Yesterday was all about checking out the Goldfish. From level flight, pitch the nose down 45 degrees. From there, pull through 5/8’s of a loop so that you stop the looping segment 45 degrees nose down again, but inverted. Now, roll upright,
keep going 45 degrees down for a second and then pull the nose back up to the horizon. Sounds easy enough right? First off, there is a serious amount of G in this figure. A normal loop starts from level flight. As soon as you pull into it you are going to start losing energy and you gradually ease off the g-load as you approach inverted and float gently, ever so gently over the top. Then of course you squeeze like hell through the bottom of the loop until you are back where you started. The goldfish has that same beginning g-load EXCEPT you aren’t starting from level! You aren’t even close to level. AND you are pointing at the ground when you start so you aren’t going to start easing off the g for a little bit longer than usual. Why is this important? Because after 4 Goldfish’s I was beat. I started to get some significant gray out (the precursor to black out) eventually so the flight was cut short. In the video I’ll post here this week you’ll see me dish out of the goldfish really early. That was due to a pretty good gray moment. In the meantime, to see what I mean about this whole gray out business, Red Bull put together this great vid.
Today’s flight was focused on looking at a humpty. Sounds fun don’t it? The humpty (or English Bunt depending on who you ask) is a vertical line up, a half loop, and a vertical line down. However you get to that line (pulling positive G’s or pushing Negative), do the loop (positive or negative again), and then get back to level are all variables. We speak of the flavor of the humpty in those respects; a pull-pull-pull humpty is a pull up, pull over the top, and then a pull back to level. I did some pull-pull-pull’s which I had never done before and I’ll be damned if those aren’t fun!
This got me thinking though. I read that a pull-pull-pull is the same mechanics as a pull-push-pull humpty just a push over the top instead of a pull. Only thing is I haven’t done any big outside push figures in the Decathlon. Well I had to fix that. I started by rolling inverted, letting the nose come down a bit to build up some airspeed before pushing as hard as I could will myself, bringing the nose up to about 45 –60 degrees nose up. I got the G-meter pegged at –2.5 G’s doing that. I set up for the humpty and went for it. The pull to vertical is fine but you start the push and things get interesting. The nose comes back to the horizon, where you spend hours upon hours of flying all through your basic training but this time you’re not staying there. No, you have 90 degrees of more of pitch change to go. It’s an interesting moment. But, you go for it. Grab the stick and pushpushpushpushpush until you are going STRAIGHT AT THE GROUND. While going STRAIGHT AT THE GROUND you have to relax. Count to 3…..1……2…….3…PULLLLLLL back up to level. Congratulations, you just flew a humpty.
As you can tell, I feel like $1,000,000 or more. Next time I go out I’ll have to take some video of the humpty, especially the push over the top because it is something to see. When I get the video of the goldfish flying edited up I’ll post it in just a few days. Thanks for reading everyone!
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