I really wonder how this can happen. They say it was the cause of the JFK Jr. crash. Does gravity not come into play? Maybe it’s simplistic but to me if the plane is upside down you are going to fall out of your seat, or at least be held in by your seat belt.
If you read the article carefully (I say this only because it’s not a point emphasized in the article, so it takes some work to spot it), the normal feeling of gravity is overcome by the effects of accellerating in a curve, which works to press you “down” into your seat. Thus, it still feels like you are being “pulled” down into the seat, though in fact you are being accellerated sideways by the seat.
I don’t see anywhere in the article where it asserts this would happen if you were actually upside down. Rather, they talk about the graveyard spiral, where your plane will be rolled sideways and lose lift. Once you no longer are accellerating relative to your “norm” of the seat bottom, you will certainly know that “down” is not really down, but you may be too late to do anything about it, and you’ll most likely experience some disorientation while your senses try to make sense of the data.
As the plane moves, you are pressed in different directions. In an ideal state for your senses, you get the feeling of sitting in your seat and get used to it. You interpret this as ‘gravity has me held down’. But gravitational forces are not the only forces that hold you in an airplane seat.
It is the most frequently observed feeling, but it is easily duplicated by your body, butt, whatever, being pressed against the sides and bottom due to inertia.
You could be losing altitude, while banked, but be convinced, by way of how you feel in your seat, that you are in level flight.
I’m guessing the OP has never flown through clouds. It is very much like trying to swim in a white bowl filled with milk. There are no visual cues to help you remain oriented, there is no horizon, and g-forces can pull you everywhich way, to the point that you really don’t know which way is up without looking at your instruments.
I know you are pressed down to the seat in a curve , maybe that is the only time this happens. From other articles I have read there was no mention of the plane turning but maybe they just left that out.
I have flown through clouds, but only in a big airliner. I am not a pilot.
During flight training one of my instructors subjected me to conditions that proved, conclusively, (at least to me) that yes, you CAN be upside down and not know it. In fact you can be in almost any orientation and, if you have no reference to something outside the airplane, you may still perceive yourself to be right-side up. This is counter-intuitive, but it can happen.
Most commonly, this involves an extreme bank with the pilot not knowing that the airplane is in a bank, it can also involve climbing or descending without realizing it. Truly upside-down and unaware of it would be rare but it CAN happen. Very shortly after that you may suddenly become aware something is Very Wrong as it would not be a stable situation, but you will be almost totally disoriented and figuring out what’s wrong and how to fix it may take longer than the time in which you have left to do something about the problem.
Other than a jet fighter planes are not supposed to fly upside down, correct? I read somewhere that a 737 (or similar plane) once did a complete roll and people were surprised the plane did not have major problems after the roll.
There are lots of planes that are designed to fly upside down. And, almost any plane could fly upside down, at least for a short while.
As for the JFK spatial orientation deal. Have you ever been on a roller coaster that loops? You are pushed into your seat for the entire loop - even when you are upside down. The force at which you are pushed into your seat depends on the size of the loop and the speed of the cart - or in JFK’s case, speed of the plane. The faster the vehicle, the bigger the loop you can go through while still feeling pushed into your seat.
His plane, a Piper Saratoga, flies at around 160MPH. At that speed, you can have a HUGE loop and still be pushed into your seat. So, imagine the plane is upside down, this is the top of the loop. Now, if the pilot pulls back on the stick, even slightly, the plane starts down the backside of a huge loop, and the passengers feel as though gravity is pushing them into their seats.
The Boeing 367-80 (prototype to what became the Boeing 707) did a barrel roll in Seattle in the mid-50s. Just google “Boeing 707 barrel roll” and you’ll find video. (In Wikipedia, it was said that the only other large 4-engine passenger plane known to have done a barrel roll was the Concorde!)
Flight instructor here.
I frequently take students into the clouds for the first time. Most of it’s been said already, but here’s my two cents.
There are a number of ways to become disoriented in flight through bodily perception, and visual illusions. I’ve found that no matter how much a person reads about it or is told about it, there’s no way to know how they’re going to react until placed in actual IMC (“instrument meteorological conditions”).
Basically, when you have no visual cues with which to orient yourself spacially, your body makes a guess at which way is up. It’s going to guess wrong.
You’d certainly feel something if the plane went anything close to inverted, but it wouldn’t necessarily help you. It would probably confuse you more.
Instead, what I usually see is a slight bank develops, then a change in pitch. If not caught immediately, it gets worse. This could then turn into an unusual attitude, perhaps even inverting the airplane.
My job is to carefully observe the student and stop an unusual attitude before it happens. My first line of defense is being sure the student understands what to do before I place them in this situation, and practicing on a simulator. Rarely have I ever had a student come close to actually losing control. But I have seen a few who took a while to acclimate to instrument flying.
Flying in the clouds is no joke. Most students are pretty well freaked out by the experience the first time they do it.
No - but read further, I’ll cover in more detail in a minute.
That was a Boeing 707. Here is Tex Johnson narrating a clip of the maneuver (he’s the pilot involved). As he explains, it is a 1g maneuver throughout. What that means is that during the entire roll there is a force of 1g exerted down towards the floor of the airplane. It is, indeed, a maneuver where, if you were seated inside the airplane with no reference to the outside you would be completely unaware of when the airplane was inverted as the forces involved would hold you “down” in your seat exactly as if you were sitting on the ground.
Some people with a very poor understanding of aerodynamics were surprised, but not pilots and not real aero-engineers. Although a barrel roll looks impressive it’s actually a gentle maneuver from the standpoint of forces acting on the airplane.
Continuous inverted flight is another matter entirely - in many airplanes systems are not designed to run in a condition of either zero or negative g’s, so prolonged inverted flight will potentially cause problems.
Engines designed for inverted flight are not limited to fighter jets - many very small aerobatic airplanes have them and fly upside down with no problems (although my friends who do this do say your shoulders get sore quickly, as they are not designed to support your weight the way your buttocks are).
Even where engines are not designed for inverted flight it is still possible from the standpoint of the airframe, assuming you have a pilot who knows what he/she is doing and is not prone to panic. Glider pilots - that is, people who have no engines at all in their flying machines - can fly inverted (the important thing is to turn back upright in plenty of time to land rightside up). The Cessna 150 I used to routinely fly was capable of it - I watched another pilot (one who had some aerobatic skills) fly it inverted. As it did not have an engine set up for inverted flight the engine stopped after about 5-6 seconds inverted, but the airplane kept happily gliding along upside-down, under the complete control of the pilot, for about a half a minute more. At which point he rolled it upright again and the engine started right back up. The only problem was that, while inverted, quite a bit of the oil ran out and he had to pay to top it back up again after the flight (This is not how the mechanics like to do oil changes!)
I would like to add that, personally, I am not an aerobatic pilot. My knowledge has been gleaned from watching aerobatic pilots and talking with them, not from any personal experience with inverted flight. Honestly, taking the bank up to about 60 degrees is about my limit of confidence, and I’ve never been over 70 degrees myself. I don’t particularly like pulling 3 g’s, definitely don’t like being upside down, and while I might one day take an aerobatic ride I seriously doubt ever becoming proficient in that area of flight.
“Not supposed to fly upside-down” has more to do with screaming, terrified passengers and/or the competency of the pilots to handle such maneuvers, not so much limitations of fixed-wing aircraft themselves. While some of the maneuvers discussed above are not particularly stressful on the airframe when correctly performed, if you bungle them the result could be quite disastrous.
I could be wrong but I believe the roll I heard about was an actual airline flight with passengers and a normal pilot, not a test pilot flight.
No kidding. My first actual IMC was when I was a student pilot flying solo. It was… horrible. I managed to safely land in a field (really, someone’s oversized backyard) in Beecher, Illinois.
I haven’t quite forgiven some of the jackasses who said I shouldn’t have landed - I should have “simply” flown on to Gary airport, pretended to be instrument certified, and landed there. It was “only” another 10 miles, I could have covered that distance in, oh, seven minutes if I firewalled the throttle, right?
On the other hand - the flight instructors, the owner of the flight school and airplane, TWO Flight Standard District Offices, the FAA, the Illinois Department of Transportation, the Lake County Indiana sheriff, a captain for Southwest Airlines, several former airline captains, and a whole bunch of other pilots (both VFR and IFR) all said I made the right call. And that’s good enough for me. That, and the fact at the end of it all no one was hurt and nothing was broken.
And yes, I did have an… interesting conversation with the FAA, FSDO, and IDOT the next day. Not the most pleasant 40 minutes or so of my life.
I’ve stayed out of trouble since then.
So far as I know the B707 test flight shown in the clip is the only time an airplane of that sort has been deliberately flown inverted for any length of time.
There was an airplane crash a few years ago off South America where there was a major instrument failure (actually, a double failure) during the night, during a storm, and according to the black boxes the aircraft did roll inverted or nearly so at one point before impact with the ocean. However, that was not a controlled situation at all.
Here’s a story I was told once. I don’t remember if the teller said it happened to him, or if it happened to someone else. I cannot vouch for its veracity.
A pilot was on a training flight with an instructor in a T-38. The pilot was put into simulated instrument conditions. [I note here that GA pilots wear a [hood](http://www.sportys.com/acb/showdetl.cfm?DID=19&Product_ID=1448&CATID=172) or Foggles or a similar vision-limiting device that allows the pilot to see the instruments but not outside of the aircraft. Older military training aircraft had a ‘convertible top’ that went over the pilot. I do not know the situation in a T-38. On-head devices as pictured would be problematic while wearing a helmet, and I’ve never seen a convertible hood on a T-38.] The instructor took the aircraft between two cloud layers, performing disorienting maneuvers so the pilot would not know which way was up. He then put the aircraft into a 1-g inverted dive and had the pilot go visual. Since they were between clouds (no ground reference) and in a 1-g dive, the pilot thought he was upright – and was wondering why his altimeter was unwinding so rapidly.
Aside from the vision-limiting device, there are problems with this story that should be obvious. But given the right conditions it seems plausible.
Adding to what has already been said, a barrel roll at night with an older style artificial horizon can be very confusing. The older instruments were all black with white horizon markings on them. I had one stick on a hard banking climb out off the runway and if I didn’t have ground lights it would have been very disorienting.
7 minutes of dissoriented flight by a student is solidly in the “things not to do” column. It doesn’t matter if GRY was up or not.
Absolutely.
Our “emergency IFR for VFR pilots” drill at the school did incorporate finding the Chicago Heights VOR and using it to navigate to Gary (along with talking to ATC, of course) under the theory that this sort of crap was most likely to happen near home and, having practiced it, if a worst case scenario arose where a VFR pilot couldn’t land the dry runs would have (hopefully) given them a reasonable chance of success at the maneuver. But landing IS the preferred option, student pilot or not, if you are NOT fully trained in IFR and you are able to make a survivable landing. THAT was sufficiently drummed into my head that when the shit hit the fan it didn’t take a lot of brain power to make the right choice. Which was good, because I was 400 feet off the ground and only about 10 seconds from tangling with a radio tower at the time (yeah, my knees still get wobbly when I read over my official account and log book of what happened) and I needed all available brain cells to keep my wits together and perform a very atypical and difficult landing into a very small space. In fact, the space I landed in was too short for a take-off and someone with MUCH more experience was required to get the airplane out, which involved getting it into another field that was long enough for take off. Thank goodness I landed in knee deep hay, if I hadn’t I probably would have gone through the side of the man’s garage.
No, it wasn’t a very good morning… but at least the ending was happy.
About two years later some jerk in the pilot’s lounge was spouting off that he didn’t think much of my piloting skills and if I ever had to make an emergency landing I’d be screwed. He couldn’t figure out why just after that everyone else was laughing at him and muttering about “hayfields”. I’m not the most technically proficient pilot, but I do know I can handle an off airport landing.
Broomstick, after all that, you’ve got to tell us the tale.