flaps

Spend an hour or two landing on the numbers with the stall horn squalling.

It's funny how much easier this was to do when I was renting
airplanes. Heck, I'd routinely drag it in at minimum forward air
speed and plunk it on the numbers, just to see how short I could land.

When you own an aircraft -- especially one with a big, heavy 6-
cylinder engine that is slightly nose-heavy -- you think twice before
"practicing" such things. Tires, struts, brakes, firewalls, props,
and engines all become HUGE impediments to "practicing" landings with
the stall horn squalling, since you're paying for them all.

This post, IMHO, above all else, is a real tribute to the utility of
manual, Johnson-bar flap actuators. Hard to miss when THOSE don't
work.

:-)
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"

On Jul 10, 3:38 pm, Jay Honeck wrote:
Spend an hour or two landing on the numbers with the stall horn squalling.

It's funny how much easier this was to do when I was renting
airplanes. Heck, I'd routinely drag it in at minimum forward air
speed and plunk it on the numbers, just to see how short I could land.

When you own an aircraft -- especially one with a big, heavy 6-
cylinder engine that is slightly nose-heavy -- you think twice before
"practicing" such things. Tires, struts, brakes, firewalls, props,
and engines all become HUGE impediments to "practicing" landings with
the stall horn squalling, since you're paying for them all.


Jay,
I fly my own plane the same way that I flew rental planes. Every
so often, Rick and I would try to do some basic maneuvers such as slow
flight, steep turns, stalls, soft and short field landings. We have
the tires and brakes replaced about every 250 or so hours. I have no
ideas how much money we would have saved if we had 'babied' our plane.
IMHO, being proficient at short field landings may save my skin
someday and no amount of money is worth my life.

Hai Longworth

I fly my own plane the same way that I flew rental planes. Every
so often, Rick and I would try to do some basic maneuvers such as slow
flight, steep turns, stalls, soft and short field landings. We have
the tires and brakes replaced about every 250 or so hours. I have no
ideas how much money we would have saved if we had 'babied' our plane.
IMHO, being proficient at short field landings may save my skin
someday and no amount of money is worth my life.

Oh, we practice all the other stuff -- but short-short-short field
landings are NOT one of them. Botching a power-off, let's-plant-it-on-
the-numbers landing is just too potentially expensive, since Atlas'
nose will slam down like Thor's hammer if you let him get too slow.

Which isn't to say we shy away from short fields. We routinely fly
into 2200 foot grass strips, so we're fairly proficient at it.
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"

Jay Honeck wrote:



Which isn't to say we shy away from short fields. We routinely fly
into 2200 foot grass strips, so we're fairly proficient at it.

You should have no problem using a strip half that length with two of
you on board. Is your nosewheel/strut/firewall that delicate? That's
not Pipers reputation, that's Cessna's. Piper's rep is building planes
that are overweight, not fragile.

"
You should have no problem using a strip half that length with two of you
on board. Is your nosewheel/strut/firewall that delicate? That's not
Pipers reputation, that's Cessna's. Piper's rep is building planes that
are overweight, not fragile.


No. The Cherokees have MUCH more fragile landing gear. Not only that but
they are pushed through the wing so that repair is impractical. You'll NEVER
see a Cherokee SIX with 30,000 hours on it, like most Cessna 207s in Alaska.

Karl

Longworth wrote:
I fly my own plane the same way that I flew rental planes. Every
so often, Rick and I would try to do some basic maneuvers such as slow
flight, steep turns, stalls, soft and short field landings. We have
the tires and brakes replaced about every 250 or so hours. I have no
ideas how much money we would have saved if we had 'babied' our plane.
IMHO, being proficient at short field landings may save my skin
someday and no amount of money is worth my life.

Hai Longworth


Couldn't have said it better myself.

Jay Honeck wrote:
Spend an hour or two landing on the numbers with the stall horn squalling.

It's funny how much easier this was to do when I was renting
airplanes. Heck, I'd routinely drag it in at minimum forward air
speed and plunk it on the numbers, just to see how short I could land.

When you own an aircraft -- especially one with a big, heavy 6-
cylinder engine that is slightly nose-heavy -- you think twice before
"practicing" such things. Tires, struts, brakes, firewalls, props,
and engines all become HUGE impediments to "practicing" landings with
the stall horn squalling, since you're paying for them all.

I believe my 182 had a similarly sized engine to your Piper and I always
landed as close to full-stall as I could get. If you do it all the
time, then you get to where it works pretty much all the time. And
landing this way SAVES on tires and brakes and, done properly, has no
affect on struts, firewalls, prop or engine.


This post, IMHO, above all else, is a real tribute to the utility of
manual, Johnson-bar flap actuators. Hard to miss when THOSE don't
work.

It is hard to miss Cessna flaps either. I have to admit to wondering
where Kobra mind was during that landing. Full flaps in any Cessna I've
flown is simply hard to ignore, but I haven't flown a 177.

Matt

It is hard to miss Cessna flaps either. I have to admit to wondering
where Kobra mind was during that landing. Full flaps in any Cessna I've
flown is simply hard to ignore, but I haven't flown a 177.

Matt,

Yes, you are correct, when the flaps DO deploy it is noticeable. The flaps
on the 177 are large and effective. It's when they DON'T deploy that it can
get past you unnoticed in a busy cockpit. How many times have you flow a
Cessna that the flaps failed to set? Probably never. So most of the
readers here have no idea how they would or wouldn't notice the failure.

If I was a CFI I think I might occasionally pull the flap breaker and see
how many students catch the situation and at what point.

AAMOF I will throw that out there to the CFI's...let's do an experiment.
Pull the breaker when the student isn't looking and have them fly the
pattern for a landing. Post the results on how many did and didn't
understand the problem. If they catch it, at what point did they realize
that no flaps were out? I'd be interested in the results.

Post the results here under this post "flaps".

Kobra

Kobra wrote:
It is hard to miss Cessna flaps either. I have to admit to wondering
where Kobra mind was during that landing. Full flaps in any Cessna I've
flown is simply hard to ignore, but I haven't flown a 177.

Matt,

Yes, you are correct, when the flaps DO deploy it is noticeable. The flaps
on the 177 are large and effective. It's when they DON'T deploy that it can
get past you unnoticed in a busy cockpit. How many times have you flow a
Cessna that the flaps failed to set? Probably never. So most of the
readers here have no idea how they would or wouldn't notice the failure.

Just once, but I noticed it instantly, and I was already pretty busy
flying an instrument approach into OSH of all places after having lost
my alternator. When I noticed the alternator light come on about 20
miles out, I turned off everything but one navcomm and the transponder.
However, once on short final, the old habit kicked in and I put the
flaps down even though I was on battery power alone at that point. The
flaps made it about 5 degrees before the battery gave up the ghost
completely. I said "crap" and then proceeded to land the airplane. No
big deal and it was instantly obvious that the flaps hadn't deployed
even with my mind a little preoccupied.

Matt

Matt Whiting wrote:

Just once, but I noticed it instantly, and I was already pretty busy
flying an instrument approach into OSH of all places after having lost
my alternator. When I noticed the alternator light come on about 20
miles out, I turned off everything but one navcomm and the transponder.
However, once on short final, the old habit kicked in and I put the
flaps down even though I was on battery power alone at that point.

It's amazing how that works, isn't it?

Years ago, when I was working on my instrument rating, my instructor and I
had just taken off on a night IFR flight and were having trouble checking
in with NY Departure. The radio's were scratchy and they weren't getting
our xponder, when we noticed the panel lights dim. We told NY we were
returning home.

On the short flight there, we discussed the idea that we might have enough
battery to get the flaps down and not enough to get them back up if we
needed to go around. We decided to do a no-flap landing.

Exactly the same thing happened that you described -- habit kicked in and
without even realizing what I was doing, I reached out and put the first 10
degrees of flaps in on downwind. It's just hard to break the habit.