Will the plane take off? |
yes |
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81% |
[ 9 ] |
no |
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18% |
[ 2 ] |
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Total Votes : 11 |
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Spockie-Tech
Site Admin
Joined: 31 May 2004
Posts: 3160
Location: Melbourne, Australia
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You should try flying a low altitude, low-speed (<100mph), totally open (high ground visibility) plane at high bank angles and high G turns in a bit of a wind with minimal instrumentation . Ie. a Gyrocopter.
The automatic tendency for people to judge what the aircraft is doing *relative to the ground* instead of relative to the *air* (as you should) can easily crash and kill you if you allow your eyes to override your brain. The infamous "downwind turn" that you will often hear pilots talking about.
Problem is, you can't *see* the air that you are flying through, but you *can * see the ground.
So when someone goes from flying into the wind, with the relatively low ground speed that results from a headwind, and then turns "downwind" and as a result goes to a much higher ground (sometimes 3x as fast), the tendency is to either back off on the power to slow down, or tighten up on the bank angle, since the increase in ground speed makes your turn look much wider (judging from what the ground is moving like) than you expected). So what happens is you end up in a tight bank, with low power, high ground speed, but low *airspeed* - which is what you actually need lots of to keep you flying.
Result, one low airspeed, but high groundspeed impact with the ground, which suddenly goes from being completely irrelevant to what the aircraft is doing (while its in the air), to being *totally* relevant as you try to interface with it and match your relative velocity vectors. (kind of like a mid-air refuelling).
Its perfectly understandable that most people would get this wrong. Unless you understand and have actually experienced in some way the principles of aerodynamics and how its the invisible *air* that you are flying relative to, most people have nothing in their experience to tell them they should be judging their flying ability according to an invisible reference. Even experienced pilots screw up and crash on downwind turns on occasion, and they know about it.
Ignoring the evidence of ones eyes is very hard to do. _________________ Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people
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Thu Dec 01, 2005 12:14 pm |
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