Air Combat

    

    

April 27, 2016 was one of the best entries in my pilot logbook:  Air Combat Manoeuvring — “dogfighting.”  Air Combat USA was an outfit in Fullerton Airport, California.  We showed up at their hangar for a pre-booked flight.  Suddenly our world changed.  We were on an aircraft carrier.  We were about to launch into air combat against a real pilot, in a real fighter airplane, with badass ex-Navy and ex-Marine fighter pilots.

There were two little boys in those Marchetti SF-260 fighter airplanes that day.

     

     

Now, two years later, my former adversary Paolo sits all grown up in the cockpit of an A-330 airliner.  In fighter pilot lingo he is “flying a cargo plane full of rubber dog shit out of Hong Kong.”

    

Paolo ready to go Mach 2 with his hair on fire.    

 

But two years ago, he travelled trans-Pacific the day before our knife fight and pleaded jet-lag.  He also claimed that he spent the night with “Charlie.”  Yeah, right.  I texted him that Charlie and I were already at the beach playing half-naked volleyball with Maverick and Goose.

We met at Fullerton and stepped through the looking glass.  We were instantly in an aircraft carrier fighter squadron ready room.  Within minutes we were ordered to the locker room to put our flight gear on. 

     

Air Combat USA ‘Ready Room.’  

 

We considered recreating the locker beefcake scene from the movie. 

“Yes, Ice…man.  I am dangerous.” 

Tim, Paolo’s Dad, threatened to walk out if we stripped down to towels.  So we put our flight suits on and sat for the briefing.

    

Tonet and Paolo

        

An ex-F-14 Navy jock, call sign ‘Spartan,’ ran the one-hour brief.  The biggest thing on the board was “LOOK GOOD AT ALL COSTS.”  The Marchetti SF260s we would fly had three video cameras – cockpit camera from behind looking forward; gun sight camera; and the ‘hero’ camera, which looked back at the pilots and was always on.  If your breakfast came up again, the hero camera would record the ballistics of every disgusting barf.

    

LOOK GOOD AT ALL COSTS   

 

Then there was the cryptic “IYAC YAT” on the whiteboard.  “If You Ain’t Cheating, You Ain’t Trying.”  So the playbook allowed shady tactics?  These would be covered in the airplane after take off, we were told.

    

IYAC YAT    

 

I went into the ladies room by mistake and the wisecracks were predictable. 

“The trophy for the alternates is down in the ladies room!”  Yeah, cracked me up.

We slipped into our parachute harnesses, then swaggered out on deck.  We hammed TOP GUN poses beside the airplanes.  We shamelessly pretended to shake hands.  The trash talk was personal and unforgiving.  ‘TOPGUN’ dialogue lines were abused again and again.

    

The trash talk was personal and unforgiving.    

 

My engine wouldn’t start.  Paolo taxied out ahead, chortling.  My IP, an ex-Marine F-18 pilot, call sign ‘Mac,’ cycled our boost pump and the Lycoming O-540 fired.  After a formation take off we tested our guns on the way to the range.  When you triggered the Marchetti’s guns, a laser beam fired at the target airplane.  If you hit him, his laser sensors would ignite a smoke trail.  There would be no arguments about who won.

Watch the video of our aerial battle.  The barrel roll attack tutorial is interesting.  Paolo and I shot each other down in the first two practice dogfights, then we went at it tooth and nail.  Dogfights #3 and #4 were easy kills for me, since Paolo was focused on keeping his breakfast down.

    

       “Well if you were directly above him, how could you see him?”

“Because I was inverted.”

     

Then we squared off for dogfight #5. 

The video is worth watching just for this one dogfight.  We flashed past each other head on, left-to-left, then Paolo daringly went vertical, pulling straight up into the sky.  He rounded the top of the shuddering loop and dove.  I pulled a 4.5G split-S, my body weighed four and a half times normal and my Marchetti nibbled at the stall buffet as I tried to pull my targeting reticle onto him and light him up with my guns.  

    

“You can run, kid, but you can’t hide.”

    

Paolo kicked off a miraculous recovery by wrenching his Marchetti into another high-G vertical egg, squeezing every bit of performance from his airplane. 

     

“He’s still coming, he’s still back there.  C’mon Mav, do some of that pilot sh*t!”

    

After three mind-blackening vertical turns it was clear that Paolo had gained the edge, pulling tighter and flirting more daringly with the stall buffet.  He was almost on my tail.  ‘Mac’ suggested I reverse my turn, and I made it worse by hesitating in level flight for two seconds.  I realized my mistake and desperately rolled 90 degrees more to the right, but Paolo was already there.

     

”Goose, I WANT Viper”

     

Clearly, he was quite motivated to kill me.

He slashed in almost at right angles to me, a tough 90-degree deflection shot, where the target airplane was flashing perpendicularly across his nose.   He was also in a high closure rate, but his timing was exquisite as he held the trigger down. 

    

The Defense Department regrets to inform you that your sons are dead because they were stupid.

  

‘Mac’ and I were toast.  Eject, eject, eject.

   

Blood in his eyes, Paolo wanted one more.  ‘Spartan’ and ‘Mac’ set us up head on again, and then Paolo and I took over our respective controls.  Dogfight #6.

As we neared each other, nearly head on, I slammed the stick left, even before ‘Spartan’ announced, “Fight’s on.”  IYAC YAT!  My Marchetti instantly rolled wings vertical.  As Paolo predictably went vertical again, I slipped across his loop, and it was my turn to rake him as he crossed my nose.  Guns, guns, guns, and it was over.

    

 “Say hello to my little friend!”

       

“Say hello to my little friend!”  Mac rubbed it in with the Al Pacino’s line from ‘Scarface.’  Fighter pilots are suckers for movie lines.

     

We flew home in tight formation, pumped up and basking in the smug realization that for the rest of the day our shit would smell good.  Heroes.

 

"We’re going home, Viper has the lead."

    

Los Alamitos Army Airfield, on our route home, made our day when they requested a low flyby.  Goose, it’s time to buzz the tower. 

“Marchetti Ball!”  We recovered with overhead breaks just like they do at aircraft carriers.  On the ramp they thought I had to be helped out of the cockpit.  I just sat there not wanting it to end.

At the debrief we watched both SD cards unreel in perfect synchronization.  Shirl, Paolo’s Mom and Dad, and my cousins Rico (United B777 Captain) and Jeepy (retired B747 Captain) snickered at our self-awe.‘

“Gutsiest move I ever saw, Mav.”

 

It was worth every cent.  Today, two years later, Air Combat USA is transitioning to new ownership, and I really hope they sort things out quickly, because I want to do this again.  And again.  And again.  Heck, Paolo even bid for the airline equipment that will get him into the LAX area for layovers.  Layovers my ass. 

    

    

Posted from Manila

April 27, 2018

Two years later

Read Full Post »

Death by Ignorance

 

 

That is the real danger:  this faulty reaction to the stall, rather than the stall itself.  It is quite rare that a pilot is killed simply because he stalled.  But it happens with tragic monotony that a pilot is killed because he either fails to recognize the stall for what it is, or fails to control that impulsive desire to haul back on the stick.

–  Wolfgang Langewiesche

  

  

  

  

This was a tough article to write.  It took me days.

 

 

Carlo, my English teacher son, always starts class with a quiz.  So, Pop Quiz for all pilots out there.  (Watch this.)

 

True of False?

1. Langewiesche is lead investigator for the Air France 447 crash. 
2. An airplane stalls when it gets too slow to fly.
3. Speed is irrelevant.  Instead, an airplane “stalls” when its wings are angled up too steeply. 

Bonus question:

How does an airplane fly? 

 

We’ll take the last one first.  Ask three pilots and you might get four answers.  Embarrassing.  So let’s avoid three-syllable words like ‘Bernoulli’ and ‘laminar’ and keep it intuitive.  Newly-hatched birds learn this stuff right out of the nest. Every time someone is called a “bird brain”, it’s very insulting.  To the birds.

It is easiest to think of the wing as an inclined plane, trying to climb the oncoming airflow.  The wing deflects the airflow down and thus keeps itself aloft.  The drawing below shows a concept that is over 60 years old.  Cross-section of a wing flying left to right.

   
         

A surfboard is an inclined plane that surfs the waves.  A wing is an inclined plane that surfs the oncoming air.  That, Langewiesche explains, is why we call the magical machine an

air-plane.

 

Not only does the wing ride the airflow beneath it, but it also gets sucked up by the pocket of near-vacuum above it.

If you are still with me, you now know more than many pilots do.  Seriously.

       

    

If the airplane slows, the oncoming airflow weakens, and the wing descends.  Think about a waterski or surfboard settling as the speed diminishes.  The airplane is still flying – but it is flying downward.  Nothing wrong with that.  You have to descend to land, after all.

So #2 above is False.  An airplane never gets “too slow to fly”.

Watch an airliner land – as it slows down, it descends until it gently touches down on the runway.

If it gets very slow, it will fly downward. It wants to fly. It was designed to fly.

 

Unless a pilot fools around with it and tries to make it do the impossible.

           

So what does make an airplane stop flying and fall out of the sky? 

When the wing is inclined too steeply against the airflow, it no longer rides the oncoming air.  Instead, it plows through the air like a bully through a crowd, leaving a riot of confused and disturbed air in its wake. 

The image below shows a flying wing on top, and a stalled wing at the bottom.

 

With the wing dragging in the airflow, flight becomes impossible, the wing stalls, and the airplane starts to fall.

#3 above is False.  An airplane doesn’t stall because the wing is angled up too steeply.  It can stall even with the wing pointed down.

At left, a wing diving down, in flight.  At right, a stalled wing falling down.

 

The culprit is Angle of Attack, the angle at which the airflow hits the wings.  At an excessive angle of attack, the wing doesn’t ride the airflow, but batters it aside.

 

 

  

So, how much angle is excessive?  Anything over 16-18 degrees will destroy the airflow.  At that angle, drag simply overcomes all upward lift.

 

 

 

 

This isn’t theoretical.  In wind tunnel tests with smoke streaming against a real wing, the angle of attack at which the wing stops surfing and starts dragging against the airflow becomes very visible.

 

 

Once the airflow is disrupted, the wing is stalled.  It gives up flying, and the airplane begins to fall.

The human instinct is to pull the nose higher, away from the looming ground.  Nothing could be more fatal.

It takes only 3-5 seconds to recover from a stall.  It takes longer to read this paragraph.  But it takes a lot of faith to do the right thing –-> point the airplane down.  Lower the nose, reduce the angle of attack, restore the airflow over the wings, and fly again.

 

 

 

 

The key is to let the nose fall, and the wings will start flying again.  Do it once, twice, and we become believers.  Practice it often, and we keep the faith.  But many pilots have never flown stalls!  Not once.

 

I was lucky.  Enlightened instructors made me a believer.  Pull the nose high, feel the wing give up flying.  Let the nose drop, there’s the ground, filling the windshield.  But we are flying again!  Gently pull out of the dive, done.

Done, really.

 

Later, in aerobatic training, Meynard ordained belief into faith.  He pushed me deeper into the monster’s belly, then taught me the way out, every time.

Spins.  One wing completely stalled.  The opposite wing, still bravely flying, rolls the airplane inverted into a dive, corkscrewing around itself. 

Recover.  Later, recover on a specific heading!  That’s real man stuff.

 

In World War II, 18- and 19-year old kids used advanced stalls to carve the edge of controlled flight into masterpieces of technique.  Combat maneuvers are the samurai cousins of civilian aerobatics.  Fighter aces had maneuvers named after them.  Max Immelman.  Jimmy Thatch.  Saburo Sakai’s favorite evasive maneuver was the snap roll.

 

 

Snap rolls.  Snap the nose high and deliberately stall one wing.  The opposite wing, still flying, twists the airplane into violent corkscrew.  A horizontal spin! 

Recover. 

Breathe.  Awed that I could stall a wing at high speed.  Sure.  Speed has very little to do with it.  It’s all about angle of attack.

 

In flying schools, the theory looks fiercely boring.  Bernoulli and laminar flow and L=CL ½r S V² yada-yada, right?  Those of us who are professionally curious dive deeper into stalls through books and websites.  They want to get it.  Bravo!

Those who choose to stay ignorant, or who are ignorant about their ignorance, are potential mass murderers.

 

 

 

 

 

We now know about stalls.  It’s time to study three catastrophic accidents.

 

 

 

 

It is worth repeating the quote that started this whole article.

That is the real danger: this faulty reaction to the stall.  A pilot is killed because he either fails to recognize the stall for what it is, or fails to control that impulsive desire to haul back on the stick.

— Wolfgang Langewiesche

 

#1 in the quiz is False. Langewiesche, the Yoda of aerodynamics, published his wonderful book, Stick and Rudder, in 1944.

  

  

Posted from Bangkok, August 20, 2011

Credits:   

A delightful article about F-1 car wings!

Curiously, Microsoft Flight Simulator has a good lesson on stalls

AOPA Online:  If you don’t fully understand angle of attack, you are a candidate for joining the more than 100 pilots [last year] who crashed in their attempt to make an aircraft do the impossible.  Accidents are the ultimate manifestation of confusion.

   

   

.   

Read Full Post »