I bet they’d have no problem at all letting you do a spiraling ascent before departure.
I’m not an aerobatic guy, so perhaps I’m way off base here, but.... if a half turn spin is what I am imagining, why would anyone in their right mind recommend this at low altitude?
Okay. By throwing it out there as a possibility on the forum it certainly came across, at least to me, as a viable option.
I am glad my thought was at least partly correct about trim having faster and better reactions then us pilots. A little extra airspeed is never bad, and could even compensate to the natural pilot instinct to pull back once your hands are firmly on the controls and you start to fly to the emergency landing spot.
It’s conceivable that the speed could settle out higher. Without the prop wash blowing over the tail it may be less effective and result in a lower angle of attack. Depending on the design and rigging of your aircraft, of course.
And how much extra altitude loss was that?? 100’ perhaps?? What’s the glide ratio on your airplane?
I’ll try it tomorrow in a C150 (at 3000’), a totally different animal, and post how it works in a trainer.
Statistically it actually pretty easy to count roughly how many have been killed doing it. But Statistically that only tells us that they can go badly. So statistically we can just make up a number and say it kills 1 in 10 pilots that attempt it. We can't prove that number right or wrong simply because we don't know how many pilot successfully perform the maneuver.
As others have pointed out, this varies from airplane to airplane. Even in the same airplane, though, CG can have a huge effect on 'abruptness'.
The question wan not whether I can put the nose down fast enough. It was - can the airplane’s trim system do it for me automatically? That was proven in a decathlon, I’ll test it in my C150.
Very good point. Way to go using your noggin. I’ll have to redo the test with some heavy bags in the back sometime.
You have plenty of terrible ideas too, but we don’t complain. So has Cessna and Burt Rutan.
I’m not following. How would the airplane hold Vy after a power loss and not stall?
I don’t need to know how many successfully performed it. The statistics show that those who tried to make the turn back, most commonly, ended up in a fatal situation. That’s enough evidence for me to avoid it. I realize that there’s plenty of individuals who think they’ll be able to beat the odds, and for those people, I say more power to them.
Trim holds airspeed irrespective of power. That is why you can trim for 100mph and add power to ascend or reduce power to descend without your speed changing. The question I had was whether that held up not just in the cruise realm of 40-100% power but also in the 0-100% power realm. One member tested it in a decathlon and elevator trim (alone without pilot input) did indeed allow the nose to drop quickly enough to prevent a stall from Vx at full power engine out.
I’m very skeptical of that, very.
"Most commonly" implies that more people fail than succeed. In order to know that, we would have to know how many people succeed, but we don't have that information.
Yep. Same with single engine stoppage with a twin. It's supposedly dangerous, but as you don't have to report successes, the numbers are skewed.
All I know is that it worked in the one data point we have so far. So 1-0 in favor of the airplane being smarter than us pilots. And this was in a decathlon, not a docile trainer. Think about how we are taught that in most training airframes, it is pilots that cause most of the accidents with improper control inputs. Recovering from a spin is often just as easy (but not most correct) hands off as it is PARE in a C150. Pilots cause a lot of problems with our brains working too hard.
By lowering the nose and descending. Vy is an airspeed, not an attitude.
A more realistic test IMO would have been to set trim to takeoff position and hold stick pressure for Vy, Vx or some other arbitrary climb attitude which is what quite a few pilots are doing just off the runway below pattern altitude. If you did it that way, I suspect getting the nose quickly would become something much more than the total non-issue you saw in your test.