Bill Crawford’s Flightlab Blog

I’ve owned six airplanes in the past twenty years. I’ve also owned some six cars in roughly the same period of time. Thinking back on airplanes versus cars, it strikes me that there’s a curious difference. Apart from a revelatory spinout on black ice in New Hampshire one winter, I can’t say that I learned much from my cars. They either drove well or they didn’t; they all collected dents. Essentially they were the same, and they produced no new thoughts. But the airplanes were different. Staying safe in them meant learning new things. Each aircraft had something distinctive it was determined to teach, and those lessons are how I remember them best.

I picked up aircraft number six in Florida recently. It’s an Italian SIAI Marchetti SF 260, a single-engine retractable of a type widely regarded by over-stimulated enthusiasts as the Gina Lollobrigida of aerobatic aircraft. Mine served as a trainer for Sabena (the Belgian national airlines, now out of business). The owner previous to me was a former Air Force Colonel and American Airlines pilot who did a fine job restoring it and bringing the avionics up to date. He flew it in a formation airshow act with his buddies at Spruce Creek, just outside Daytona. Many SF 260s are registered in the experimental category; this one is in standard category, which means I can teach in it. I’m not yet sure what it will teach me in return, but I expect that its small, thin, tapered wings will have plenty of lessons in store.

Memory Lane: My first aircraft was a Citabria. It certainly provided airmanship lessons connected to its tail-wheel configuration and its basic aerobatics capability, but probably the key lessons came from the maintenance obligations. I’d never taken care of an aircraft before. The guy who did the pre-purchase inspection was a touch laconic and low-rent, so there was more to take care of than I’d first understood. I began writing checks. I was lucky to find a shop at Plymouth Airport where the mechanics knew Citabrias well. They became friends and mentors. They still are. Be nice to mechanics.

After selling the Citabria, I bought a single-seat Pitts SIS, which had once belonged to the Peruvian Air Force’s aerobatic demonstration team. You can learn a lot from a Pitts, but the primary lesson is how to get the beast back on the ground without, say, demolishing a runway light. The Pitts is a smart aircraft in the air. It behaves as if it already knows what you want. But it’s an idiot on the runway. You have to be on top of it. The landing gear can’t dissipate the aircraft’s kinetic energy without pushing back. So to keep it straight, you need to work the rudder all the time. Plus, in a three-point landing attitude, you can’t see ahead—the nose is in the way. After a bunch of Pitts landings I though I was a hot stick, until I flew a friend’s Cessna 182 without first explaining to my feet that they weren’t in a Pitts anymore. During the landing roll, I reverted to motor memory and over-controlled on the rudder pedals. The aircraft made a sound like a Cantonese opera on a bad cell phone, and I thought that the shimmy damper had gone berserk. Nope, it was all me. So I also got to learn that what works in one aircraft may not work in another. Fly the airplane you’re in.

After selling the Pitts, I ordered a Giles G-200, a carbon fiber unlimited aerobatic aircraft that looks like a small Extra. The first thing I learned was that undercapitalized aircraft companies don’t deliver when they say they will, repeatedly. But when they eventually did deliver, I had a fantastically responsive airplane. The pitch forces were so light, and the aircraft was so close to having neutral stability, that it didn’t need an elevator trim tab. I could hold it in trim with my hand. The drawback, initially, was a tendency to pull too hard and stall the wing during maneuvers, especially in the excitement of an aerobatics contest. When it stalled, it rolled left. The judges knew exactly what all that twitching was about. The lesson here was to let the aircraft do the work. Use a gentle hand. I sold the Giles to an aerobatic competition pilot in Washington State. He’d had an S1S as well, so we’d come up the same way.

Then there appeared a Zlin 242L and slightly later a PZL M26 Air Wolf. Both aircraft were purchased as part of an unusual-attitude program now largely conducted for test pilots and flight-test engineers. The Air Wolf is made in Poland (mostly out of Piper parts). It’s maybe the Dagmara Dominczy of aerobatic airplanes (whose credits include Law & Order: Special Victims Unit—she’s hot). Initially, the Marchetti will replace the Air Wolf, which will go on the market, and it eventually might replace the Zlin, as well. Three paragraphs from now, in pursuit of this plan, I’ll try to sell you the Air Wolf.

One other important lesson I learned from owning aircraft was how to present the purchase news to my non-flying wife. This is not trivial. Men evolve different ways to dance around the spousal problem. In my case, there’s usually a long period of hinting—unexplained pictures on the refrigerator, for example—followed by repeated, indignant denials. The idea is to get her comfortable with the notion well before I confess to its reality. That way, when I finally come clean, the announcement merely confirms what she already knows. Women like to feel omniscient, so I think it’s a win all around.

Not all of my male, married friends have achieved so sophisticated an approach. Some try to protect the secret by claiming that the new aircraft belongs to someone else. I’ve taken fictive possession of several aircraft, just to help guys out. Or maybe they simply “forget” to mention it. One friend of mine completely “forgot” to mention buying two aircraft at once (a Fairchild 24, and a cabin Waco). Then, at a Christmas party, his wife became involved in a conversation with another woman. The wife pointed to her husband standing across the room (and showing signs of acute anxiety, presumably). “Oh,” said the other lady, “is that your husband? I just sold him two airplanes.”

Back to the Air Wolf: There’s a collection of pictures on the flightlab.net web site. Let me know if you might be interested. Rely on my discretion. Tell your spouse/partner/soul mate about it—or not. You know best.

I got my CFII back in 1992. Harry Bradley, an instructor at Hanscom Field, in Bedford, Massachusetts, took me through it. Harry is a venerated institution at Hanscom, having gotten a lot of return customers up the ratings ladder. He’d probably be interested to know that, despite my undying admiration for him as an educator and a man, I have absolutely no specific memory of the instruction he gave me in preparation for the CFII ride—all I have is the recollection that I was supposed to be able to talk and fly, more or less simultaneously. Evidently, I could fake this ability enough to satisfy the requirements, and therefore Harry anointed and blessed me and sent me up to Charlie Cashin, at Manchester, New Hampshire, for the CFII check ride. I do remember holding at an NDB with Charlie, while giving a halting explanation of what I was doing, and then flying an ILS approach back to Manchester. I remember that shortly after I intercepted the glide slope I began to over-control in my usual enthusiastic manner, and Charlie became aware that he needed to demonstrate how an ILS should actually be flown. I was more than happy to hand over the job. Charlie took the yoke and put the needles smack where they belonged. After that, they never twitched. I passed the test. (From which experience we derive a fundamental principle: Always let the examiner show off.)

The first ironic thing about my CFII flight test was that the trip up from Hanscom to Manchester was also my first solo flight in actual IFR conditions. At the time, it struck me as pretty lame that someone with my dubious experience could be permitted to teach others. But that’s what the regulations allowed. The second ironic thing about my CFII flight test is that the trip up remains my only solo flight in actual IFR. I’ve never done it since, unless some other pilot was with me in the soup, prepared to save my butt. Part of the reason for this is that I got into aerobatics and ended up mostly flying airplanes that don’t belong in clouds. My instrument flights have been few and far between. I’m long out of currency, my instrument scan is shot, and approach charts now look like something they buried with King Tut. I think I might well be the least qualified instrument instructor in New England, and maybe one of the ten least qualified nationally, just to put a number on it!

I’m trying to rectify my long lapse by becoming instrument current again. It’s not the first time this particular New Year’s resolution has hit the list, but maybe now will be different. I’ve been flying the simulator at Alpha One, at Plymouth, with Jimmy Abdalla as instructor. Jimmy is a senior in the aviation program at Bridgewater State College, in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. He looks a bit like a young Shriner. You want to stick a fez on the boy and buy him a tiny motorcycle. He’s got a deft teaching style, consisting mostly of gentle nudges and well-voiced reminders. So far, he hasn’t seen fit to humiliate me big-time, although I have a sense that he may now be gearing up.

The simulator, however, is trying to humiliate me. It’s one of those “if you can fly me you can fly anything” jobs. I’m having a miserable time holding altitude, among other issues. Part of the problem, frankly, is that at this point in my life the ability to hold altitude no longer has the deeply satisfying mystical significance it once commanded. That inner, fundamentally obsessed, nagging voice has fallen silent. The desire to hold altitude is simply gone. So screw it. I don’t see why ATC can’t just accept the fact, make an exception, and allow me free range, at least in the vertical plane—especially if they start applying user fees. But knock a few dollars off and I’ll hold all the altitude you want.

The other part of the problem is that the yoke mechanism in the simulator consists of a collection of springs that brilliantly simulate a really crappy airplane. I usually fly aircraft with nice control feel. If you trim the aircraft and then push or pull, flying respectively faster or slower than trim, you feel a coherent force building through the stick. The farther you go from trim the higher the force you need to hold. But the simulator requires a high initial force just to move the yoke, and then the required force falls off. It really feels wrong. The solution, I’m beginning to remember, lies in not trying to trim off forces but to use the trim for fine pitch control. Fly it with the trim? Yuck, on so many levels! Maybe I should quit.

Here’s what I do when I’m working out the weather for a cross-country. Until recently, I relied on CSC DUATS and the AOPA web site, but I’ve started using the NOAA National Weather Service site, www.weather.gov, as well—both for long-range forecasts and for specific information the day of the flight. (I still prefer AOPA for the current radar picture. It’s prettier there, actually.) I’m not an early adopter in the weather briefing by computer department, and can’t say exactly when color-coding was introduced to show flight categories, but I think it’s revolutionary. The colors allow you to get the basic weather pattern immediately, at a glance. It jumps out; you don’t have to go in and decipher.

I go to www.weather.gov/forecasts/graphical/sectors/conusWeek.php#tabs for long-range planning, This page gives a national map you can interact with by moving your cursor over a time scale that extends a week into the future. The map’s graphics show the predominant forecast weather (rain, snow, fog, mix, ice) for a given time period. You can click on “Daily View” for the shorter period ahead, broken down into more detail (predominant weather, temperature, dewpoint, wind, sky cover, etc). I find the information much easier to take in than on the traditional forecast presentations, especially as a function of change over time. And I like that the time reference is EST (at the moment), not that leftover Rule Britannica Greenwich merry old London ZULU nonsense.

If I’m flying that day, my first stop is www.weather.aero/metars. I click “Flight Category” on the lower left, to see a current national map depicting areas of low IFR, IFR, MVFR, and good old VFR. You also can get tricky and break the flight category down into ceiling and visibility components.

Then I often go to www.adds.aviationweather.gov/satellite, to check out the view from space—by clicking “Western U.S.” or “Eastern U.S.” This shows a satellite image with superimposed color-coded station reports. Although the sky cover in Pangapangapapa may not matter much if you’re headed to Poughkeepsie, you can also get international satellite imagery on this page. It’s fun to look at, and reminds you to think globally even while acting locally.

Next is www.aviationweather.gov/products/nws/tafs/graphics. Here you can cycle through a synoptic view of Terminal Aerodrome Forecasts (TAFs) stretching out over the next twelve hours. This page is still in testing and doesn’t always seem to work. But it has my vote. It provides a quick way of determining whether the trend is friend or foe.

Now that I have a general sense of what’s what, I pry into nature’s most intimate secrets at www.adds.aviationweather.gov/metars/java/index.php?appletsize=large. This is the METARs Java Tool page. It shows current METARS across the entire country, but you can zero in on the geographical area of interest to you. The weather is depicted using the standard station plot codes (the circle with the wind flag sticking out, surrounded by all those cryptic numbers and weather symbols). The cool thing is that you can turn the graphic elements on and off, or you can flash them like suburban Christmas lights to make them easier to pick out. As a result of how it’s set up, this web page interactively teaches you to read station plots. Plus, place the curser on the station and the corresponding METAR text appears. You can also turn on a TAF overlay, wait a moment while electrons discuss among themselves, and then see those weather stations with TAF forecasts associated with them appear as black squares. Place the curser on the black square and the corresponding TAF appears. The data is not translated, but getting fluent in METARs and TAFs in their native format is no big deal. Even airline pilots can do it. Even I can do it, broadly speaking. Flight instructors should send their students to this page, especially instrument students!

The address www.adds.aviationweather.gov/metars presents another view of weather station graphics. After you click on a region of the country, a map appears showing the current aviation weather station plots. Go to the pull-down box at the top center of the map, and give it a click to open a TAF list extending into the future (or even METARs into the past, if you’re that big a wonk). Click away. Now the station models give the terminal area forecasts for the period you’ve chosen.

There’s a lot more available on the NOAA web site, such as turbulence and icing. You can have fun searching for the goodies. I mentioned that I go to AOPA for radar, but you might feel differently. For years, I listened to the Flight Service Station briefer and pretended to be writing down and following everything the briefer said. Yet the details often went by too fast. I still get a briefing (abbreviated, usually) but now it’s mostly with a bunch of NOAA weather printouts and a CSC DUATS-generated route forecast and flight log already in hand—essentially just to cover my butt in case some late-erupting Temporary Flight Restriction lies waiting to confiscate the pilot certificate. I find that I now tend to get my good-morning weather fix from the computer, rather than from The Weather Channel. Considering the commercials and the socially penetrating banter that meteorologists are famous for, it takes less time by computer. And despite that most of my flying is VFR local aerobatic and unusual-attitude instruction, daily use of the computer gives me practice absorbing and analyzing aviation weather over wide areas, even when I’m not planning a real flight. That way, when I do need to go a distance through lurking muck, I’m at least capable of finding out where the muck is most likely to be.

We looped last month, and contended with the usual errors. We should roll this month, and try out a new set of mistakes. Usually, pilots learn the simple “aileron roll” first; then learn the additional inputs necessary to transform the aileron roll into a “slow roll,” which is in turn the foundation maneuver in both unusual-attitude training and aerobatic competition. (Oh-oh. My personal sylph, the grease-stained, litigation-conscious muse of aviation prose, whom apparently no one else can see, just blew into the hangar, fluttered to earth, and is now whispering in my ear. “Remind your readers that they shouldn’t try this rolling nonsense without parachutes, and then only in an approved aircraft with an instructor who actually knows what she’s doing. Cover yourself—you live in a litigious dimension. And by the way, you might want to start working on your column earlier in the month. I’m getting a little tired providing your filler on deadline day.” Wow, what a crummy mood on her! At least I think she’s a sylph. Maybe she’s a nymph. That would explain a lot.)

Whatever she is, she’s right—on both counts. Procrastination is a very bad habit, and the problem with rolling an aircraft is the real possibility of hitting the dirt but missing an attorney. I like to demonstrate the latter possibility to students by doing a couple of lousy (within reason) rolls to show what happens. Starting from level flight, all I ask is that the student apply full aileron, while leaving the rudder and elevator alone. As the aircraft rolls, the nose begins to drop below the horizon. It can be well below the horizon at the completion of 360 degrees. The slower the roll rate, the lower the nose at the end, thus the faster you’ll be going, and consequently the more thrilling the next couple of seconds.

The nose heads south because the aircraft is simply doing what its inherent stability is telling it to do. At 90 degrees of bank (knife-edge flight), the aircraft wants to yaw its nose downward to align itself with the relative wind, which now has a vertical component due to the fact that the aircraft is sinking. That’s directional stability. At inverted, the aircraft’s longitudinal stability, meaning its tendency to returned to trimmed angle of attack, pitches the nose toward the earth (and gravity gives a boost). As the aircraft then rolls upright, passing through the second knife-edge, directional stability again sends the nose down.

Roll rate is a function of how fast you’re flying (double the speed, double the rate) and also how far you’ve deflected the ailerons. If you don’t have full deflection, you’re missing the roll rate the aircraft has to offer, and you’re prolonging the time the aircraft is subject to the stability characteristics described above, which are designed for upright flight, not for excursions to knife-edge or inverted.

In an aileron roll, you solve the nose-going-down problem by starting the maneuver nose-high. Dive for speed, remembering that airspeed equals roll rate, then bring the nose up maybe 20 degrees or more above the horizon. Release any aft pressure on the stick, and apply full aileron. Hold full aileron until the wings roll back level with the horizon, and then return the stick to neutral. The nose will again be below the horizon, most likely, but not nearly as much as when you start the maneuver with the nose in normal flight attitude, rather than up.

The aileron roll provides the basis for the more complicated slow roll, in which you use rudder and elevator, separately and in combination, to hold the nose up throughout the maneuver. Briefly, you push forward on the stick a bit when inverted, and use “top” rudder at each knife-edge. Sometimes you use a combination of rudder and elevator, blending one in while blending the other out—whatever works best to hold the nose up.

The transition from aileron roll to slow roll is where mistakes typically appear. As an instructor, you welcome them. You want the aerobatic beginner to make the mistakes necessary to clarify technique. Learning aerobatics is not like learning to land, for instance. You don’t want students to screw up overmuch during landing practice, because a: they secretly blame their mistakes on you; and b: it’s hard on airplanes. But you want people to screw up—a bit, under supervision—in aerobatics, because the screw-ups contain so much information.

The almost universal screw-up is for the student to release some aileron deflection as he attempts to hold the nose up with forward pressure when inverted. Releasing aileron deflection, of course, causes the roll rate to go down. The student may not perceive this as it occurs, and not correct for it. The nose goes down as a result, for the reasons we’ve described. Or the student may be spooked by the reduction in roll rate (or just plain confused in general) and start pulling back on the stick in response. Now the nose can really go down, and the student might begin to pull into a split-s, as if flying the second half of a loop—except at much higher speed and maybe not enough altitude. That’s why the instructor’s hand is guarding the stick, ready to take over.

I went a few months without posting my columns from the Atlantic Flyer. So here’s to catching up.

You’d think that an aerobatic maneuver as apparently straightforward as a loop would be a cinch to perform: Dive for speed, haul back on the stick, and then be patient until the world appears more or less as it was before. That’s certainly the core idea, but it’s not by itself a sufficient plan. We want a round loop, something Euclidian. And we want a loop in which the wings remain level with the horizon throughout the maneuver.

Roundness isn’t easy. It comes from flying a constant radius, which itself isn’t easy because the aircraft is busy changing speed and also its relationship to the pull of gravity. If you could hold your speed constant during a loop, roundness would be a matter of staring at the G-meter and adjusting your stick force to maintain a constant G value. The trouble is that speed doesn’t stay constant, but decreases in the climbing part and increases as you come back down. (Your exit speed, by the way, is always a bit lower than your entrance speed, due to the induced drag those Gs cost.) Because of the change in airspeed during the loop, you have to vary the G-force to maintain a constant radius. In practice, you pull pretty hard at the start because you’re going fast, ease up over the top because you’re slowing down, then start pulling hard again as the nose passes through vertical and comes back up to the horizon.

The problem with roundness is that as a pilot you can learn to infer it, but can’t actually see it. You are yourself within the phenomenon you’re trying to observe. To remove this epistemological roadblock you need help from an aerobatic coach on the ground, to see the loop for you and keep you apprised on the hand-held. If your coach radios “flat spot,” your pitch rate (thus G) was too low for your airspeed. If your coach says “pinched,” you pulled too hard—your pitch rate was too great for your airspeed. Eventually, if you have a good coach and aren’t a complete dullard, you learn to associate each part of the loop with its appropriate pitch rate—at least from a given starting speed, and at least in calm winds. When the wind is blowing you have to compensate by increasing your pitch rate if the wind is behind you in the loop, and by decreasing it if the wind is ahead. Windy conditions are a pain.

In an aerobatic competition, big loops tend to score badly because the judges can easily see variations in radii (flat spots and pinches). If you’ve got a fast airplane, you’ll have to pull pretty hard initially to keep the loop from getting too big. When I had my little Giles G-200, which was fast, I was pulling 6-G loop entries in an effort to keep them small. That was during my irresponsible period, but at least I slept well. Training in the Flightlab Zlin or Air Wolf, we pull about 3 G entering a loop, and maybe 0.5 G floating over the top.

Keeping the wings level with the horizon isn’t easy, either. Imagine you’re beginning a loop from a slight bank angle. Model this with your hand. As a banked aircraft pulls from level flight to vertical, one wing will end up lower than the other. In other words, after ninety degrees of pitch-up, an initial roll error becomes an error in yaw. If you just continue merrily along, that yaw error will again become a roll error, ninety degrees later, at the top of the loop. That roll error, in turn, becomes a yaw error as you head through vertical on the backside. Finally, as the nose returns to the horizon, the aircraft is again banked and you’re no longer headed in the direction in which you started.

All aerobatic maneuvers are extremely sensitive to initial conditions. In other words, if you screw things up at the start you have to work extra hard to make things come out happily in the end. Most beginning aerobatics students have a tough time keeping the wings level on the initial pull into a loop. With the right hand on the stick, there’s often a tendency to pull slightly to the right when pulling back. Sometimes it’s hard to track the resulting bank error, because the nose rises quickly above the horizon and the familiar roll references pass from view. In a loop, once you lose the horizon ahead, you look at the wingtip in order to judge attitude and position in the maneuver. If a wing is up or down when you hit vertical, a quick jab on the rudder can make things right. But it takes practice to learn where to look to identify errors, to recognize them, and then quickly to make the fix. Eventually, you pick up errors right as they begin. Then small, easy corrections are all you need.

I like to remind my sometimes-frustrated aerobatics students that you can’t learn to see errors unless you make errors. So lighten up. It’s all data, and it’s all useful if you’re willing to persist. I’ve noticed that good aerobatic learners take their mistakes more or less in stride. They don’t hurl a fit or have smoke come out of their ears. There’s no ego to nurse. They understand the relationship between making errors and making it to the next level.

Tonya Hodson has just become my go-to person whenever I need someone dumped from an airplane. I should clarify this: I mean the memorial dispersion of a loved one’s ashes, not the sudden disappearance of a business partner.

Unlike my male flying buddies, whose behavior is hard to predict, I trust Tonya to keep the mood solemn and appropriate. She was in the funeral business in Kansas for seven years (working the dry side, I believe), and so knows how to finesse the bereaved. She also owns a Stearman and flies formation at AirVenture. She recently won the Red Baron Memorial Scholarship for Aerobatic Training. Who better for the dispersal job?

An article by Tom Benenson, “Scattering Ashes,” in the October 2007 issue of Flying called these thoughts to mind. Benenson quotes from an account on the Internet that describes the basic problem: the somewhat lower pressure within the cabin, compared to outside, tends to suck the stuff back in. The typical narrative includes a lot of work with a vacuum cleaner. Airplanes are full of good places for ashes to hide. It may take several annuals and maybe an overhaul before the departed has truly done so.

Here’s Tonya’s response to my email inquiry as to whether she had ever dispersed ashes during her funeral parlor days, out there on the wide and rolling prairie.

“Yep, the first time was out of a Skyhawk. Dropped a preacher man over his church in the country with the congregation watching from below. Actually it was quite a moving experience. But aren’t all firsts?

“Next was out of the Stearman. A mother died of cancer and had pre-arranged the whole thing herself. We spread her ashes out in the Flint Hills about 25 miles east of Marion. Her husband and children were watching on top of the hill. We made a circle, and then dropped on the second pass. The air was really calm and the prop wash was well defined by the ashes. We got photos of the circular motion from the ground and the air on that one. Pretty cool.

“Her husband died about 10 months later and we dropped his ashes exactly one year later over the exact same location in the hills.

“Make sure the crematory runs the ‘cremains’ through the grinder at least twice; let them know they are to be dropped from the air and need to be extra fine. It costs a little more but it sure saves the paint on the plane.

“As far as I can tell, there is no way to keep the dust from settling on the side of the plane. I’ve heard of people running PVC pipe down the side of the plane. Never tried that.”

I hope Tonya can find the photographs showing the motion of the prop wash, as revealed by “cremains.” That would be educational, and also bizarre.

Wikipedia.org is full of information on the subject of cremation: Hindus swear by it, Roman Catholics often have mixed feelings. Zoroastrians prefer to expose the body to the elements. Most of the soft tissue turns to vapor and escapes through the crematory’s ventilation system. The ash that remains represents only about 3.5% percent of the body’s original mass. The mean yield in Florida is 5.3 pounds. If you leave a pacemaker inside the body, it explodes when the flames arrive. After the first time, apparently, this is no longer fun, and the originating funeral parlor gets in lots of trouble.

In her email, Tonya mentioned two trips through the grinder as a good idea, which is in conformity with industry recommendations for aerial dispersal. Wikipedia’s treatise contains a photograph of a grinder operator. He’s herding ashes down a hole in a sink. The apparatus looks suspiciously like a commercial kitchen garbage disposer. Even better, he’s wearing a Super Bowl XXXVII sweatshirt with the skull logo of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Even better than that, he’s smoking a cigarette. I don’t see an ashtray. Tonya says that when she got out of the business, around 2002, a second trip through the grinder cost the funeral parlor an additional $50. What a racket! It’s also the case that the grinder may not be perfectly cleaned of the previous set of remains before your party’s ashes go crunching on through. That means you may end up vacuuming a complete stranger out of the Cessna.

In a follow-up call, Tonya reaffirmed that residue is inevitable. Some ash is going to stick to the sides of the airplane, or to your delivery device, or to the inside of the ash container, no matter what. In the case of the airplane, this is just the nature of the boundary layer, in which the speed of the airflow becomes zero at the surface, and you can’t blow the dust (or Uncle Edgar) off, no matter how fast you fly. The only solution, according to Tonya, is discretion. Be prepared to keep the bereaved away from the airplane when you land. Only an amateur would promise airplane rides afterwards.

I’m not finished complaining. Last month the gripe was airshow jingoism. (One email in support, one righteously aghast.) This time it’s the editorial overuse of the phrase “the dream of flight” and its related constructions.

For example, the sentence “As a boy in Kansas, Edgar was seized by the dream of flight, believing that one day he too would soar….” Or maybe something like “For thousands of years, mankind gazed upwards, watching the birds follow their long, lonely track across the sky, and dreamt the dream of flight, until finally two brothers….” That sort of overly lofty stuff is what I’m complaining about now. The phrase “dream of flight” has a definite annual cycle, like ragweed, peaking with the advent of AirVenture every summer, which is why I’m irritable. Read EAA’s Sport Aviation and all the Oshkosh hype. You’ll see.

(I suppose you think I could come up with something less arcane and more compelling—or actually informative—to write about, since it’s only twelve times a year. I won’t disagree. Unfortunately, the grease-stained muse of aviation prose takes August off and I’m pretty much out of Schlitz, inspiration-wise. I don’t know how the other guys do it. Better column next month, I promise. But please continue.)

Beyond our well-founded objections to the relentless use of cliché, we complain that what’s usually being described is actually mere daydreaming. The kid in the cornfield, the upwardly gazing caveman, or perhaps the fellow who is thinking about building an RV-6 or resuscitating a Cub are all daydreaming. They’re not on a vision quest, or achieving Nirvana, or making a solemn pact with future generations. We just don’t want to use the phrase “daydreaming of flight” because it sounds too much like lollygagging, which reflects badly on the pilot population in general. A daydream suggests slacking off—in the sense that maybe it would be far more productive to mow the lawn or fix the roof than to build an airplane. A true “visionary dream,” however, transcends such mundane projects with utopian ambition beneficial to all. Think of Dr. Martin Luther King. There’s a Dream, capital D. He wasn’t just lollygagging, or drooling over a rivet-gun catalog, and Coretta certainly wasn’t yelling at him to get all that airplane crap out of the garage. Note the difference?

Also make the distinction between the cliché “dream of flight” and the much more interesting “flying dream.” In a flying dream, meaning the kind that usually happens at night, you might be copying an endless clearance from ATC in what sounds like Medieval Lithuanian, or flying like a bird yourself, or scrambling to jump clear of the Hindenburg. In an aviation daydream you are mostly in the world, and only a little bit out. You are held responsible for your actions and are expected to be at least marginally rational. In a “flying dream” you are irresponsibly zonkers and editorially unrestrained. My wife tells me that over the last year or so I’ve become an extreme, physically active dreamer. (“You’re thoroughly obnoxious,” was one way she put it.) I wake up screaming, “The bunny rabbit, where’s the bunny rabbit?” I live in Boston; a bunny would get mugged. My wife fears for her safety and longs for a little more REM sleep. She believes that my dreams are largely aviation related, but the connection is difficult to confirm, because they usually vanish when she wakes me up. Yet sometimes I do remember. My favorite is the repeater that started in childhood, in which I stand in the back yard, look up, and they’re holding an amazing old-time airshow, apparently just for me.

Here’s an aviation dream that survived the dawn. It belongs to a distinguished author (“Astonishing … A breathtaking performance” – Washington Post.) who is also a pilot. We turned off the gyros and flew aerobatics together recently. He had the following dream that night. Here’s the extract from his email:

“I can’t sign off without telling you about the dream I had last night. I was flying along while lying back on what seemed an awful lot to me like a mattress, and a phone rang. I answered it to find that it was “Sherry, from across the street.” I have no idea who “Sherry, from across the street” is, but I said it was good to hear from her, and that if she would hold on a second, I would pull back the throttle to reduce the engine noise so I could hear her better. As soon as I did this, the nose of the mattress turned straight down, and I found myself in clouds, very aware that the gyros of the attitude indicator were caged. I told Sherry VERY quickly that I would have to call her back, and then I began monkeying with the controls to try righting myself. That was the end of the dream, or at least all I remember.

“Gee, I wonder where the idea of pointing straight down, and having caged gyros on the attitude indicator could have come from?”

The above is a great example of how dreams process, and mangle, the events of the day. Elaborate dreaming is actually quite common after the first aerobatic flight. And I also like it when mysterious women show up in the neighborhood. Did this Sherry person leave a number?

I’ve never been to an airshow outside the United States, so I can only imagine what it might be like elsewhere on the planet. In the U.S., at least, major airshows tend to involve patriotic themes. This is especially the case at airbases or when there’s otherwise a strong military presence. But even when the Thunderbirds or the Blue Angels aren’t around, the Flag usually gets waved pretty hard.

Which happens in both literal and symbolic terms. I can’t remember an airshow that didn’t begin with skydivers descending with an American Flag. Taking symbolism to the limit, airshow performer Julie Clark calls her “Mopar T-34” the Free Spirit. It makes red, white, and blue smoke; the aircraft, in effect, becoming the Flag. The imagery is potent. Aerobatic flight represents physical freedom of the highest order, and it’s popularly thought to demand physical courage. Stick them together and you have America’s fundamental notion of itself—the land of the free and the home of the brave. Clark’s aircraft is even painted with a nod toward “Air Force One.” Plus, as she flies, Neil Diamond’s “Coming to America” blares dramatically from the sound system. When Clark lands and taxis back in, she waves an American Flag out the canopy. There’s nothing subtle (or new) about the appropriation of the national identity by a performer working the emotions of a crowd. There’s nothing subtle about the national identity it projects, either. Then again, what could be more boring than a subtle airshow?

I’m a child of the political ‘60s, so you have to be cautious around me and not expect to pluck my heartstrings. I think listening to anything sung by Neil Diamond is like eating lard. Having already been told to “love it or leave it,” I’m wary of those whose patriotism is either aggressively simple-minded or just a ploy to get me to agree with a bad idea—or maybe to buy a certain brand of auto parts.

As a result, I sometimes miss out on the fun. The pilot in me loves it when an F-18 pulls so hard you can see water vapor condense over the wings. But then the cautious patriot in me remembers that the aircraft is, in its brutal reality, a killing machine. I can accept the need for such a machine, but I can’t stop worrying about its misuse. I can admire those Americans and others who are fighting now in Iraq and Afghanistan, and thank them. But I can’t feel as I might have if the war—in Iraq, at least—had not been such a duplicitous blunder. I feel the troops need my apology more than my thanks. A bad world became worse because we refused to examine our presumptions, and servicemen and women and their families have taken the brunt. We abused their patriotism. Maybe we should re-question the meaning of our own—not to lose love of country but to see things with more critical, less-misty eyes, and minus the soundtrack.

Patriotic enthusiasm comes easier to me, without ambivalence, when I’m watching World War II warbirds, defenders of liberty against outright aggression, pure and simple. The older warbirds at airshows bring to mind Hollywood scenes of fighter pilots in individual combat or bomber crews with the wise guy from the Bronx and the kid from Nebraska battling through the flack and the Messerschmitts. And the World War II machines, now antiques, refer us back to what really were simpler times, when enemies were bordered nation states with aircraft of their own, and we could harness our industrial might to pummel them in a standup fight, toe to toe. We didn’t have to win hearts and minds afterwards, or keep the fanatics apart. We didn’t have to deal house to house with vicious sectarian and tribal resentments many times older than our own country. Victory was absolute. Maybe those were the days. Then again, be careful what you wish for. Not much stays simple anymore.

I keep promising not to tell flying stories, but the spirit is weak. This month I want to write about the aerobatic maneuver called the hammerhead, yet am drawn by strange alien forces to the subject of swimming pools. There’s a lot you can tell about the tenor of a community by flying around and checking out its backyard swimming pools. If you know anything about pools—or ever had an ambivalent dominion over one, as I have—you know that the natural tendency of small, self-contained bodies of water is to become vile. Rather than signaling moral failure on the part of the man of the house, as my wife once suggested, a green, algae-rich pool actually reveals conformity with nature’s plan: that the fittest slime should take control. Obviously, pool water that’s transparent and sparkling means the presence of folks to whom nature’s wishes carry little weight. These are the same people who deny global warming. They believe the universe is 6,237 years old, at most, despite the fossils dug up when the pool was installed. More about swimming pools in a bit.

Last month I wrote about my first encounter with a Pitts S1S—a little trouble steering on the ground combined with a little trouble making the smoke system stop. Yet I grew to love that airplane, and more importantly, I learned to land it. Come to think of it, I destroyed my first prop in that Pitts, actually a loaner prop from my buddy Hans—a man of serene forbearance, fortunately. Plymouth Airport threatened to but never billed me for the taxi light that was also destroyed, a fact (assuming that a statute of limitations applies) I now feel comfortable flaunting in front of management.

Anyway, a Pitts does a fine hammerhead. In this maneuver, for reminders, you pull to the vertical, slow down almost to a stop, and then kick left rudder. The airplane yaws 180 degrees and heads back down toward the dirt. Before it hits the dirt, of course, you pull back to level flight. I’m going to reconstruct the most satisfying Pitts hammerhead I ever flew. But first a more specific description of how the maneuver is performed.

A hammerhead either requires lots of entry speed in order to gain altitude during the initial vertical line, or should be started high enough so that altitude is irrelevant. The problem is that you slow down to almost nothing at the top of the maneuver. So when you come back down, you have to generate sufficient airspeed to pull the Gs necessary for recovery. That means trading potential energy (altitude) for the kinetic kind (airspeed). An airshow pilot starting a hammerhead at low altitude and low airspeed might not be able to gain the altitude necessary for recovery. Pilots have died this way. My little S1S required an entry speed around 140 mph to drive the vertical line high enough so that recovery at or above entry altitude was guaranteed.

So now we are in the vertical line, with plenty of altitude beneath. As the aircraft slows, slipstream effects increase and cause the nose to yaw to the left. Consequently, a gradual increase in right rudder is needed to keep the flight path vertical. In fact, if we just left our feet flat on the floor, the aircraft would slowly yaw around in a lazy arc and head back down on its own.

At the same time, as we climb and lose airspeed, the torque generated by the prop becomes more apparent. The aircraft starts to roll to the left, against the prop’s rotation to the right. Right aileron may be necessary to counteract torque. If so, aileron deflection will have to increase as airspeed drops and the control surfaces become less effective.

Learning when to kick left rudder takes practice. We go to the left to take advantage of the leftward yawing tendency generated by the slipstream. Kick too soon and the aircraft flies around in an arc, with the pivot point somewhere beyond the wingtip. Wait too long and the aircraft will pivot around its center of gravity, while the center of gravity itself begins to sink. A pivot point somewhere within the span of the left wing usually gives a good-looking turn around. Aesthetics matter.

As the aircraft yaws around the top, the right wing goes faster than the left and tends to produce more lift. Compensating right aileron is necessary to keep the aircraft from rolling. Some of the rolling tendency is still due to torque effect, however, and if the ailerons are giving up the ghost it may be necessary to pull the power back to reduce the torque.

Now that we’ve kicked and are headed back down, the subject of swimming pools returns. My best ever hammerhead happened one hot, summer afternoon, when I pivoted around the top and headed vertically down exactly centered on a circular, above-ground swimming pool. “Dude, way cool!” I thought. This was over a sparsely settled, less fashionable outskirt of Taunton, Massachusetts—a town not fashionable to begin with. There was a mobile home, and cars and pickups scattered around the yard. Clearly a redneck enclave. Perfect!

In my experience, folks with above-ground pools and redneck landscaping invariably fit the airshow attendance profile. They’re what make airshows such classy affairs. This isn’t snobbishness; it’s simply the truth. So I gave them a four-point roll on the down line. On the first point, I must have gotten their attention. By the second point, I bet they were questioning the future. By the third point, at least four individuals could be seen climbing out of the pool and heading off in all directions. The fourth point probably went unobserved by the runners below. Aerobatics doesn’t get any better! In fact, life doesn’t get any better.

The regulations prohibit aerobatics over an open-air assembly of individuals. Do four excitable rednecks swilling Budweiser in an above-ground pool constitute an open-air assembly? Of course I recovered above 1,500 feet AGL, as required by FAA regulations. I will take a polygraph, if necessary, to confirm the entire story.