Accidental Aerobatics

Remember my first stall fiasco that prompted talk about starting a dive bombing school because I was a natural? The power-off stall training was followed by power-on stall training. Power-on stalls are intended to simulate stalling the plane on the climb-out after leaving the runway. In a power-on stall the plane attains a much higher angle to the ground before stalling, as you might expect.

Well, after the accidental dive bombing event and a few power-on stalls I decided to go out by myself and practice so that I would develop some confidence with them. I rented my favorite C-152 and headed for the practice area. Because I was still very anxious about stalls I climbed to seven thousand feet instead of just three thousand. That turned out to be a wise decision.

I took a deep breath and started my power on stall procedure... full throttle... pull back on the yoke until the plane stalls... release back pressure... pretty simple.

It seemed to be taking a long time for the plane to stall... maybe that was because I was alone in the plane. If it were more lightly loaded it would achieve a higher angle to the ground. It had been a long time since I had seen the horizon, so I looked out the side window to get an idea of my orientation.

I was appalled to discover that the horizon was vertical in my window! That meant the plane was pointing straight up! I did not know why or how I had attained a straight up orientation, but I noted that this was the opposite orientation of my dive bombing stall, so I had that going for me. I decided that something was amiss so I pulled back on the throttle.

The plane stalled immediately and without warning. Of course. I had just removed all upward thrust that the engine was providing. Of course it would stall immediately and without warning!

I felt myself falling backward in what must have been at first a tail slide. But the plane is rather like a dart, in that it wants to go nose-first in the air, and as it was sliding backwards toward the earth it was also turning around. I was expecting that to happen.

I saw the horizon appear in the top of my windshield and move toward the nose. The direction it was moving was reassuring, but what was not so reassuring is that from my viewpoint the sky was down and the ground was up. I was upside-down! The plane was putting the nose first by falling backwards.

Soon the plane was pointing straight at the ground again. Great. More dive bombing. At least this time the engine was not at full power. I watched the airspeed move toward the red line. Not good. Gingerly, I started pulling back on the yoke and coaxed the plane out of the dive without exceeding the maximum allowable speed or pulling enough gees to make me sick. I noted that the dive bottomed out at three thousand feet, so I had lost four thousand feet falling backwards and flipping over. If I had started my stall at three thousand feet I would have plowed into the ground at a high velocity.

A little shook up, I decided to go back to the airport and call it a day.

Later that night I discovered why all that happened. To simulate a stall on climb-out after take-off, the plane needs to be at the same speed it would be at during climb-out... somewhere around seventy miles per hour. I had started pulling back on the yoke at cruise speed - one hundred and fifteen miles per hour.

Flying is really about ninety percent planning and ten percent moving your hands and feet. That was my introduction to that concept.

This just doesn't happen

Hot off the presses!

This evening I spoke with an older friend of mine who is eating the way I do, and he told me that today his optometrist gave him a prescription for WEAKER glasses!

That's what can happen when you become healthy by focusing on repairing your DNA. When the individual cells of your body have the nutrients they need, your body systems tend to change toward proper operation.

That's how simple it is. Really.

Filthy and Exhausted

Jeb and I performed our pre-purchase inspection with the help of an Airframe and Powerplant mechanic. We all agreed that the minor deficiencies we found were reasonable for a plane that age. The most remarkable item we found was a pack rat nest in the wing. How the hell could a rodent get into the wing of an airplane? I'm guessing that it happened some time ago, maybe when the plane was sitting for a while, as it waited for the new engine. Anyway, the inspection took eight hours of hard work - some of it rolling around on the dirty concrete floor of a hangar - to inspect everything we needed to look at. Airplane inspection panels have a lot of screws in them. There are a lot of tight places that need to be inspected. But now I am confident that the wings aren't about to fall off, and all of the controls are in airworthy condition.

I'm going to shower and go to bed. It has been a long time since I was this filthy and exhausted.

The Simple Solution

When I was recovering from my heart attack I felt like I had been given a second chance on life and had better not screw it up. I knew I had to lose weight and start eating right, or I would be asking for trouble in my later years. I believed I had a good handle on the exercise part - thirty minutes a day of aerobic exercise, alternating between straight aerobic and interval training, and weight training including machines and free weights.

It was the diet/nutrition part that depressed me. I knew I was essentially starting from ground zero, because I never paid attention to what my mother or teachers told me about how I should eat. But when I started trying to learn about it I felt swamped by conflicting information.

I want things to be simple! Why make life more complicated than it naturally is?

After reading a pile of books, talking with physicians and nutritionists, and thinking through things as best I could, I came up with a simple solution. Here it is - plant-based nutrition, also called phytonutrients.

Here is what you should do (and what I aspire to do every day) ...

• Eat the nine to thirteen servings daily of fruits and vegetables that the government recommends. Eat more than that, if you can.
• Ensure that you get a variety.
• Eat as much as you can in the raw state. If you must cook them, steaming is best. Only steam veggies until they are crunchy, not mushy. Boiling vegetables leaches the nutrition out and it is thrown away with the water (unless you are keeping it for a soup or something). Remember that heat destroys some nutrients, so any cooking will eliminate those from that dish. Microwaving has been shown to also destroy some nutrients, so avoid that when you can. Actually, some vitamins are destroyed by exposure to sunlight, which, after all, is electromagnetic radiation too.
  
• Focus on fruits and veggies that have high nutrient density (that is, a lot of nutrition per calorie that the food contains) How do you do that? Easy... eat the dark green and purple leafy veggies, eat the red and purple berries, eat the fruit skins. Dark colors mean nutrients and antioxidants are in there.
  
• Ensure that your fruits and veggies are organic, because honestly, nobody knows what trace amounts of pesticides and fertilizers do to humans.
  
• Ensure that they are vine-ripened, because fifty percent of the nutrition in a fruit or vegetable develops in the last week or two before it ripens. Grocery stores contain produce that was picked a week or more before ripeness so that it would ripen along the way or in the store, but if the product was not connected to the mother plant, the nutrition does not develop as the thing ripens.

You think I'm advising you to become a vegetarian. Did I say to quit eating meat? No, I did not. It has been shown that red meat is not good for you, but the best red meat on the market is grass-fed free-range buffalo. If buffalo is not available, purchase grass-fed beef. Cattle did not evolve to eat corn, and it makes them sick, which is one reason the stockyards have to inject them with antibiotics - that, and the fact that in their last days they are standing hock-deep in their own shit. I mean, the guys who are going to slaughter the cattle and process meat for us to eat start with an animal that is covered with shit. Grass-fed, free-range meat is best. But eat it sparingly.

Everyone has heard about chicken and fish. Don't eat the chicken skin. Don't fry it - as delicious as fried chicken is. (Yes, I eat fried chicken once in a while... maybe one meal every six months, I'll have two pieces.)

Do I eat junk? Yes, of course I do. I had a hot dog last week. Yes, I know what hot dogs are made of. I know they have nitrates in them. I ate one anyway. I had a Coke, too, even though I will advise you to stay away from high-fructose corn syrup. I had Fritos. Yes, I know they have a high fat content and lots of salt. When was the last time I had a hot dog, Fritos, and a Coke as a meal? Two years ago. Moderation is important.

The bottom line is this - humans co-evolved with plants. We can consume a lot of other things without dying from what we swallow, but our bodies need phytonutrients to function properly. If your body is properly nourished, there many ailments that will get better without medical intervention.

I can hear you now... nine to thirteen servings of a variety of fresh, organic, vine-ripened fruits and vegetables every day? Nobody could do that!

Heh, heh. How can you do it? That's for me to know and you to find out!

Oh, okay. I'll tell you. But it is lunchtime, so I've gotta go. I'll tell you later.

Pre-Purchase Inspection

Looks like we are taking the plane purchasing process to the next level - the pre-purchase inspection. Jeb found a mechanic who is familiar with the Grumman AA-1 series. The owner has agreed to fly the plane to the mechanic's site. Jeb and I will meet them there Monday and spend the whole day pulling panels off and inspecting the plane inside and out. This is exciting - scary, but exciting.

Loading the gun

My partner in aviation (Jeb) and I just returned from opening a joint account to fund our airplane purchase and to act as a clearinghouse for financial transactions related to aircraft ownership. It's a big step, and one that has me a little nervous, much like I was when I bought my first house. Actually, this plane is going to cost just about as much as my first house!

We're looking at that Grumman AA-1B in the Phoenix area. Jeb found a mechanic who is familiar with the AA-1's to do our pre-purchase inspection. He wants to do it Monday. We all need to be there to help and to see for ourselves what the condition of the plane is.

Jeb already had his share of the funds to contribute. I have to accumulate mine from various accounts I have scattered around. We think of this as Loading the Gun. When we write the check for the plane, that is Pulling the Trigger. You can't pull the trigger if the gun isn't loaded.

Wish us luck.

More With Less

Okay, I stole the title from the article. There is a great article in the June 2008 EAA Sport Aviation magazine by Neal Willford titled More With Less - A look at low-powered and efficient flight, appearing on page 54. The article is about flying using the least fuel. He covers sink rate and drag, speed, power to climb. He talks about how wing span loading affects minimum thrust horsepower requirements and minimum power speed. There is a lot of interesting stuff in this article,

The most fascinating section in the article for me is the one on sink rate and drag. In order to understand that section, you must know that parasite drag is drag caused by moving a solid object through a fluid. Induced drag is drag due to lift. Here is an interesting chart from Wikipedia:



Here are some gems from that section: "What aerodynamicists discovered is that there are some interesting performance relationships between parasitic and induced drag. The first is that the airspeed for minimum sink rate occurs when an airplane's induced drag is exactly three times its parasitic drag. Any other speed, whether slower or faster, will require more power to fly."



Veerrrrryyyy interesting. You can see that in the chart.

"The second relationship occurs when the parasite drag is equal to the induced drag. At this speed, the airplane is flying at its best lift to drag (L/D), or glide, ratio. This occurs at an airspeed that's 32% greater than the minimum sink airspeed. The max L/D speed is what you would want to fly at if maximum range or fuel economy is your goal."

I did that in a Piper Cherokee 160 after reading this article. Its best L/D speed is 82 mph. I flew around for an hour to see what it was like. First, I noticed that it was quieter in the cockpit. The engine was not laboring very much. I found it to be quite serene. And consider this - when people want to know how much experience you have as a pilot, what do they ask? They ask how many HOURS you have. They don't ask how fast or far you fly. They don't ask how big a hurry you are always in. So if you fly at max L/D, you are gaining more hours of experience AND you are saving fuel AND you are being easier on your engine simply by flying a little slower.

But back to the article...

"The last relationship occurs at the airspeed when the parasitic drag is three times greater than the induced drag. This condition is sometimes referred to as Carson's speed, and is 32 percent greater than the max L/D speed, or 73 percent higher than the minimum sink speed... ...While flying at maximum speed will get you to your destination the quickest, it requires the most power and fuel burned. Flying at maximum L/D gives you the best fuel economy, but it is slower than most people want to fly. ... there is a speed where you get the most increase in speed for the least amount of excess power (and fuel) burned... This is the Carson speed mentioned earlier."

Okay, so the Carson speed for that Cherokee 160 would be 1.32 times 82 miles per hour, or 108 miles per hour. I have not gone up to see what engine rpm that correlates to, but I think it would be an interesting experiment.

For me, the point of this article was to remind me that I can fly at any speed I want to, and there are benefits and consequences to any speed I select. I think I should become familiar with the relationship between speed and fuel consumption in any plane I fly.

One more comment. If you rent a plane wet (that means the fuel is included in the rental rate, for you non-pilots), you get charged the hourly rate regardless of whether you are saving fuel or not. If you slow down and save fuel, it takes you longer to get to your destination, so you end up paying more for the trip. You pay MORE for conserving! The economics of aircraft rental are such that you minimize your rental cost if you fly as fast and fuel-inefficiently as possible. That is harder on the plane and wastes fuel, but it costs the renter less.

If you own your own airplane, however, I think there are true benefits to slowing down a little. Your fuel costs will be lower. Your engine will last longer. It will take a little longer to get where you are going, but that means you get to fly for a longer period of time! It's win-win-win-win!