Every takeoff is optional. Every landing is mandatory.
If you push the stick forward, the houses get bigger. If you pull the stick back, they get smaller. That is, unless you keep pulling the stick all the way back, then they get bigger again.
Flying isn’t dangerous. Crashing is what’s dangerous.
It’s always better to be down here wishing you were up there than up there wishing you were down here.
The ONLY time you have too much fuel is when you’re on fire.
The propeller is just a big fan in front of the plane used to keep the pilot cool. When it stops, you can actually watch the pilot start sweating.
When in doubt, hold on to your altitude. No one has ever collided with the sky.
A ‘good’ landing is one from which you can walk away. A ‘great’ landing is one after which they can use the plane again.
Learn from the mistakes of others. You won’t live long enough to make all of them yourself.
You know you’ve landed with the wheels up if it takes full power to taxi to the ramp.
The probability of survival is inversely proportional to the angle of arrival. Large angle of arrival, small probability of survival and vice versa.
Never let an aircraft take you somewhere your brain didn’t get to five minutes earlier.
Stay out of clouds. The silver lining everyone keeps talking about might be another airplane going in the opposite direction. Reliable sources also report that mountains have been known to hide out in clouds.
Always try to keep the number of landings you make equal to the number of take offs you’ve made.
There are three simple rules for making a smooth landing. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.
You start with a bag full of luck and an empty bag of experience. The trick is to fill the bag of experience before you empty the bag of luck.
Helicopters can’t fly; they’re just so ugly the earth repels them.
If all you can see out of the window is ground that’s going round and round and all you can hear is commotion coming from the passenger compartment, things are not at all as they should be.
In the ongoing battle between objects made of aluminum going hundreds of miles per hour and the ground going zero miles per hour, the ground has yet to lose.
Good judgment comes from experience. Unfortunately, the experience usually comes from bad judgment.
It’s always a good idea to keep the pointy end going forward as much as possible.
If you pull the stick all the way back too fast, you climb way fast, but also drop your airspeed. Drop your airspeed (what they call “stall”) and lose the lift from the wings. Lose the lift from the wings, and your airplane becomes a big rock - hence falling towards the houses.
screech-owl and Tripler, if you pull the stick back long enough and hard enough, you’ll fly a loop, during the second half of which the houses would get much bigger indeed.
But the rest of that rule isn’t exactly true. When I was taking lessons, my instructor had me set up the plane (elevator trim and throttle) to fly straight and level at 80 miles per hour. In fact, I took my hands of the yoke and we stayed straight and level. Then he told me to push the throttle in, and we started climbing. Pull the throttle out a bit and we leveled off, pull it back a little more and we started descending. All without touching the yoke and all at 80 mph.
He told me that (to some extent, at least) the stick controls your airspeed and the throttle makes you go up or down.
There’s a speed at which a plane’s wings will cease to produce lift, called the “stall speed.” As you pull the stick/yoke back, your “angle of attack” increases and your speed decreases until the point where you stall (that is, the wings cease giving lift, the engine doesn’t stall). At that point, the plane behaves less like a plane and more like a rock. Before you reach the point called the “critical angle of attack” the plane will generally climb (hence the part about the stuff on the ground getting smaller). But if you keep pulling back and exceed the critical angle of attack, the wings stall and the plane drops.
Note to other pilots: I know that’s not the most thorough and accurate explanation, but hey, I’m not a flight instructor… yet.
Hey, I think I did a bang-up job with my explanation. Not bad for a pilot without his liscence yet. (I just don’t feel like paying the $3500 to be legal about things just yet).
Okay, I figured it was a “bad thing”, but wasn’t quite sure exactly how.
Second request - is there a website (so I don’t take up bandwidth) that has some basic vocabulary on flight? Yoke? Trim? Hanh?
Oh, let’s not start that debate! Heh… My favorite response to that is to taxi out to the end of the runway and start pushing the stick or yoke forward and back. When the person who made the statement asks what the hell you’re doing, tell them you’re trying to get up enough airspeed to lift off. I’ve never gotten a chance to do this, but rest assured, I will.
Obviously, both throttle and stick/yoke influence altitude and airspeed. For some reason, many pilots insist that it’s one way or the other and argue endlessly about it. Pilots sure do love to argue.
Some planes have sticks for control, some have yokes. A stick is just that - it’s a stick coming out of the floor which you grab onto and push forward/back/left/right. A yoke is more like a steering wheel. You push it in and pull it out, but you rotate it as you would a steering wheel for left/right. Most trainer planes have yokes and most antique (or at least old-style) planes have sticks, although there are plenty of modern planes with sticks as well. I’ve never heard of a large plane (bizjet or bigger) with a stick (other than military fighters), but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
Trim is something you can set so you don’t have to constantly hold the stick or yoke to keep yourself straight and level, or in a constant-rate climb or descent. You push or pull the stick/yoke until the plane’s doing what you want, set the trim, and you should be able to take your hands off the controls and the plane should keep doing what it was doing if you’ve got it trimmed properly. Some planes have rudder trim, too, but we’ll save that for another lesson.
I see some people who say pulling back too much will result in stall… others say loop. I always thought you could only do a loop in a fighter jet or similar small and extremely maneuverable (and fast) plane.
In other words, under what conditions would you do a loop and what conditions would you stall?
Simply put, if you have sufficient airspeed and altitude, you can loop any aircraft with the structural integrity to withstand the forces. A loop becomes a stall when you lose sufficient airspeed and thence airflow over the wings, after which other unpleasant things can occur.
screech-owl, next time you’re near a library or book store, pick up a copy of Stick & Rudder, still one of the premier books for basic flight instruction. I believe you can find it at Barnes & Noble.
I had the pleasure of watching as Bob Hoover looped a Shrike Commander,( a high wing twin engined aircraft) deadstick,(no power) and closer to the ground than I ever want to be under those circumstances.
You can do a loop in any plane that can handle the stresses put on the airframe by such an aerobatic maneuver and which can get going fast enough without being in danger of coming apart. There are plenty of small, single-engine aerobatic planes that can do loops.
I don’t have any actual aerobatic training, but my understanding is that you have to relax your back-pressure (i.e. stop pulling so hard) on the stick near the top of a loop to prevent a stall. The original statement still applies, even in a loop - if you keep pulling back, you’ll stall the plane.
This reminds me of my private pilot checkride. I was having trouble doing a power-on stall and the FAA inspector takes control of the plane and yells at me, “This is how you do a stall!!” at which points he yanks back the yoke and the plane seems to point straight up. I’m sure it really wasn’t, but it was at a much higher attitude than I’d ever seen before. Sure enough, the plane stalled, dropped, and leveled out again. I started to feel pretty ill at this point, but I still managed to pass my checkride.
A loop in a plane is a lot like a loop in a roller coaster. The roller coaster goes down a hill first to give it enough speed to get over the top of the loop. It’s the same in a plane, except you can build up the speed you need by running the engine faster (or by pointing the nose down, I’ve seen a guy do a loop in a glider). Of course, if a roller coaster doesn’t have enough speed, it just stops and rolls backwards to the low point on the track. If a plane can’t get over the top of a loop, bad things happen.
pestie, I did say that bit about throttle and stick was “to some extent”. I agree that the real situation is a tricky mix of the two. But that demonstration from my instructor was interesting, and it’s something you can never know too much about.
I didn’t mean to disagree. More than anything, it just amuses me that some people get so worked up about what controls what when clearly the throttle and stick both have a lot to do with whether the plane goes up or down. Heh… I also agree that it’s something you can never know too much about. Aviation seems to have a lot of things like that.