Thursday, June 15, 2006
PAs
Well for two glorious days, I was really having a good time flying. I started precision aerobatics or PAs for short. This is real air show stuff; split-s, immelman, half cuban eight, barrel rolls, loops, all kinds of good stuff! Then the Navy decided to screw me over once again, but I'll get back to that.
I have been looking forward to PAs ever since I found out that we do PAs in Primary. Some of my friends (mostly squids) don't like PAs, they just get through them, but I was psyched to start flipping the horizon.
The first flight was on Monday with Captain Owen, who most people love flying with. He's laid back and likes flying. He's just a generally happy guy. Our brief went pretty well, he wasn't really too interested in briefing, he wanted to go fly.
For the first flight, we did aileron rolls, barrel rolls, loops, and wingovers. Pretty benign stuff, but still fun.
An aileron roll is just like you see them do all the time in Top Gun. You jam the stick all the way to the left or right and the plane flips over. It's a good time but has not real tactical application. The T-34 rolls pretty fast, but it's not going to bounce your head off the canopy or anything. Mostly it's just fun to watch the world spin by.
The barrel roll is probably one of the most misunderstood maneuvers. Many people think that a barrel roll is an aileron roll but it's not. It helps to imagine a barrel in the sky that the plane is going to fly around. To do a barrel roll you pull up on the stick until your nose is about thirty degrees nose up and then you start to roll. You continue to roll and pull until your nose is pointed 90 degrees away from your original heading and you are completely inverted. Continue the pull and roll and you come out exactly where you started, on the same heading and airspeed. One of the coolest things about the barrel roll is that when properly executed, you feel no negative Gs even when you're inverted. You are firmly planted in the seat at all times.
The wingover is just a quick way to change directions without losing airspeed. Imagine one of those hotwheels race tracks that you had when you were a kid. A wingover is what would happen if you place a U shaped section of track up against the wall with regular sections leading into and out of it. You pull up and roll at a smooth, constant rate, until your wings are perpendicular to the ground and your nose is pointed 90 degrees from your original heading. Allow the nose to fall a bit and reverse the roll and pitch inputs so that you smoothly level the wings and pull the nose up to arrive back on your same altitude and airspeed headed the opposite way.
The loop is a lot of fun because you get to really put some Gs on the plane. You enter a loop at 200 knots (230 mph) and pull the nose up hard. You achieve 3 and a half times the force of gravity in about two seconds. Just to test what would happen, I didn't do the anti G straining maneuver (AGSM) when my instructor demonstrated the first loop and I started to gray out.
Graying out is the first stage of G induced loss of consciousness (G-LOC). Blood is being pushed to your feet and without this blood your eyes can no longer see color. Pretty soon, like in a matter of seconds, your vision will close in to a very narrow circle and if you continue to pull Gs without doing the AGSM you will black out. You are conscious, you can hear and talk, but you can not see. In a few more seconds you will completely lose consciousness.
Being unconscious when you are not flying level is a bad thing; it usually leads to a collision with the ground. So to prevent this, we do the AGSM. The first part is tensing all of your muscles from your feet to your abdomen. At 3.5 Gs, this is usually enough. If you were going to pull any more Gs, you would start the "hook" breathing technique. You sharply draw in a breath by sucking in as you make the "hoo" sound. You hold your breath for three to five seconds then exhale sharply, making the "k" sound. You repeat this until you are no longer pulling Gs. If executed properly, you should be able to safely pull as many as 9 Gs for a short period of time.
In all honesty, pulling Gs hurts. Your entire body is crushed into the seat and just holding your head up becomes a chore. Three and a half isn't too bad, there's a little pain and you have to work to hold your head up, but it's not superhuman by any means. Nine Gs is really going to hurt.
So the loop is just like it sounds, a big loop in the sky. You pull the nose up so the G meter reads 3.5 and you keep the wings level with the attitude gyro until the nose gets so far up that it no longer provides a reading and flips over. Tilt your head back and locate the horizon behind you. Now you are using that to level your wings. At the top of the loop things become kinda peaceful as the Gs fade and your airspeed bleeds off. You continue to pull and the aircraft starts down the other side of the loop. Now you are nose down and screaming back towards the earth (or, in our case, the
My first loop was kinda ugly, I let the Gs fade early and had to start my pull again, which actually bleeds off a lot more energy than if you just keep the pull in constant. So at the top of the loop I had bled off too much energy and the plane started to stall. Fortunately I was just a little bit slow, because if you get too slow at the top of a loop, the plane will depart controlled flight and start to fall back to earth any way it damn well pleases. It's recoverable, but it'll get your heart beating pretty hard.
The loop I did on Tuesday, on my second PA flight, was a whole lot better. It was actually a perfect loop. I know this because as I leveled off I hit a pocket of air that caused the plane to buffet slightly. My instructor asked me if I felt it and I said yes but I didn't know what it was. He explained that I had flown right through the disturbance that I had created in the air as I pulled up into the loop. Pretty damn sweet.
Everything was a lot better on my second flight. My barrel rolls were great, wingovers were good, loops were perfect, and I did the split-s, immelman, and half cuban eight. I won't bore you with the details of those maneuvers, they are a lot cooler to do than to hear explained. I was really having a good time, and I think the Navy found out about it.
I got a call Tuesday night that I was headed to IGS (
To make matters worse, there are three solo PA flights and I was scheduled to fly my first PA solo on Wednesday. I briefed it, was ready to go, all I needed was for aircraft issue to assign me a plane. Then the fucking clouds moved in. There was a scattered layer at 8,000' and the haze was obscuring the horizon. We start most of our PA maneuvers at about 7500 and top out at 9000', so the ODO cancelled my flight. I was within half an hour of taking that plane out on my own and really getting to whip it around.
So now, instead of pulling Gs and watching the horizon do flips, I have to do two weeks of classroom crap followed by nineteen simulator events and ten flights in the back seat with a bag over my cockpit staring at instruments. Pretty much the most boring type of flying possible. I guess it's cool and all that I'll be an instrument certified pilot and able to fly through clouds, but it is boring flying.
I'll get to go back and do PAs, but it won't be for about six weeks. The only plus side is that I'll get to do my cross country flight sooner so I'll likely be flying to
