Angle of attack

The threads on this subject has uncovered something that gives me chills.

Internationaly, gliding has an abominable safety record. Many fatal
accidents have as their root cause, failure by the pilot to maintain flying
speed or, stated more directly, control his angle of attack. Clearly, based
on these r.a.s threads on the subject, some do not understand AOA in some
fundamental way and that's chilling.

Controlling airspeed is simply not good enough - it's too abstract, too easy
to triviallize, too easy to misunderstand the significance of it.

Safety committees and organizations need to take this to hart. Here is a
root cause of our most dangerous accidents. The awareness of and
understanding of AOA has somehow slipped through the cracks. Slay this
dragon, and our accident numbers will look far better.

If the concept and practice of controlling angle of attack is not absolutely
ingrained in a pilot, the probability of an accident is non-trivial - in
fact, sooner or later, it's a near certainty. Awareness of AOA should never
be far from a pilots consiousness.

Controlling angle of attack is so fundamental to being a pilot that it's
staggering to think that it's possible to become one without it being
hammered into them until it's as instinctive as walking. Flying an aircraft
without this level of understanding is like being the captain of a ship
without understanding what makes it float.

As pilots, we do not fly the cockpit, the fuselage or the empenage - we fly
the wing. The wing is really the only thing that does fly, the rest is just
baggage.

Read Jim Webb's truly excellent book "Fly the wing".
http://www.amazon.com/Fly-Wing-James-Webb/dp/0813805414

Or equally good, Wolfgang Langewiesche's "Stick and Rudder". You can read
it free on line at Google Books.

Read these books - please! There is simply no subject in aviation that is
more fundamental or important to your survival.

Bill Daniels