Ground school
I can’t tell precisely when my love for flying started. My dad worked for ESA, the European Space Agency, so space, spacecraft and aircraft, were always there.
The first time I saw Top Gun was with my dad. We laughed our behinds off. That might have been it.
Fast forward to today where I could quote you the entire movie by heart:
Charlie: Well, if you were directly above him, how could you see him?
Maverick: Because I was inverted.
Doesn’t that seem like the coolest thing ever? To do loopings, to be inverted… actually, to be able to fly yourself…
Then, when you actually learn to fly, the strangest thing happens, or at least it did to me. A wonky mix of feelings takes over. There’s excitement, but there’s also a bit of fear, and that’s weird. Because really. Flying is what you dreamed of, so why be afraid?
Unlike when you’re driving a car, when something goes wrong in the air, you can’t just “pull over”. Sure, you’re guaranteed to come to a “full and complete stop” at one point, but this could be some hundreds or thousands of feet lower than where you were when the trouble started.
Accident reports detailing the most gruesome crashes because of wrongly executed base-to-final turns, aircraft entering into spiral turns and spins, make you question whether maybe you should just stick to watching Top Gun, rather than getting airborne yourself.
Precisely for this reason, our flying club organises an “unusual attitudes” day every year. Two hours of classroom training, a refresher on the ins and outs of aerodynamics, briefing on the different exercises and demonstrations that will take place during what comes after: the actual flying.
As per the usual recipe, it takes Flora no effort to convince me that this will be “fun” and we should join.
Hans van Geffen is our instructor today and he’s nothing if not enthusiastic. He explains time and again that planes are built to recover from most upset attitudes automatically. Given enough time and altitude, a plane will usually recover from a spin on its own, if given no control inputs by the pilot. That is of course, unless you’re talking a “Mooney”, a Cirrus, or most planes certified before 1963…, or….
Right, Hans, let’s just stop there, ok?
In one anecdote he mentioned, a pilot ejected from his plane because he was caught in a spin, and then, when he ejected, the plane recovered and landed itself in a field. I had to look it up, the story is just too cool.
He talks us through the exercises and explains what to do to get yourself out of the different finicky situations and how to react to become an aviation accident statistic and get yourself a thousand stupidity hits on youtube.
After two hours, the main message I got was: “Stay calm, give yourself time to do nothing first, so you can figure out what’s going on and what the best course of action is”. That little bit of time you give yourself can prevent things from going from bad to worse, and… Hans adds cheerfully: “If you don’t have time to give yourself that second, you were probably screwed anyway…”.
We will be going through high power stalls, clean stalls, wing dips, stalls in steep turns, stalled flight, circuit errors and more. Should we still have time, Hans mentions, then there’s time for dessert.
To understand what dessert could be, maybe I should mention we will be flying the club’s Robin R2160 Alpha Sport, nicknamed Acrobin, certified for aerobatic flight.
Preflight drinks with instructor Hans
There’s nine of us in total, Flora, Mansur, Robin (how appropriate) and I will take to the skies today, the rest will have to wait till the day after.
Flora goes first and before I have time to go full blown Kajsa inquisition on how it went, Hans has turned around and it’s my turn.
I’m too short to properly reach the pedals, so I get to fly with a pillow in my back. The 5-point harness glues you to the seat. That is, after you’ve let each of the five belts drop at least twice, before you manage to enter them into the bayonet. There’s got to be a way to do this looking slightly less uncool, I keep thinking.
I have my phone stowed away to take some pictures along the way. Spoiler: It never left its pocket.
The fun starts after the power-on stall. The stall in the steep turn:
As predicted, the high wing stalls first and while releasing the stick to neutral the plane literally snaps from a 70+-ish bank to its neutral horizontal position. Now that’s just cool! I try it again and sure enough it’s like someone hits the reset button at the stall: pooffff, back to horizontal.
The circuit errors are another story. Hans demonstrates the “right” way to mess up your base-to-final turn (slipping). Sure you stall, but the result and the altitude loss are survivable, provided they’re corrected in a right and timely way.
On to the wrong way next. We’re at 5000’, so we have fun acting like idiots. Come on, says Hans, you’re overshooting the runway, turn and more rudder. Tighter! Remember, you see the ground coming up at you! Pull on the stick! More! I correctly do everything wrong and finally we flip over. After I correct, we’ve lost 400-500’. In the circuit I would be dead. Now, I’m just having fun.
Hans is happy. So am I. Time for dessert.
Looping? Yes, please, but I still want to experience a developed spin (I must be properly mental). Looping first, then spin, we figure. Hans tells me what to do. Dive, speed to 135 knots and then just pull the stick all the way to your gut and keep it there (ok, there’s some throttle work involved too). Green turns to blue and I think:
Look Daddy, I’m inverted!
Well, you might as well do the spin yourself too, reckons Hans. I idle the plane, stall it properly, kick full rudder, keep it there and booffff, we flip and turn. After three full turns Hans tells me to break the spin. The 2160’s POH has a slightly divergent spin recovery in that you keep the stick pulled while you give full opposite rudder. The spin breaks, we roll back, pull out of the dive and climb back.
Barrel roll! I am thoroughly enjoying myself.
Hans asks whether I am ok, but he knows already and demos some manoeuvres of which I don’t know the names, but there are some short snap rolls and at one point we find ourselves completely vertical, flip over and are vertical again, this time heading for the ground. Hans pulls out, I have controls and we quickly head back to Rotterdam, because Mansur is waiting.
Mansur is up next and when he comes back down, he’s also thoroughly chuffed.
Though I enjoy hanging out in the sun with our feathered friends, I don’t have time to wait for Robin to come back from his run, as I want to spend some time with my kids, but when I send a text to ask what he thought of it, I get these shots back:
Enough said.
One thing we all agree on is we would have liked more time. A big part of flying is preparation. When you’re well prepared, the chance of error is reduced, which makes you more sure of what you’re doing and silences the little anxiety voice in the back of your head. This starts with taking your time getting into the plane, getting to know it. Next time, we all agree, we would like more of that, but we also realise that in the present setting , trying to allow as many people as possible to fly in a single weekend, that is just not feasible.
Before I leave Hans asks me: “ So when do we start?”
Flora grins. She already knew the second I got out of the plane from the look on my face.
Ray Bans are an aerobatics pilot’s best friend.
If you’ll excuse me, I will be checking my schedule now to pencil in some aerobatics lessons…
What about you? Is upset attitude recovery part of your training? Do you fly aerobatics? Chime in in the comments.