Flaps and V-Tails of Death

Eric Greenwell wrote:

JJ Sinclair wrote:

OK, It's winter time and I'm bored, so let me throw my 2 cents in here. The
only flight I ever had in a ship with flaps only was in a PIK-20B. It was a
test flight after a broken fuselage. Things went well until it got time to
land. I rolled in 45 degrees of flaps and everything looked just about right.
Came over the fence at 50 knots and waited for her to settle down. I waited and
waited and waited. By now I had floated down most of the 4000 foot runway and
I'm still floating about 1 foot off the ground. What do I do? Musn't dump the
flaps or she will drop like a stone, right? Finally got the wheel on the ground
and jumped on the brake.
That night I read the flight manual and it said to slowely crank off the flaps
in this situation. I think the flaps only ships are OK, but require a different
set of skills that must be mastered. Probably not for the low time pilot or
those who don't read the flight manual before flight. My real problem was being
about 5 knots too fast. Proper speed control is critical.

So I'm told. Our club had a member from Long Island, where the club
there had a 1-35. He said they got rid of it after a while because they
got tired of pulling it out of the weeds at the end. Without a landing
flap equipped two seater, they weren't able to train their low time
pilots well enough to land it properly. I think there would be a lot
more acceptance of HP style flaps if we had two seaters to train in.


Flaps only ships are very rare in France and kowledge about their handling
is probably even more rare. I wonder how one can handle in such a ship what
is described in our flight Bible, the "blue book" (Manuel du pilote Vol a Voile,
i.e. glider pilot's manual) as the 3 most common mistakes when landing:
1) flare to high; 2) flare with excessive back stick action; 3) bounce.
In this 3 cases the glider comes a few feet above the ground at a speed
just marginally above stall speed and quickly decaying due to the drag of
open airbrakes. The immediate action to avoid that the glider falls on
the ground like a stone in the following seconds is to retract the air-brakes,
so that the drag stops killing your speed and you regain some lift, then
try to land better ahead. But what can you do with no air-brakes?