{"id":4736,"date":"2018-02-23T14:21:56","date_gmt":"2018-02-23T22:21:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tailwheelersjournal.mechadigital.net\/?p=4736"},"modified":"2021-08-26T20:37:53","modified_gmt":"2021-08-26T20:37:53","slug":"198-shaking-hands","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tailwheelersjournal.com\/198-shaking-hands\/","title":{"rendered":"#198 Shaking Hands"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve mentioned this subject to most of my students from time to time.\u00a0 So it seems only natural to write it up for those who may never fly with me.<\/h3>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I\u2019m referring to the fact that it doesn\u2019t matter who you are or how well you fly.\u00a0 When you climb into an airplane you\u2019ve never flown there is an amount of time when you are getting used to it.\u00a0 I call this \u201cshaking hands\u201d with the plane.\u00a0 Just as we introduce ourselves to others, we have to go through a moment of introduction to a new airplane.\u00a0 After all, until you do certain maneuvers and practice certain operations, you don\u2019t know how the airplane will react to your inputs.<\/h3>\n

I\u2019ve been asked what I do during this hand shaking period.\u00a0 Since coordination is so important, I usually perform an adverse yaw experiment.\u00a0 Keeping my feet on the floor, I perform some Dutch rolls to see how much adverse yaw is present.\u00a0 It helps a bit because then, when I perform a coordinated roll, I have an idea how much adverse yaw I have to compensate for.<\/h3>\n

I also experiment to see how much rudder is required to compensate for left yawing tendency (that\u2019s \u201cleft-turning tendency\u201d for you Acme fliers) in climbing flight.\u00a0 That\u2019s also a good time to see if it\u2019s properly trimmed so that there is no left yawing tendency in level cruising flight.<\/h3>\n

Another maneuver that helps me is the alternating side slip.\u00a0 Many of my students have encountered the fact that there is a huge disparity in how much rudder an airplane has.\u00a0 For example, our little Cessna 140 has an extremely effective and sensitive rudder.\u00a0 By comparison, a Cessna 172 has very little rudder.\u00a0 So if the objective of the alternating sideslip is to use rudder to maintain heading while the aileron is holding bank, we find that the 172 will run out of rudder after very little bank, where the 140 will allow us to use significantly more bank without running out of rudder.\u00a0 That\u2019s kinda nice to know.\u00a0 That knowledge of the rudder\u2019s effectiveness will also help you as the aircraft accelerates during takeoff or decelerates as it\u2019s rolling out after a landing.<\/h3>\n

Since I\u2019ve done a bunch of slipping, it seems only fair to do some skidding as well.\u00a0 So I usually throw in some Sky Doodles, the only skidding maneuver I teach.<\/h3>\n

Since all the Acme guys are, by now, complaining that I haven\u2019t included a stall series, I\u2019ll certainly include that.\u00a0 The only difference is that I don\u2019t consider a stall to be an emergency, calling for an immediate recovery.\u00a0 I prefer the \u201cFalling leaf\u201d, keeping the aircraft stalled while rudder controls its heading and bank.\u00a0 Some airplanes are damned near impossible to keep going straight with only rudder, so it\u2019s important to know if you\u2019re flying one of those!<\/h3>\n

Formation flying calls for a real understanding of the airplane\u2019s characteristics.\u00a0 It\u2019s also a little harder to organize.\u00a0 I\u2019ll never forget the first time I flew the Schweizer 2-32 in formation with a C 172 camera ship.\u00a0 I was amazed and impressed with how quickly it could re-join and also how incredibly effective it\u2019s spoilers were at bringing it to a stop, locked into formation.\u00a0 It\u2019s safe to say that a similar exercise is helpful when flying a powered aircraft.\u00a0\u00a0 It won\u2019t \u201cwow\u201d you so much, however!<\/h3>\n

So now I\u2019m ready to fly the airplane, whether doing a job or providing flight instruction.\u00a0 But it\u2019s only the beginning.\u00a0 That hand-shaking will continue for a while until the airplane and I are truly operating as a team.<\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“I also experiment to see how much rudder is required to compensate for left yawing tendency (that\u2019s \u201cleft-turning tendency\u201d for you Acme fliers) in climbing flight.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":4737,"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":[35,67,130,165,173,174],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tailwheelersjournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4736"}],"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=4736"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tailwheelersjournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4736\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tailwheelersjournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4737"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tailwheelersjournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tailwheelersjournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tailwheelersjournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}