{"id":1229,"date":"2013-01-11T06:11:46","date_gmt":"2013-01-11T14:11:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tailwheelersjournal.mechadigital.net\/?p=1229"},"modified":"2021-08-26T20:37:59","modified_gmt":"2021-08-26T20:37:59","slug":"45-too-windy-to-fly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tailwheelersjournal.com\/45-too-windy-to-fly\/","title":{"rendered":"#46 Too Windy to Fly?"},"content":{"rendered":"

(Note to my readers:\u00a0 My attorney, J. Litigous Cautionpuss, proofread the following article and commented, \u201cAre you out of your flippin\u2019 mind?\u00a0 You can\u2019t write stuff like that; someone might go out and practice it, kill themselves and sue us!\u201d\u00a0 I pointed out that if they were dead they couldn\u2019t sue us, but I got his point.\u00a0 MY point is that my readers are smart enough to know their limitations and to seek competent flight instruction to keep their butts out of trouble.\u00a0 I\u2019ll stick with that opinion.)<\/em><\/p>\n

Jeff was at a point where all student pilots find themselves eventually.\u00a0 He was \u201cgetting it\u201d.\u00a0 He was flying pretty well and he understood coordination and the airplane\u2019s gaits.\u00a0 Crosswinds, however, were still eluding him a bit and it was partly because we hadn\u2019t been in very many of them.<\/p>\n

And then, one day it was windy as hell.\u00a0 Jeff was scheduled to fly and many students at his stage would have been happy to hear their instructor say, \u201cI think we\u2019ll hold off on flying today\u2026 it\u2019s just too windy.\u201d\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I understand that sense of caution on the part of many instructors and students.\u00a0 But I\u2019m also concerned that such a cancellation may both deprive the student of valuable experience and set the stage for future wimpiness.<\/p>\n

Most of my students have heard me quote one of Bill Warren\u2019s favorite expressions:\u00a0 \u201cNo guts, no air medal\u201d.\u00a0 There is a lot more truth than poetry in that line.<\/p>\n

That windy day, Jeff and I launched off and flew up to Madras.\u00a0 The wind was blowing directly across the runway at about twenty-five knots or so.\u00a0 As the Unicom operator heard us call downwind, he told us the wind, assuming that we were oblivious to it and needed a warning.\u00a0 We thanked him and continued the approach.\u00a0 We\u2019d already decided that this was going to be a low approach for the purpose of observing the effects of a hellacious crosswind.\u00a0 It was one of the most productive flights Jeff ever made with me.\u00a0 At one time we put a wheel down and ran down the runway, banked steeply into the wind and holding runway heading with opposite rudder.\u00a0 The run demonstrated why I love the wheel landing in a crosswind.\u00a0 It allows you to make the touchdown and then decide if you have the skill and controllability with which to bring the plane to a stop.<\/p>\n

The lessons learned from that flight were not only the the how-to\u2019s of crosswind work, but also that it is not necessary to land in order to teach crosswind work and that we shouldn\u2019t \u00a0be afraid of wind, we should simply respect it.<\/p>\n

If you have any doubt about your own ability to fly safely under some windy conditions, get a flight instructor or trusted pilot who has that ability and can protect you while you gain experience.<\/p>\n

Oh, and while you\u2019re at it, Happy Swooping!<\/p>\n

Brian<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Most of my students have heard me quote one of Bill Warren\u2019s favorite expressions: \u201cNo guts, no air medal\u201d. There is a lot more truth than poetry in that line.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1242,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tailwheelersjournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1229"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tailwheelersjournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tailwheelersjournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tailwheelersjournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tailwheelersjournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1229"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tailwheelersjournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1229\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tailwheelersjournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1242"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tailwheelersjournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tailwheelersjournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tailwheelersjournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}