An Eddy? In the space-time continuum like what Ford Prefect talked about?
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Naval Aircraft and AOA
- Thread starter AllAmerican75
- Start date
haha Jim you old fuck. My big sister and brother are both heart of the envelope (late 60s to mid 70s) Gen X. They both always talked about this (for them) coming of age book. If only I could read, maybe I would understand the fanfare. Did this get printed in Canada then?
Clearly it isn't right. But it might be more interesting if one had a picture of a normal installation to compare. As it is, looks nothing like the one I recall, S-3, B837, or MD80.
One simply does not ask Jackson Pollock what his canvas looked like before the masterpiece was completed.
DON'T PANIC!
You would also understand why 42% get jets . . . just sayin'.haha Jim you old fuck. My big sister and brother are both heart of the envelope (late 60s to mid 70s) Gen X. They both always talked about this (for them) coming of age book. If only I could read, maybe I would understand the fanfare. Did this get printed in Canada then?
One does wonder the over/under for the number of swear words coming out of 120 and 12C when the masterpiece came back to the line, though. "Umm . . . about that signoff . . ."
They're all civilians, so... I dunno. If it ever cures, it will probably peel right off in one piece.
Speaking of AOA...the recent accident sent me on a trip through the wayback machine...
I was an OCF instructor, and one of the demonstrations, when it happened, was of a high speed spiral. Would randomly happen when demonstrating the adverse yaw departure, since we had decent knots on the airplane at stall. AOA stalled but not pegged, roll rate higher than spin, nose lower, and the big tell was airspeed increasing. If you put in anti-spin controls the plane just flopped into an opposite spiral. It was dangerous for that reason.
It was around my time, 1991, that a T34 was lost. The investigation assessed that the pilot (squadron CO?) got into a high speed spiral, kept putting in anti-spin, eventually got fast enough to where it started flying again and now the plane was way over Vne and essentially trimmed for 10Gs, so the wings folded up. Baldwin County, AL.
I flew with a NFO retread once, Tomcat guy, and he was a horrible stick at the time. During OCF we got into a spiral, he kept doing the wrong thing, and I had to take it and recover. He went on to fly Tomcats. Years later and I am visiting NADEP Jax as a civilian engineer, and there’s a pile of Tomcat debris in a hangar for an investigation. Turns out the same guy had a spun a Tomcat into the ground. Huh.
I was an OCF instructor, and one of the demonstrations, when it happened, was of a high speed spiral. Would randomly happen when demonstrating the adverse yaw departure, since we had decent knots on the airplane at stall. AOA stalled but not pegged, roll rate higher than spin, nose lower, and the big tell was airspeed increasing. If you put in anti-spin controls the plane just flopped into an opposite spiral. It was dangerous for that reason.
It was around my time, 1991, that a T34 was lost. The investigation assessed that the pilot (squadron CO?) got into a high speed spiral, kept putting in anti-spin, eventually got fast enough to where it started flying again and now the plane was way over Vne and essentially trimmed for 10Gs, so the wings folded up. Baldwin County, AL.
I flew with a NFO retread once, Tomcat guy, and he was a horrible stick at the time. During OCF we got into a spiral, he kept doing the wrong thing, and I had to take it and recover. He went on to fly Tomcats. Years later and I am visiting NADEP Jax as a civilian engineer, and there’s a pile of Tomcat debris in a hangar for an investigation. Turns out the same guy had a spun a Tomcat into the ground. Huh.
We stopped doing high speed spirals in the T-6 about seven years ago after two or three avionics bay doors were lost to the woods of lower Alabama. It had always been an IP-IP only maneuver, the emphasis on the maneuver was the indications (greater airspeed and stalled or not stalled AoA depending on the direction of the turn, due to the location of the probe out there on the left wing) and to experience the different feeling (you did get tossed around inside the cockpit much more forcefully than the spin and it occasionally made pukers out of non-pukers), but the recovery was the same: PCL (power) idle, controls neutral. The tail feathers in the T-6 are very large and effective in most every regime of flight, including various OCF regimes.
FWIW inverted spins and tail slides/zero airspeed departures are prohibited in the NATOPS.
The story of the avionics doors falling off is a funny one. It happened twice to one IP (friend of mine); the second time he double and triple checked the latches on preflight and made a comment to the other IP about it. The latches on those doors are ordinary Hartwell latches (Hartwell is a trade name but kind of a common name for them too), the flush kind that you pop open and close with your thumb, one latch on each of three sides and a hinge on the fourth side. The latches don't have much grip, only about 1/8" or so. Of course if there is enough flex and force to pop one open then the other two don't stand a chance (great design... not). Our friends at NAVAIR swore that part of the airplane couldn't possibly be flexing during the maneuver (anyone who's flown straight-and-level formation would probably disagree...) and therefore the lost doors had to be pilot error. The latches on the hydraulic access door are a much more robust variety with about two or three times more grip; the avionics access doors are about a square foot in size and shape while the hydraulics access door is barely six inches across. The difference in a parts catalog is one ends in a -2 and the other in a -3, and the -3 costs more. Small price to pay for TFOA.
Naturally, getting the stronger latches for the avionics doors was one of those indefinite "we're working on it" airframe changes, lost in the bureaucratic morass.
Sample picture of this kind of latch:
FWIW inverted spins and tail slides/zero airspeed departures are prohibited in the NATOPS.
The story of the avionics doors falling off is a funny one. It happened twice to one IP (friend of mine); the second time he double and triple checked the latches on preflight and made a comment to the other IP about it. The latches on those doors are ordinary Hartwell latches (Hartwell is a trade name but kind of a common name for them too), the flush kind that you pop open and close with your thumb, one latch on each of three sides and a hinge on the fourth side. The latches don't have much grip, only about 1/8" or so. Of course if there is enough flex and force to pop one open then the other two don't stand a chance (great design... not). Our friends at NAVAIR swore that part of the airplane couldn't possibly be flexing during the maneuver (anyone who's flown straight-and-level formation would probably disagree...) and therefore the lost doors had to be pilot error. The latches on the hydraulic access door are a much more robust variety with about two or three times more grip; the avionics access doors are about a square foot in size and shape while the hydraulics access door is barely six inches across. The difference in a parts catalog is one ends in a -2 and the other in a -3, and the -3 costs more. Small price to pay for TFOA.
Naturally, getting the stronger latches for the avionics doors was one of those indefinite "we're working on it" airframe changes, lost in the bureaucratic morass.
Sample picture of this kind of latch:
They weren't in the T-34...until they were sometime around 2006-07. There was a rash of chip lights and several OCF IPs known to do zero-speed departures, so they stopped that and cases of chip lights went back down to their normal instances. I'm guessing the T-6 prohibition is a carry over.
Chip lights were pretty uncommon in the T-6 (it's got the "big" PT6, not the small or medium one) and I can only think of one IP who had one (on a night fam no less) although I'm sure there have been more. I figured the tail slide prohibition was because of what the air loads did to the elevator and rudder, but I can see how the committee would have got it in the book from day one because of T-34 corporate knowledge. Oddly, extended flight going straight up or straight down (i.e. vertical rolls) isn't explicitly prohibited, and the airplane certainly has enough smash to do it- I always thought of that as being very bad for the oil system. The oil pickup needs at least a little G, either positive or negative but at least some, or the engine won't get any oil. We'd occasionally set off the low oil pressure warning (not just the mere caution) by bunting too hard out of a spin recovery... that tells you a lot about respecting the limitations of the oil system.
In Dec. of '76 as an SNA in T-2's in Kingsville, I was flying my spin hop with the XO. Went through the pre-spin checklist, pulled the PCL's to idle, pulled the nose up and at the prescribed airspeed, pulled the stick full aft and to the left while simultaneously using my left hand to help hold the stick full aft and left by putting my left hand on top of the stick grip to hold it. As the aircraft stalled, it entered a spin to the left. I neutralized the controls, pushed right rudder to recover, only to have the jet enter a right spin. So I initiated proper controls to recover from a right-hand spin, only to immediately re-enter a spin to the left. We had the ICS on hot-mic as prescribed in the pre-spin checklist and the XO nonchalantly said, "OK. I have the aircraft." The jet then continued to go from spinning one direction to spinning the opposite direction every time the XO changed control inputs. As I was watching the altimeter unwind, the XO's breathing was getting heavier over the ICS and getting closer to the mandatory out-of-control-flight ejection altitude of 10K', I heard him exclaim, "Oh SHIT!" I began thinking how cold it was going to be ejecting on a much-colder-than-normal December day in Texas. The XO finally recovered the jet right at 10K' and breathing very heavily over the ICS told me, "You have the jet. Let's go home." Not another word was said the rest of the hop and I figured I'd just received my first down. During the debrief, he explained that he finally had looked at the elevator trim gauge to see it pegged at full nose up. Once he ran the trim back down, the jet recovered as prescribed. Talking it over, we realized that I had inadvertently ran the trim full nose up with my palm on the coolly-hat switch when I used my left hand on top of the stick to hold it full aft and left. An emergency change to the NATOPS procedures for spin hops was sent out that day prescribing the electric trim switches be set to OFF after setting the prescribed trim for entry into the maneuver. I didn't get a down, but I did get a below average for procedures.