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
Chris, I really enjoy your blog here, as I would someday like to follow your path. I have a great book you'd definitely enjoy, called "The Skies Over Rhinebeck" by Richard King, and it has many great true stories in it, but one particularly intriguing story about trying to teach himself to do rolls in his recently purchased tiger moth. I'll try to remember to bring it in next time I'm in Horizon. best of luck training for the competition circuit!
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