to do it) is to raise the nose and roll the wings the shortest way to the horizon, and then roll the airplane back rightside up. But as I mentioned earlier, most of your control motions are reversed when you are flying upside down, and you have to stop and think what input will get you the result you want. If you are hanging upside down in a harness of straps, and your feet are barely able to stay on the rudder pedals (which are above you), and your inner ear thinks you are still about two turns back, clear thinking becomes difficult.
The one thing you don’t want to do in this position is pull the stick toward you and start a split-S. It’s too easy to overspeed and overstress the airplane.
It wasn’t even a very good split-S. Udo was unhappy with me. I was unhappier than he was. We tried it again.
The second try was marginally better, but still poor. Udo did one by himself to give me a picture of the proper method, but by now I was past learning. We agreed to review the maneuver in our second session, and we flew back to the airport.
I was as close to airsick as I have ever been, and I told Udo so. “Okay,” he said, “You fly the airplane.” This is proper. If you are busy flying you are unlikely to get sick. It’s the passenger who needs the sick sack, not the pilot. This will not help you if you hit nasty weather on an airliner, but at least you can be sure that the captain is not tossing his cookies up there in the cockpit.
I made the landing and taxied us back to the hangar for debriefing. “We’ll start with those nose-down inverted recoveries next time,” Udo said. “That way, you’ll be less likely to be…upset by them.” Very polite. Less likely to throw up in my hat, he meant.
We finished up a week later. This time I took the sensible precaution of cheating when Udo told me to close my eyes, so I didn’t get queasy. It’s a lot easier to analyze your predicament when you are hanging upside down from your seat belts if you aren’t dizzy. My recoveries were still pretty ragged, but they were better than before, and Udo was satisfied. The rest of the lesson was more fun than work.
As we tied the airplane down outside the hangar, I told Udo, “Today is my birthday. I’m 55.” He congratulated me and said, “That’s my Dad’s age.” Of course. “Does he fly?” I asked. “No. I took my parents up a few years ago-just nice gentle moves, none of this stuff. They seemed to like it, but they never asked to go again.”
Would I go again? Flying aerobatics, that is. Well, I have, a few times, usually as part of my biennial flight review. But aerobatics as a regular thing? Truthfully, I don’t know. It is immense fun, the sensations of vertical and inverted flight are astonishing and delightful, and the moves I have learned could be lifesavers in certain situations. But most of the planes I’m likely to get my hands on won’t stand that kind of stress. More to the point, I don’t relish that kind of stress. I’m 10 years older now. The loops that look so elegant and graceful and effortless from the ground turned out to be as strenuous as weight lifting. I hate to think it, but maybe aerobatics is a young pilot’s game.
The experience reminds me of something I heard years ago in another context entirely. For many years I’ve been a passionate lover of old-time string band music, the fiddle and banjo tunes and ballads of the mountains. There’s a true story about one of the old banjo pickers, a traditional player of great gifts. Somebody took him to hear Earl Scruggs, the bluegrass banjo genius who plays a fast, ornate style, much flashier than the old fellow’s music. Somebody asked him what he thought of this newfangled picking. “I’d love to be able to play like that,” the man said, “and then not do it.”
© Paul J. Sampson