Bill Crawford’s Flightlab Blog

(Note: My monthly column in the Atlantic Flyer is printed across from the comic strip Smilin’ Jack)

I like being across from Smilin’ Jack every month. Although I admire Jack, I don’t envy him—one way or another, he’s always getting clobbered. He has the look of a perpetually annoyed Clark Gable. He’s a magnet for sabotage schemes and for women who tear up the scenery. He wears absurd hats, but he’s infinitely resilient.
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The then CAA (now FAA) removed the spin requirement from the private pilot flight test in 1949, but the arguments over spin training never let up. There were even Congressional hearings, in 1980, in which the Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight of the House Committee on Science and Technology, clearly wowed by a witness list of right-stuff test pilots, recommended that spin training be restored—a recommendation the FAA did not follow.
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Most aircraft are laterally stable, up to a point. If you put them in a shallow bank, then fold your arms in feigned indifference, they tend to return to level flight. But first they sideslip in the direction of the low wing. On aircraft with conventional dihedral angle—the wing tips higher than the wing roots—the sideslip leads to an increase in the angle of attack on the low wing, and to a decrease on the high. That difference produces a rolling moment that brings the wings back to level and simultaneously makes the sideslip disappear. The reaction is called dihedral effect. It gives an aircraft lateral stability. But remember, a sideslip has to happen first.
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Sometime ago I lent a student my Dad’s old bedraggled copy of Wolfgang Langewiesche’s classic Stick and Rudder, and got two copies back. The original copy was looking like it might have gone through the prop, so including a fresh one when he returned it was a nice gesture on the student’s part. He enclosed a note saying that he had read it cover to cover three times. Not a lot of books—on anything—live up to three encounters. I remember reading Stick and Rudder as a beginning pilot and thinking afterwards that I was starting to understand stuff. It was fun to read it again over the December holidays, and still experience revelation.
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I just finished updating the ground school texts available on my website, www.flightlab.net. Click on “Download Course Notes & Documentation.” Please take a look. Here’s the background.

In 1997, about when I began teaching aerobatics, I took a course at the National Test Pilot School, in Mojave, California, called “Introduction to Performance and Flying Qualities Flight Testing.” This was an abbreviated version of their professional test-pilot course. It happened to occur during the fiftieth anniversary, on October 14 of that year, of Chuck Yeager’s assault on the sound barrier in the X-1 rocket plane. Edwards Air Force Base, the former Muroc Army Air Field of sound-busting days, is just south of Mojave. The plan was for Yeager to depart Edwards in an F-15 to break again what was really no longer a barrier, fifty years to the minute. At NTPS, they shuttled us out of a class on supersonic aerodynamics and pointed to the sky. We admired the contrails and heard the boom, then they shuttled us back in for more academics. It was absolutely the best lecture demonstration I’ve ever seen.
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