I want one of those for our tow plane!
The jet exhaust might be a tad hard on the tow rope! 
The exhaust won’t be so bad; the afterburner on the other hand. :eek:
Serious question (because my GA experience is very limited):
Does the big fan on the nose not dissipate the exhaust fumes of an idling Lycosaurus?
I doubt a MiG-17 will lift off the runway at any speed below the V[sub]NE[/sub] of your typical sailplane.
Talk about an odd couple!
We had a young (15 year old or so?) new student pilot in our glider club for a while. All the instructors said he was an excellent student pilot. But he always got airsick. I just learned that he has given up on learning to fly.
An excerpt from the e-mail he sent to the club mailing list:
> You [the instructors] gave me a chance to realize that flying
> is not the way for me after all; for one i had trouble with
> vertigo, and sought medical advice; the doctor told me i was
> born with it. Medication would not help me enough. I felt
> fearful-not just for my life, but for the instructors lives
> aswell and end up after a lesson dripping sweat and nauseas.
Is this so? Is susceptibility to vertigo (air-sickness?) something that some people are just born with and that’s just that? Is vertigo the same as motion sickness? (It’s not the definition that I think I know.)
What medication might be used to treat this? Scopolamine (a.k.a. Hyoscine)? Dramamine? These all have sleepiness, drowsiness, or dizziness as side-effects, so those aren’t good to have in your blood if you’re operating an aircraft anyway. Are there effective (or even somewhat-effective) meds for this, that would also be safe to use while flying?
I guess I had just never heard before that motion sickness is something that people are just born with.
I myself got sea-sick on a whale-watching trip some years ago, and took a Dramamine, and basically just slept for the rest of the trip. But I’ve never had a trace of a hint of motion sickness while flying, and I’m sure I’ve done enough lately (thermaling, turbulence, steep turns, stalls, incipient spins, spiral dive) to know if that was going to happen.
I’m guessing that if a doctor told him that he may have some actual condition beyond a predisposition for motion sickness. And no, vertigo and motion sickness are not the same thing, although the former often brings on the latter.
Vertigo occurs when what is seen is different from what the brain expects. As one gains experience in the airplane, one learns what to expect. When I learned aerobatics I had to work up to it. At first I could do only 15 minutes or so before reaching the point of airsickness. But as the maneuvers became familiar I could last longer. I’m told this is also why it’s much more common to experience motion sickness as a passenger, rather than the driver or pilot - when you are controlling the vehicle you have a much better idea of what to expect and when.
Also, I seem to recall that over the years NASA has pretty much given up trying to predict who will get space sick. Something like half of astronauts experience discomfort regardless of their background. Fighter pilots, whatever - some of them get sick and there’s no predicting it. Frank Borman, an Air Force pilot, had a hell of a bad time on Apollo 8. Jake Garn (a senator at the time of his space flight, but he had been a fighter pilot previously) was so far gone they named an informal airsickness scale after him. I mention this so that if you see the guy again you might tell him it’s not a failing.
My sister in law suffers from easy motion sickness. Has since childhood and she’s in her late 50s now. She’s hopeless on airplanes or boats unless loaded up on dramamine, and even then it’s 50/50 whether she’ll barf or not.
She’s not bad in cars now as long as she’s looking straight ahead or better yet doing the driving. Don’t ask her to look out the side and spot addresses on passing buildings unless you want to see her most recent meal.
She doesn’t have disturbance of balance. She can walk & run & jump just fine. But anything that’s dynamic or where the visuals don’t match what she’s doing with her body is bad news.
Docs have no idea why. But she’s not that rare a case they say. Any ENT will be familiar with the syndrome.
I too have occasional bouts of vertigo – very mild and very transient – but I’ve learned that there are very specific things I should consciously do to minimize, avoid, or overcome that. It’s never gotten to the point where I actually feel queasy or nauseated.
Y’all know the basic rule: Look out at the horizon, or at least out into the distance. There’s a bit more to it than that, which may be obvious, but instructors don’t mention it much: Also be sure to focus on what you see out there and don’t let it all become a blur.
There are also certain places to not look. During a steep turn, if I look out beyond a wing-tip (either at the ground or up into the sky), I get that disoriented feeling very quickly. Looking up into the sky when I can’t see the horizon (e.g., during stall entries) does it too. Looking at the instruments inside the cockpit for more than a brief glance will do it (especially during steep turns) – when I look out again, the brief moment until I get my eyes re-focused into the distance is dizzifying. Part of the solution is to simply get accustomed to being a bit dizzy sometimes and live with it. (Just watch those Olympic-grade ice skaters.)
My instructor from 40 years ago taught me very explicitly, specifically when we did spins. He had me look out at distant landmarks, focus on them, and call out their names as they went by. (We were doing full 2-turn spins.) We went out into the middle of the S. F. Bay for this, and he had me call out the names of the bay-shore cities as they went wheeling past. I haven’t forgotten that lesson to this day. Now, when doing steep thermaling, e.g., I always have that consciously in mind, and I pay specific attention to watching and focusing on all the things I see out there. I works. But I haven’t heard any of my instructors lately suggest this. They all say to keep looking out towards the horizon, but they don’t say specifically to focus on stuff out there and not let it become a blur.
I still have this crazy fantasy that I want to try aerobatics sometime, so it behooves me to get well accustomed to stuff like this.
As a student pilot and as a passenger as a child, I was taught many ways to avoid vertigo. what a danger it was and etc., etc …
"Long story " :: sniped ::
After a few minutes every time I go into instrument conditions I spin out left and down. My older sister would always go right and down.
I never had to worry about getting vertigo. I always did. I had to rely on the instruments. I eventually stopped holding my head crooked, stopped sweat, stopped having to fight my instinct to believe what my mind felt and go with what the sounds, instruments & experience said was happening. 
So I never had to worry about getting vertigo. I always had it instrument flying.
Saved a lot of worrying about having it sneaking up on me at a bad time. Many dead pilots said it would kill me one day. :eek: So far, so good.
“Tilt-A-Whirl” at the ‘Fair’ always makes me sick as a dog. Riding backward in anything, skating backward, water skiing backward, = sick, unable, furgetaboutit… 
The “gyros” (semi-circular canals actually) in your head are designed to handle some of the motions common in walking, running & jumping. They’re not nearly so good at pure 3D motion.
If you want an E-ticket ride some time sit in your plane’s seat going straight and level while the instructor flies. Put your chin in your chest and look at your lap. Have the instructor slowly & smoothly roll into a 60-ish degree level bank turn and hold it. After a full turn or so, have him roll sharply to wings level while you snap your head up to look straight out in front.
The 3D version of dizzy makes the ordinary 2D version seem like ordinary life. Your eyes may shut off completely for a few seconds. All you’ll “see” is colors. And qualitatively it doesn’t even feel like seeing at all. It’s some other undefinable sensation of sensing something somehow.
The point of that demo is that rotating your head or having the airplane roll or pitch, which also rotates your head, is inherently disorienting. For a non-aerobatic airplane, roll is the only angle rate you can get fast enough or sustained enough to much matter. Aggressive acro can add high pitch rates too.
When flying instruments, it’s important that you move your eyes, not your head, to the degree possible. And that any head motions be deliberate and coordinated with any airplane motions. Finish rolling out of the bank and *then *fiddle with a knob on the floor or overhead. Doing both at once can be a fatal mistake.
Your steep turns looking at wingtips are a soft version of my exercise. Next time try pointing your face to about 45 degrees off the nose before rolling into the turn and move your eyes from straight ahead to wingtip and back during the turn. You’ll probably have far less or even no spatial disorientation sensations.
See Bárány chair - Wikipedia for more.
@Gus: There’s never an instrument letdown or climbout involving maneuvering where we don’t feel that little tickle that stuff is getting weird. We get real good at working through it. We never get to not having it. **Richard **has said the same thing a time or three.
I’ve had all of maybe 10 minutes of under-the-hood training, 45-some years ago.
I’m not aware that student glider pilots get much, if any, specific training in dealing with any of those types of sensory illusions. We certainly don’t get any hood or foggle training, that I’ve ever heard of.
It would be difficult to offer very much of that stuff. Gliders are not typically equipped with turn-and-bank indicators, nor an artificial horizon. No gyro instruments. Perhaps it’s considered rather unimportant, as gliders are never operated (or shouldn’t be) in IMC conditions.
(ETA: I’ve noticed that a lot of two-place gliders have an inclinometer on the real instrument panel, but never on the front panel. Go figure. I think it’s because the rear yaw string tends to be rather insensitive.)
Still, ISTM that this would be good stuff for any pilot of any kind of aircraft to have some experience and training with. Some of those exercises like LSLGuy describes sound like they would be good training. But I haven’t heard of it being done with student glider pilots.
I’d be almost tempted to try some of that stuff myself after I solo. Now that really sounds foolish. I imagine such attempts at self-instruction could lead to some seriously crunchy experiences, certainly if one doesn’t get some suitable dual training first!
I realize this isn’t GA, but it seemed like the right place to share the Twitter conversation about Delta Flight 431, from NY to San Juan, Puerto Rico. I’d love to hear what some of our resident pilots think about making this trip. Would YOU have done it, were the choice entirely up to you?
News story here: http://miami.cbslocal.com/2017/09/06/hurricane-irma-delta-flight-puerto-rico/
And to think…
That flight was supported and made possible by the controllers, ground crew, and such, who didn’t get to be aboard but got left behind to their fates.
A hurricane/typhoon/tropical cyclone is just a weather pattern that has a lot of rain and wind. The intensity varies with distance from the centre as well as position relative to the hurricane’s direction of movement. For a hurricane like Irma, moving west and spinning anti-clockwise, the worst weather would be expected to be in the north west quadrant as this is where the rotational speed and linear movement of the hurricane are additive.
Whether or not it is a good idea to “land in a hurricane” depends on the actual conditions at the time. Flightaware shows the wind for Delta’s arrival as 330º at 19 knots gusting to 30 knots. There was a cloud base of 2200 feet with some lower patches at 1500 feet. There’s nothing special about this weather. If you were to show it to a crew and not mention anything about a hurricane they would shrug their shoulders and head off knowing that it was a bit windy but generally ok.
As a point of reference I happened to land at Sydney airport a couple of nights ago when the METAR was:
That’s wind from 290º at 33 knots gusting to 46 knots with clear skies and good visibility.
This was associated with no weather system in particular, it was just a windy night in Sydney. It is significantly worse than what the Delta crew flew in to.
So, my opinion is that it is a storm in a tea cup (heh) and if I was rostered to crew the flight I would have looked at the weather, made sure we had a suitable alternate airport, and headed out to give it a go.
Unfortunately “hurricane” is an emotive word, the general public know little about aviation or weather, and they have access to the internet that allows them to spread their ignorance far and wide.
As an aside, I overheard my neighbour talking recently. It was a clear day with good conditions for contrails and he’d looked up and noticed a contrail making a fairly sharp bend. He says, “look, the pilots were going the wrong way and the controller’s told him to turn around!” If he bothered to look up more often he’d realise that all flights turn like that just there as they fly over an en-route waypoint.
As **Richard **said. Move along, nothing to see here. You can also reasonably assume they had enough fuel to go someplace else if conditions had deteriorated faster than expected.
You may be surprised to know that an airline is real interested in not having an airplane stranded at an airport having a real hurricane and getting damaged. They’re far more interested in making sure every airplane is elsewhere before it gets too crappy and making sure all their portable equipment is safe inside a building. Meantime, a heck of a lot of people are relying on the airplane to arrive in the poor conditions and airlift them to safety.
The Miami area airports are presently planning on having few to no arrivals after dusk on Fri, but lots of departures through midafternoon Saturday. With the goal to leave zero flyable airplanes left behind and for every plane to leave with a full load of people. Then to let all the ground staff of all sorts bail out for home before it gets too exciting. As well, we’re working to ensure no itinerant crews are left in town. instead they’ll be lifted out also and local crews will take the jets.
In the last hurricane (Matthew that ended up missing us at the last minute) I got caught in that, so the last thing I did after all my home & family prep was leave them all behind, drive to work, secure my car as best I could, then drive a jet and a couple hundred people to safety in NYC. Sorta sucks to abandon your family to their fate.
‘Window shopping’, as I do, I saw a Cessna 172RG Cutlass for sale. I always wonder, ‘What’s the point?’ The 177RG Cardinal seems to fit the niche, and while the 182 or 182RG Skylane is more expensive to operate, it seems to fill the need for higher performance than a ‘straight-leg’ 172 better than a retractable 172. A Cardinal RG, from the numbers I see, is a little bit faster than a straight-leg Skylane, and has a less expensive to operate engine. One of the ‘complaints’ I’ve read about the Cardinal, which was supposed to replace the Skyhawk and was originally going to be called the 172J, was that it didn’t fly like a Skyhawk. I can see that pilots that like the way a Skyhawk handles would like to have a Skyhawk with retractable gear. But it seems like the faster Cardinal RG or Skylane would be a more practical choice.
I understood the target market for the 172RG was flight schools that offered Commercial training. For the test, you need a plane with variable-pitch prop, flaps, and retractable gear, and the 172RG was both cheaper and more familiar to students than the 182RG.
The Cardinal looks faster than the Skyhawk, and has better visibility, but isn’t any faster. The wing is thicker so it can contain the stiffer spar it needs with no struts, and is therefore draggier. The more-forward seating position moves the CG forward, so more tail downforce is needed, again making more drag.
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That makes sense. Thanks.
According to this page, the Cardinal RG cruises at 148 kts (170 mph). A Skyhawk tops out at 132 kts (140 mph). A straight-leg Skylane cruises at 140 kts (162 mph) and tops out at 147 kts (170 mph).