Setting up a practice session

One of the big challenges of flying acro in Southern New England is simply finding the area to fly! There are some regulations set by the FAA that you have to abide by. Sure you could go out and loop and roll where ever you want, plenty of people do but I want to have a long career flying and you never know who is watching you from the ground. Here is what I have to deal with:

“No person may operate an aircraft in aerobatic flight --
(a) Over any congested area of a city, town, or settlement;
(b) Over an open air assembly of persons;
(c) Within the lateral boundaries of the surface areas of Class B, Class C, Class D, or Class E airspace designated for an airport;
(d) Within 4 nautical miles of the center line of any Federal airway;
(e) Below an altitude of 1,500 feet above the surface; or
(f) When flight visibility is less than 3 statute miles.”

To show you what this means I’m posting a photo of a chart I marked up showing all the legal and illegal airspace that I’m surrounded by. Pink highlighted areas are happy areas (no jokes please.). Black crossed out areas are license-revocation areas. (Picture to be posted tonight!!!)

In addition, I generally don’t want to keep going back to one spot. I don’t want to annoy the people below me and I don’t want to get too used to the same visual cues. Different areas are going to look different and offer different challenges. Imagine training for a marathon but only running laps on a track. You show up for the marathon and its not on a track; its on roads and has hills and all sorts of stuff you haven’t dealt with before. AND (I’m on a roll here eh?) To get to a practice area I have to fly some 20 miles in any direction. I want to find an intermediary airport where I can relax in between without flying all the way back to PVD.

I’m going to try an area up by Hopedale, MA tomorrow. It’s in the happy pink area and has a fantastic intersection of two power lines that is almost perfectly 3300 feet. That’s the size of an aerobatic competition box so I’ll have some awesome visual references. I could either land at Hopedale or head down to North Central which is only a few miles away. I know that North Central has an indoor lounge so I’ll probably head there since the temps aren’t going to be all that high.

I’ll be working on the clover again. I’ve done reading on the figure and I was right about some things, a little off about others. The most interesting thing I read though was from Alan Cassidy. He writes in his book “Better Aerobatics” that the loop will usually lose energy. You should finish the loop slower than you started. What? Really? In all my years of flying and all the instructors that I’ve looped with I don’t remember hearing that. I’m going to keep flying the loops the same way I always have abiding by the “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” mantra. I’ll be able to put it all together in the confines of a box for the first time. Tomorrow morning cannot come fast enough.