Got up this morning and continued the arduous process of putting away all the crap that I own. I really have a lot of it. A lot of useless junk too. As time goes on hopefully I'll be able to get rid of a lot of it by just chucking it or pawning it off on eBay for a dollar or something.
My flight was at 1, wanted to set up a good impression by getting there early, but ended up driving around the airport twice before finding the correct parking lot. Of course it was the parking lot I originally arrived at. Met up with Chris who'd arranged it on the phone, he said it would probably be a short flight due to the weather. I was fine with that, plan on giving them plenty more of my money to learn to fly anyways. On the way out to the airplane we passed a Catalina, another similarly sized flying boat, and a DC3. Apparently all privately owned... I must meet these people!
Catalina
DC-3
My pilot Mark was a nice guy, he showed me the various knobs and instruments. It is honestly mindblowingly simple compared to the 787 cockpit, which I kind of like because it blurs the lines between engineering and athletics and art. One of these days I'll have enough flowerly language to give a TED talk! And honestly it's even insanely simple compared to a 172 cockpit. This is good, Karl Erickson would die before flying something with a glass (modern) cockpit.
The instruments consisted of a compass, a piece of string glued to the outside of the windshield, an airspeed indicator, a radio, an altimeter, and two variometers [which measure rate of ascent/descent, Mr. Sid would no doubt call them d(altimeter)/dts]. For control surfaces you have a typical stick for the elevator and ailerons and rudder pedals for the elevator. Very conventional. The airplane stalls around 37 knots, the speed to stay aloft longest was low 40s and the speed to move the farthest distance per height loss was high 40s. To convert knots to mph, multiply by 1.15. And for your useless piece of trivia for the day, 1 nautical mile is 1 minute of arc (although it has been redefined to be 1,852 meters). So be sure to laugh at all your unit challenged friends when they complain about how many dumb units we have, because the nautical mile and knot are now defined entirely by metric units.
Anyways taking off was pretty awesome. You get towed up behind this tank of a crop duster, and it takes about 5 minutes to get to 3k feet. The whole time it looks exactly like the "behind the plane" view in flight sim. Then you let off town, and the townplane does a diving turn the left, while the glider does a shallow climb to the right. Then we flew around for a while, Mark tried to find lift (there wasn't much) and he let me fly around for a while. Its amazing what you can feel in the glider vs. your regular GA plane. Basically you have to do what is called coordinated turns, where you use aileron and rudder to turn. The reason for this is as you deflect the ailerons you get drag that tends to yaw the airplane in the direction opposite of the way you want to turn. The piece of yarn is to tell you if that is happening. However it takes surprisingly little for the airplane to start buffeting (aerodynamics telling you the plane is not happy). And you can get some really neat transients and periodic motions with small stick inputs. The aerodynamicist in me was going nuts.
Landing was fun too. It's a little disconcerting, the grass strip we were on had sailplanes at the end, and we seemed to come in pretty hot. However, when Mark deployed the speedbrakes it was remarkable how quickly the airplane slowed down to a stop.
PLANE!
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