My Ground Loop
"R.W. Behan" wrote in message So did you three-point the Twin?
Yes
As a Navy aircraft mechanic and sometimes
"plane captain" on the Twin--the Navy designation was "SNB"--I had to tend
to hungover BOQ pilots, driving around the sky until it was time for the
skipper, now well rested, to land the plane. I never saw a 3-point
landing
made by the SNB. But watching them land, level, on the mains, it always
was
a bit dicey to see those struts wobble fore and aft--almost as if the
airplane was walking, not rolling, down the runway.
We had an SNB-5 in our stable, but it had been converted to a tricycle after
the Navy released it. It flew a little different from other Twin Beeches. It
didn't like to go slow. If I got below 110mph on final, it would drop like a
rock. It would stall without much buffet too. I gave a checkride to 20,000
hour Beech pilot in it and it's characteristics surprised him while on
final. He had to cob a bunch of throttle to recover. The only thing I can
attribute it to is that the civilian Twin Beeches had a different horizontal
stabilizer incidence angle than the military version and that maybe this
airplane wasn't set to the civilian specification.
D.
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