Flying Slow

Have you ever really taken your aircraft to the bottom edges of its
flight ability and airspeed, and flown it with any degree of precision
and of more than just a few moments/minutes? Are you comfortable doing
it on the edge or nibble of a stall? Can you do it while holding
altitude and desired headings within reasonable limits - depending on
your experience?
When is the last time you did it just to sharpen your skills without
prompting by a CFI in the next seat? When is the last time you spent
some diligent time doing stalls and the full range of them with your
aircraft? Are you honestly comfortable with your abilities? I know I
have to think about it every time I go fly and always find some fault
with my performance.
In a previous post it appeared I aggravated some pilots or CFI's with
saying I felt many pilots didn't know how to fly slowly these days. I
have seen a slow errosion of what used to be basic pilot skills and
level of performance with too many pilots compared with acceptable
standards not that many years ago. Now if that won't open a bucket of
worms I'll be surprised.
Fact is, just making the FAA minimums doesn't necessarily make you safe
or even a good pilot.
Care to weigh in on the issues?
I'll be polite in my responses in accordance to the way they are
presented to me. No axe to grind, no ego to inflate (its big enough
already thank you) just a sincere desire to make pilots think a little
more about what they are doing when they go flying. You need to make
your own mistakes to hopefully learn from them and avoid repetition.
Ol Shy & Bashful

..... and have you ever done it in an airplane without a stall warning
indicator or an airspeed indicator that drops to 0 before your wing quits
flying?

Jim

wrote in message
oups.com...
Have you ever really taken your aircraft to the bottom edges of its
flight ability and airspeed, and flown it with any degree of precision
and of more than just a few moments/minutes? Are you comfortable doing
it on the edge or nibble of a stall? Can you do it while holding
altitude and desired headings within reasonable limits - depending on
your experience?

wrote in message
oups.com...
Have you ever really taken your aircraft to the bottom edges of its
flight ability and airspeed, and flown it with any degree of precision
and of more than just a few moments/minutes? Are you comfortable doing
it on the edge or nibble of a stall? Can you do it while holding
altitude and desired headings within reasonable limits - depending on
your experience?
When is the last time you did it just to sharpen your skills without
prompting by a CFI in the next seat? When is the last time you spent
some diligent time doing stalls and the full range of them with your
aircraft? Are you honestly comfortable with your abilities? I know I
have to think about it every time I go fly and always find some fault
with my performance.
In a previous post it appeared I aggravated some pilots or CFI's with
saying I felt many pilots didn't know how to fly slowly these days. I
have seen a slow errosion of what used to be basic pilot skills and
level of performance with too many pilots compared with acceptable
standards not that many years ago. Now if that won't open a bucket of
worms I'll be surprised.
Fact is, just making the FAA minimums doesn't necessarily make you
safe
or even a good pilot.
Care to weigh in on the issues?
I'll be polite in my responses in accordance to the way they are
presented to me. No axe to grind, no ego to inflate (its big enough
already thank you) just a sincere desire to make pilots think a little
more about what they are doing when they go flying. You need to make
your own mistakes to hopefully learn from them and avoid repetition.
Ol Shy & Bashful

I would not have posted in this thread had you not referenced the other
thread peripherally in your comments.

Your points are well taken, and have validity. It's true that there are
many pilots out here who don't spend nearly enough time in the left
corner of the envelope, and doing so would make them much safer pilots.
I see only one difference between my approach to flying and what you
have stated here.
I have a problem with your sentence as follows;
"You need to make your own mistakes to hopefully learn from them and
avoid repetition."
In my end of the business thinking like this will kill you.
It's for this reason that I never taught my students, both primary and
aerobatic, to think this way.
Although it's fine to learn from a mistake, and by all means, pilots
should learn from mistakes if they live through that mistake, but my
thinking on this leans heavily toward the prevention of mistakes, rather
than learning from them.
Most good pilots I know have no problem understanding that time spent in
the left corner is time well spent, and most CFI's doing the job
properly spend plenty of time exploring slow flight and flight at and
near CLmax with their students. This is especially true of aerobatic
instructors.
Plainly put, if instructors are not doing this, they are not doing the
job properly.
It behooves all pilots to stay current by practicing flight in the left
corner, and what you have said about that is highly relevant to flight
safety.
Dudley Henriques
International Fighter Pilots Fellowship
Commercial Pilot/CFI Retired
for private email; make necessary changes between ( )
dhenriques(at)(delete all this)earthlink(dot)net

On 14 Jan 2005 08:21:11 -0800, wrote in
.com::

When is the last time you did it just to sharpen your skills without
prompting by a CFI in the next seat?

Here's a little confession/story.

After departing in a hurry on evening in a rush to make it back to the
home field before the sun sank below the Pacific, I discovered that
I'd failed to latch the door on the trusty old PA28. I was busy
following departure vectors, altitude restrictions and handoffs during
which I tried several times to get the door latched without success.
Part of the problem was the cabin vents were open, and the air was
exiting through the trailing door's 2" gap. It was the inside
pressure that prevented me from successfully latching the door in
flight, but I was too busy to realize that.

The noise of the slipstream rushing by at 100 mph was so loud, that I
had difficulty hearing ATC instructions, and it was very distracting.
When ATC finally assigned a higher altitude, I pulled up into slow
flight, and lowered the flaps, then trimmed for 50 knots. At the
reduced speed it was easy to get the door latches fastened.

So slow flight is useful for things beside landing and photographic
missions.

Jim
A lot of my flying is just as you describe it. I frequently show
students how to fly with zero indicated and discuss the reasons for it.
When they get it figured out they are a lot more relaxed flying in that
slow speed regime and pay more attention to other clues. Not uncommon
to have them do it under the hood as well.
There are no great mysteries about it all, or there shouldn't be. When
I fly with low time CFI's I often challenge them to show me precision
maneuvers with zero IAS and maintain standards. It helps them to see a
different level of performance and increased standards that many have
not been exposed to.
Take it a step further, while crop dusting, in the turns you are
frequently very deep in the stall region to the point the stall warning
is always going off. A lot of the pilots I have worked with just turn
it off so they aren't distracted by it and simpy fly the airplane by
feel. If that can be done safely by hundreds if not thousands of spray
pilots, why shouldn't that knowledge and ability be passed along as a
part of flight training? Please note: I am not saying it should be done
all the time but part of training so they can see how it can be
accomplished and safely.
I know of a number of fatal accidents that happened because a pilot
lost his IAS indications and crashed. That should never have happened
with proper training.
Were you referring to something specific? I'd enjoy an honest exchange
of information and experience.
Cheers
Rocky aka Ol Shy & Bashful

Dudley
Thank you for your reply. On the issue of making mistakes....if a pilot
never makes one, what have they learned that will take care of them
when the inevitable mistake occurs?
Certainly our goal is to show pilots how to avoid mistakes but I can't
divorce myself from the knowledge I learned from all those I have made.
How to get out again safely is the goal isn't it?
Cheers
Rocky

Jim Burns wrote:
.... and have you ever done it in an airplane without a stall warning
indicator or an airspeed indicator that drops to 0 before your wing quits
flying?

If the stall warning is of any use to you, you are not flying slow
enough. You need to be below the stall warning. Same for airspeed,
what possible use could the ASI be to sit there and hang on the prop?
All your indications come thru your ass on this one.

The stall warning light in our Aztec is positioned right behind the yoke and
all but impossible to see during landing, so we don't really pay much
attention to it or bother to reposition ourselves so it is visible. The
buffet on the tail when approaching a stall is quite pronounced and easily
felt through the yoke and the seat of your pants. We keep our eyes outside
and concentrate on the power settings and the landing approach,
crosschecking the airspeed occasionally. My experience with airplanes
either without stall warning indicators or airspeed indicators that drop to
0 in slow flight, thus far, has been limited to a C170B and a SuperCub.
Both of which are very easy to fly by feel. I think they teach you to keep
your eyes out the windows instead of peeled on the instruments. Another
common airplane that is fun and highly maneuverable in slow flight is a
C182RG. I think the full flap landing configuration stall speed is 37kts,
but it won't indicate that correctly so the airspeed indicator isn't where
you want your eyes.
Jim

It would seem to me, that as in anything we wish to be great at, practicing
ANY aspect of flying that you normally don't encounter or do regularly improves
your overall knowledge and skills.
"Proficient" and "Expert" are certainly not the same.

Besides "learning to fly", I play guitar and other instruments.
To become better at playing guitar, I often practice things that aren't
really played in songs when I play a gig. What it does is make me better
at many other things - "mastering" the guitar may be impossible to
a part-time guitar player like me, but pushing myself to do things I might
not has certainly helped me play better.

Whether it is physical or mental, that sort of discipline is, in my opinion, an
outstanding trait and shows a true desire to be as good as you can be.

Now, maybe there are those who don't want tor need to be that good, but "need"
is something you never really know about.

Anectodally, Israeli AF pilots learn about systems and engineering of their jets and planes
to better understand the entire aspect of flying. In a marginally humerous story (from
"Raid on the Sun"), when the Israeli's were learning the F-16 at Hill AFB in Ogen Utah,
they asled so many engineering and systems questions, some suspected them of attempted
espionage, when in fact they were literally just doing things the "way they learned to".
This helped them later modify and affect the Falcons for their raid on the Iraqi nuclear plant.
Interestingly enough, many of their question could not be answered by the USAF pilots and
trainers, and ended up learning a lot of important aspects of the F-16 from the Israelis.
The analogy? Is there such a things as "over preparation"?
Were they better pilots for this. I'd argue yes.

And, in the end, when you're in a commercial plane or in another situation where your
life is in someone else's hands, would you want that pilot to be "proficient", or possibly
"over qualified".

That's my 2 cents . . .

Now I expect people (as usual) to poke holes in everyrthing I wrote, according to the unwritten
Newsgroup laws that exist somewhere. and somehow, someone is going to take it personally
and begin to flame me unconditionally, whereby someone will rise up in my defense and create
a 3-month long posting under this Subject that, in the end, results in life-long animosity between
otherwise respectable people who have a lot in common - ha ha!

I often like to put the plane into a sharp heawind and slow it to MCA.
If the wind is right, you can get the plan to fly backward. That's
right, negative ground speed.