I hope you don’t mind indulging me a little and allowing me to change the subject and relate my latest flying experience (non-work).
Pre-flight nerves
I was asked recently to do some flying in a Tiger Moth. The excuse was that the owner, who I work with, had lost his medical and needed a safety pilot to fly with him. A win/win situation (ignoring the medical problems for the moment), I get to slip the surly bonds of earth in a more traditional manner and he gets to fly legally. It seems he is keen for me to fly it without him as well, so I might just get to introduce my children to real flying. Something I’ve been meaning to do for a number of years but haven’t got around to.
I last flew a Tiger Moth in 2001. I’d flown about 250 hours in them up till then (actually I’ve just checked, it’s 275.5 hours, electronic logbooks are awesome!) This seemed like a lot at the time, and in a way it was, it made up about a quarter of my flying experience in 2001, but now it’s just a brief episode in my log book.
I wasn’t sure if it was actually going to happen, my colleague’s illness may easily have prevented him from finding the time or even having the desire to go flying with me, but plans were made, a date was set, and I rocked up at a small, slightly dishevelled, private airstrip bordered by trees, a river, and industrial buildings. A runway and a couple of taxiways had been maintained by a lawnmower in amongst sparse weeds. A large troop of kangaroos* roam the perimeter fence and later I’m warned to keep an eye on them, be ready to abort a landing or take-off if they decide to bound across the runway at the wrong time.
My friend isn’t here yet but I take a look around and find an open hangar with a couple of people pottering around with rotted wooden wing frames (“gotta hang these up on the wall to make room for a bench we’re building”). Also in the hangar is a Tiger Moth, a Chipmunk, and a Jabiru. In adjacent hangars I find a Stearman and another Tiger Moth. Elsewhere there is apparently a Yak of some description but I didn’t get to see it. Already I am struck by this little collection of aircraft. Back in the “before time”, when I flew because it was fun, I would have known about all the old aeroplanes in the neighbourhood. I would be on first name terms with the owners and there’d be a reasonable chance I would’ve flown some of the machines at least once. Not anymore.
I don’t mind admitting that I’m a bit nervous at this point. I know I’ve flown these things before and didn’t find it difficult. I’m sure I can do it again. But it’s been 16 years. The airstrip is not the wide open space I’ve been used to in the past and am used to now. I remember that the Tiger Moth needs left rudder instead of right to counter the engine torque and spiralling slipstream, but how much does it need? Is it a lot or not? I can’t remember that. Tail draggers have a bit of a reputation for being difficult. I don’t remember them being difficult, but maybe that was just because I was young, had good reactions, and flew a lot. I found myself being psyched out by the very taildragger myths that I had spent time in the past telling people were not really true (“I’d much rather be in a Pitts Special in a strong crosswind than a C172,” I’ve said, “it may be twitchy but it’ll do exactly what you tell it to do, just make sure you tell it to do the right things :).”)
To compound my doubts, this Tiger Moth is different to the ones I’d flown before in one major respect, it has brakes. I’d never seen one with brakes before. I knew they existed, different countries built Tiger Moths and each had different ideas how they should be, the Canadians even built the things with a canopy. Some have leading edge slats, some have anti-spin strakes, some have the oil tank strapped to the fuselage while others are bolted on, and some have brakes. This shouldn’t be a problem, the vast majority of aeroplanes have brakes, but I knew a guy who put a Tiger Moth on to its nose by using the brakes a bit too enthusiastically, so it was another niggling doubt. It also has a “gosport tube”, of all things, for communicating between pilots. A gosport tube is a glorified garden hose that goes from a mouth piece, that looks a little like a device designed for women to pee in, to some ear cups, and is supposed to transmit speech well enough to be heard above the cacophony of the engine, propellor, and wind.
This might be a good time to give a brief description of these aeroplanes. A Tiger Moth is generally a very simple machine. The ones I’d flown were very “pure”. A tail skid rather than a wheel, no mixture control, no generator, no battery, no starter motor, no carb heat control (though they do have an automatic carb heat that comes on at low throttle settings), and no brakes. That said, many of them do have leading edge slats which are a lift generating device most commonly associated with high performance swept wing jets. On Tiger Moths, when unlocked, they deploy automatically at low speed and give a few extra knots of margin above the stall. One concession to modern flying that my previous steeds had was a radio/intercom powered by a standalone rechargable battery, not a fucking gosport tube!
So the scene is set. The airstrip didn’t inspire confidence, I hadn’t flown a Tiger for years, and this one was different to what I’d flown in the past.
Chocks away!
After I’d spent a bit of time looking over the machine and noting its peculiarities, my colleague arrived. Without much further fuss, we removed the Tiger from the hangar, and I was briefed on the plan for the flight. We were to fly to another private strip about 25 NM away and do a bit of air work on the way including stalling and steep turns. It was basically a checkout for me. There was a handheld radio with a headset connected in the rear cockpit but you couldn’t use that and the gosport tube so the radio was ditched in favour of being able to communicate between ourselves. We would have to be careful to avoid a couple of busy airstrips en-route, but I’d done some homework and knew where they were.
He asked if I was happy to sit in the back, this is the seat you fly it from, the front is for passengers and instructors; I was happy to sit where ever he wanted me to and told him such.
With the help of the chaps I’d found in the hangar we got the old girl started** and taxied out, getting a feel for the brakes with a few turns as we went. The front set of controls weren’t connected to the brakes so they were all mine. (“Don’t use them for landing, they are only for assisting the turns while taxiing”, I am told.) At the end of the runway we swing the tail around to face towards the trees and buildings at the opposite end. It is perhaps a blessing that I can’t see the trees and buildings because, being an old fashioned taildragger with a long nose and twice the number of wings currently in fashion, the forward view is almost entirely obstructed by fuselage, wings, and my friend in the front cockpit. I open the left door so I can lean out and peer down the side of the nose in the hope of getting an idea of where we are going.
Holding the brakes we run the engine up for a mag check at 1500 rpm. Any higher and the brakes won’t hold it. That done, I open the throttle, probably a little more cautiously than I’d’ve done in the past, and finding the swing to be negligible, continue to open it all the way.
We are off! The tail comes up quickly and with a couple of dabs on the rudder to keep straight we bounce gently over some undulations in the strip and I find myself airborne at around 50 knots or less. In my working life, in a regional jet, I sometimes taxi at 30 knots. 50 knots is not even fast enough for the rudder to become effective. At 50 knots the airspeed indicator hasn’t really become “alive”. 50 knots doesn’t even have a marking on the airspeed indicator, it goes 0, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100 etc. In my working life, 50 knots and not moving at all, is considered to be roughly equivalent.
We climb out at 60 knots, or at least I try to, I’m a fish out of water at this stage and it’s a little turbulent which makes my efforts at holding a speed worse than they otherwise would be. As we climb I try a few turns, concentrating on coordinating the rudder with the aileron. The Tiger Moth has so much adverse yaw (yaw in the opposite direction to the roll) that the ailerons only go up. If you push the stick right, the right aileron goes up which dumps lift from the right wing, and the left aileron stays roughly level***. This makes the roll quite sluggish, or at least that’s how I remembered it, but this didn’t seem anywhere near as bad as I thought it would be. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised to find the controls were quite well harmonised. The amount of rudder required to balance the aileron inputs seemed right and the control forces were nice and light.
At 2500’ we levelled off and headed towards our destination. In the cruise the speed hovered somewhere between 60 - 80 knots. It was a warm day and thermal as well as mechanical turbulence meant we were constantly moving from general updrafts to downdrafts and if height was to be maintained, speed had to vary. The problem with a machine with such a slow cruise speed is that 20 knots of headwind takes 25-30% of your groundspeed away resulting in a significantly increased flight time. 20 knots of wind is near enough to 0 for planning purposes in the jet; this was like punching in to a 100 knot headwind.
In the cruise, the view out the front was marginal. The horizon just cuts across the top of the nose while the top wing obscures much of the area above it and the lower wing obscures the area below. There’s not much to be seen forwards, even in level flight.
Once I’d got a feel for the aeroplane and started to get comfortable, I found my thoughts turning to our lack of a radio. It made me more anxious than I was expecting. I’d only ever flown with no radio once before, some 18 years ago, when ferrying a Tiger Moth from a maintenance facility to our base airfield. That time a lot of it was through controlled airspace and the flight had been organised with ATC over the phone. Even though I couldn’t talk or hear, I knew they knew I was there and were keeping traffic clear of my route. This time no one knew about us, and we truly had to rely on “see and avoid” which I think is a fundamentally flawed concept. Perhaps I’d been spoilt all this time. It’s a big sky, I’m sure we will be fine, just keep scanning.
AEROPLANE! A fucking aeroplane just flew right past our left wing at our level going in our direction! Once I got my heart of the floor and jammed it back into my chest I remembered the hangar chaps had said they’d follow us out in their Jabiru. They’d caught up with us and were sedately overtaking. They waggled their wings and I waved back. I tapped my mate in the front on the shoulder and pointed it out. “If this was WW1, we’d be dead right now” I said to him.
Which brings me to the gosport tube. Well I’ll be! It sounds like a ridiculous system that can’t possibly work very well at all, but it turns out it is actually very effective. All the advice and, sometimes, commands coming from the front were clear and easily audible over the engine and slipstream noise. It’s a bit disconcerting that you can’t hear yourself talk, but presumably he could hear me as well as I could hear him.
I’d tried to set a course of about 120º initially but found that I couldn’t get the compass to work. It was the same type fitted to previous Tiger Moths I’d flown but I realised I had literally never bothered to look at it before or learn how to use it. It had some kind of locking device which, when unlocked, allowed the compass to be freely rotated, and when locked seemed to not move at all, regardless of whether you were turning or not. I gave up playing with it after a while and just looked outside. The weather was good and I knew the area pretty well from ground level so found my way with out much trouble.
Once near our destination we did a bit of air work. A stall and some steep turns. I’d been a little tentative up to this point, but I was asked for a steep turn to the left and I obliged by bumping up the the throttle and rolling into about 45º of bank. At these slow speeds, the turn is completed quite quickly and any sloppy pitch control has little effect on our altitude, so I found that in little time we had turned through 360º and I felt a little bump as we flew through our wake. “Maybe I can do this after all,” I thought.
Happy landings
It seems my companion was a little bored at this point. He took the controls and gently aerobatted his way down to the circuit height. I was given control again for the landing. The first circuit was a slight disaster. Stripped of all my airline crutches and having no real reference for where and how high I should be, I ended up high and fast and had to do an orbit on finals to get close to a normal approach profile. From there the final approach went ok, I toyed with a bit of sideslip to see how that felt and carrying a trickle of power over the fence, I checked the sticked forward as the main wheels touched down while chopping the last of the power. No bouncing and I managed to keep it straight. Remembering the warnings about the brakes, I kept my heels firmly planted on the floor.
Well, that was a relief. I’m not sure I can say “it all came back to me”, it very much felt like a new aeroplane type. Perhaps it’s most accurate to say that my muscles seemed to remember what to do while my mind was thinking that it all felt different and new.
Well that will do for now. The strip we landed at was home to more Tiger Moths and we enjoyed coffee and a chat with the locals. We flew back later in the afternoon and my first go at landing at the Tiger’s home strip proved to be too much for me, but that is another story.
TLDR: I flew an old biplane and loved it!
- I want to call them a “bounce of kangaroos”, but apparently “mob” or “troop” is the appropriate collective noun.
** Open the throttle. “Tickle” the carb (push a button on the carburettor that primes it with fuel). Pull the prop through four compressions forwards. Close the throttle. Pull the prop through eight compressions backwards. Set the throttle. Left mag ON, right mag OFF. Standing behind the prop, pull it through a compression and with some luck it will start.
*** More correctly, the Tiger Moth would have a lot of adverse yaw if it didn’t have this aileron design feature.