Practice flight 1/23/10

I tell all of our students the same thing.  There is no such thing as a bad flight.  There are flights that are fun, and there are those flights where you learn a whole lot.  I just had one of the latter. 

I briefed the flight wanting to work on not pinching my loops and taking a first look at the hammerhead in this year’s sportsman sequence.  What makes this hammerhead a little special is that it has a 1/4 roll on the vertical downline, something I have never done in the D. 

After a few quick aileron rolls to get warmed up I set up for some loops.  They felt lazy over the top.  I felt like my nose was just falling through the inverted and I was pinching it quite severely.  The only good thing was that I was coming out of the loop at exactly the airspeed and altitude I wanted.  I was only pulling 3.6g’s during the loops but even after only a few minutes I was starting to feel tired.   

Then it was time for the hammers.  This has always been my favorite figure to go fly.  One thing that was making this flight difficult was that the sun was positioned low on the horizon; bright as hell; and perfectly off the end of the beach I was using as a line.  This was forcing me to set up on unfamiliar lines and out over the water so that I at least had some references to find when I was pulling back to level. 

This, I quickly learned, is a bad idea.  Trying to determine how vertical you are when you are out over the water is like trying to bake a cake without any measuring cups.  You have no idea how much to put in (or in this case, just how you are oriented).  What’s worse is with any little bit of deviation from the vertical, the 1/4 roll will only exaggerate that deviation and send you way off from where you wanted to go.  AND…this is about where I started laughing at the whole situation, when you start the downline you have such minimal airspeed that you put in your ailerons for the roll and the plane doesn’t want to go anywhere!  Who shut off the controls?!?!?! 

Okay so what did I learn?

1)    I am out of shape and need to get back to the gym.  There is no reason that I should be that tired after that short a practice. 

2)    Find a better practice area.  Out over the water is safe with the landing spots right there but it makes for a horrible area for ground references. 

3)    I need to get better at relaxing through the figures.  I can feel myself rushing.  This cuts down on the time I have to see what is wrong and take appropriate action to fix it. 

 

  

Keep on rollin' rollin' rollin'

Imagine learning baseball for the first time.  Do you start with hitting?  What about throwing.  If you are going to learn how to throw you better learn how to catch.  What about baserunning?  Keeping score?  Bunting; hitting the cut off man; turning a double play; pitching; throwing a curve ball or a knuckler; how to fit an entire bag of big-league chew in your mouth.  There are endless things to learn and to practice and learn.  But where do you start?    

Figuring out what to practice first is a bit of a tricky thing.  There is a lot more to this “flying upside down” than most people realize.  The pros make it look easy…kind of.  There are the figures, presentation, placement in the box, wind correction, sequencing…it goes on and on not unlike baseball.

At this point my practices are concentrating on the individual figures.  I’m going back to the basics to get those as solid as possible.  There are a few key maneuvers that are the basis for everything in acro; the loop, the roll, and the spin.  Above all others, the roll is the toughest one to perfect.  It is not a simple act of moving the stick to one side and watching the world go around.  It’s the airplane version of rubbing your stomach and patting your head at the same time. 

I was trying out a new technique going through the roll.  Normally, as you reach the first 90 degrees of roll you have to feed in top rudder to keep the nose moving up.  In a roll to the left this would mean right rudder.  Left stick + right rudder = cross controlled = slowed roll rate.  I was shown doing the same roll but leaving the rudder alone until the second knife edge on the roll.  You avoid the cross control and have an easier time maintaining the same roll rate throughout the roll.  I guess it works but I’m having to push much much harder as I go inverted to keep the nose up.  The best I could do was keep my altitude loss to 100 feet.  Next time I go out I have to go hang upside down for awhile and burn the image of what level inverted looks like in the D.  It is one hell of a push.  I am real curious to see how this version of the slow roll is critiqued.       

 

Todays flight: 

1 hour 12 minutes. 

Decathlon N317SD

PVD local

Cleared to go

Welcome to the very first entry of Inverted Journey.  The goal of the site is to bring you along for the ride as I push towards a career as an aerobatic competitor and airshow performer. 

My career is in its infancy.  In fact I wouldn’t even call it a career just yet.  It’s out there looming on the horizon but I’ve got a long, long way to go.  At some point I’m sure I’ll write about my backstory; what I’ve done so far and how I went about getting the training that I have received but I’ll save that for a rainy day (which at the moment seem to be a-plenty.) 

 So who am I?  Chris Porter.  Commercial Pilot.  Certified Flight Instructor.  Manager of a flight school.  Airshow hopeful.  Airshow determined.  I’m 28 years old.  I fly a 1997 American Champion Super Decathlon based out of T.F. Green Airport in Warwick, RI (KPVD).  I've wanted to be an airshow pilot for as long as I can remember and am putting it all on the line to get there.  

 For years now, I’ve been watching the likes of Sean D. Tucker, Mike Goulian, and Patty Wagstaff.  I’ve always asked myself “how did they get to be able to do that?”  Recently I found myself on the receiving end of that very same question when some students found out that I go out and fly aerobatics.  It took me by surprise.  I suppose sometimes you don’t realize just how far along you are until you start to get people coming up behind you in trail.  I won’t lie.  It felt pretty good.  Still, looking ahead at how far I have to go it can feel like an insurmountable task.  

I’m inviting you along for the ride to see the successes, potentially stunning failures and the financial, personal, professional and whatever other problems/decisions I am faced with along the way.  I have to add that this website will not be a “how to fly aerobatics” website.  There is no way someone can safely learn to do this stuff simply by reading or watching a video.  There is no substitute for good instruction so, and I’m sure this the first of many times I will say this but DO NOT try anything you see me do on this site without obtaining proper instruction from a qualified flight instructor in an airplane that is designed for aerobatics. 

So here we go.