Credo
"Sign on, young man, and sail with me. The stature of our homeland is no more than the measure of ourselves. Our job is to keep her free. Our will is to keep the torch of freedom burning for all. To this solemn purpose we call on the young, the brave, the strong, and the free. Heed my call, Come to the sea. Come Sail with me." -- John Paul Jones
"Pardon him, Theodotus; he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature" --George Bernard Shaw, "Caesar and Cleopatra"
"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."--Friedrich Nietzsche
"A kind Providence has placed in our breasts a hatred of the unjust and cruel, in order that we may preserve ourselves from cruelty and injustice. They who bear cruelty, are accomplices in it. The pretended gentleness which excludes that charitable rancour, produces an indifference which is half an approbation. They never will love where they ought to love, who do not hate where they ought to hate."--Edmund Burke
“You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”--General Sir Charles Napier
"Μολὼν λαβέ" -- Leonidas
"Blogito Ergo Sum" -- Neptunus Lex
I saw this vid yesterday on a Wisconsin TV site. Another version exists which shows that a (I believe a police car) vehicle quickly merged out in front of the bird. The pilot’s response was to drop hard to the deck to get an intentional bounce over the offending vehicle. He said it was a old crop duster trick to get over ground obstructions, and he never had need for it before that incident.
Nice flying! I’d ride with him even behind the old Pratt. I’m wondering if it’s one of those two Missouri Texans (one being an SNJ) that was in SJ two months ago. Both were beautifully restored A/C.
Amazing there was no damage, great airmanship!
Brings an entire new rules set on who yields to who….you know, like a sailboat (under sail) gets the right of way over all powered vessels…aircraft with non-functioning engine(s) is allowed to merge into your lane without prejudice, or with, if you are too stupid to understand gravity and/or the law of gross tonnage, or the radio is up way too high.
Which, if you need a laugh about this, check out “405″ , which has been around a while now….and make sure to check the 3rd dimension in your rear view regularly (safe for work, safe for kids).
Will this become a standard question on the WI driver’s test from now on?
I just loved the shot where the car notices the plane descending on him so he puts on his left turn signal and pulls over…
Great! Just great!
Cool. Nice aviating.
I knew there were more considerate drivers in CheeseHeadLand!
If’n that happened on the Beltway nobody woulda made any room!
b2
B2,
If’n he tried that on the Beltway (or Atlanta’s Perimeter) he could do touch ‘n goes and simulate a cat shot as fast as those folks drive.
You guys know the geography better than I do – this is not far from Oshkosh, no?
Yes – dead stick from a pre-war lump of iron – nice work.
Yep, it’s about 20 miles SSE of Oshkosh, Chris.
A question for the professionals and/or talented amateurs– I’ve heard it takes more skill to taxi a tail dragger, is it any harder to LAND one?
A few yrs ago for my b-day my bros and sisters got me a ride in one of the SNJs at Palomar– that was probably the single best flight I’ve ever taken. On the ground, from the back seat, there was virtually NO forward view. Pretty AWESOME view once we were aloft– it was like a VistaDome rail car. Engine noise was spectacular as well. I kept thinking, “if this engine (600 hp Pratt and Whitney) sounds like THIS, what does a MERLIN sound like from the cockpit?!”
/BeachBum
We practice the same thing in the new T-6 Texan II. But we are not supposed to land on highways, just runways. If there is not one within gliding distance, then that is what the million dollar ejection seats are for. Thank you taxpayers!
yeah baby, R-985. First round engine I ever worked on and in that same airframe.
Any word on cause? Fuel, engine, operator?
An A&P somewhere is at max pucker tonight waiting for his sign off to show in the logbooks…
I do miss the aircraft. I don’t miss the liability.
a recovering sailor and recovering A&P,
dw
chic[k]pilot….
Just make sure your visor is down before you pull the “I believe handle”. There were stories of an air force wso student got ejected without his visor down and caught some of the canopy in his eyes. Sucks to be him.
Oh, and there’s a famous article from teh Naval Aviation safety mag, from back in the fifties.
I think the title is something like “…And then there were none..”
It’s about a flight of Grumman Panthers doing a cross-country who screwed up by the numbers, some of whom died, some of whom ejected, some of whom landed on the road, taxied into town, and angle-parked by the curb.
(I don’t think it was possible to parallel-park one of those. No reversers, y’know.)
BeachBum,
FWIW, I never found a taildragger harder to land per se, they just demand more attention during all aspects of ground handling, particularly the landing roll. With a nosedragger (ha!) you tend to relax a bit after touching down – you can’t do that with an aeroplane with conventional landing gear, the roll out is the most critical time. The centre of gravity is behind the main landing gear (main friction point), so during deceleration on the ground the thing wants to swap ends. Try throwing a dart backwards, same idea. Coupled to the fact that the wing is naturally at a higher angle of attack when the tail is on the ground, making it more susceptible to a cross wind.
Although if the engine quit you’d probably be happy getting onto the ground safely regardless of groundlooping afterwards.
/would love to fly a Texan one day
//but we call them Harvards
///only have about ten hours in aircraft with conventional landing gear, large grain of salt required
Chris, that Deakins fellow who writes over at AvWeb, I think it’s called, claims to be able to back a C-46 into a parking place by ground-looping it at just the right last moment.
I had a forklift get kinda almost tippy on me one time, so yeah, I understand the sensation of the groundloop.
[...] highway in between moving cars. I hope he didn?
[...] highway in between moving cars. I hope he didn’t get a speeding ticket. article continues at lex brought to you by travel and [...]
Minor nitpick: the T6/SNJ powerplant is a P&W 1340, not a 985, and it doesn’t have feathering a mechanism – but if you pull the prop all the way back while (if) you still have a little oil pressure after an engine failure the blades will go pretty flat. But not feathered.
As for visibility in the back of a T6, yup pretty blind–which is why you spend a few hours back there before you climb into a P-51.
My wife and I owned and operated that Texan at Palomar (we sold the business about a year ago), and I flew it from the back doing check outs with new pilots and training hops for FAA pilots. You get used to it. Had a some real fun flying with a Navy TPS graduate, a former X-31 test pilot, that was part of our aircrew.
As for the difficulty landing a tailwheel aircraft — with the center of gravity behind the wheels they want to swap ends if allowed. When I was at NFO school (VT-10) in Pensacola back in the early 70′s our trainers were big ol’ twin engine taildraggers, UC-45Js. The former Phantom drivers that flew them entertained us about once a week with an ego-trashing groundloop demonstration.
Crosswinds per se are not the problem, it’s the sideways drift that can develop if the crosswind isn’t properly handled. Big fat old tires, designed to be happy on grass, create a lot of friction when they touch. If the aircraft is moving sideways, the wheels stop the drift, the inertia of the fuselage and empennage keeps the tail going sideways, and a turning couple develops which leads to a ground loop. Keep the wing down into the wind to stop the drift–land initially on one wheel if you have too–and then use full aileron after touchdown to create as much adverse yaw as possible to counteract any weathervane effect and you won’t have any problem. Sound complicated? It’s not, just different. Nosedraggers, like a dart, have positive directional stability; taildraggers, with negative directional stability, are not forgiving.
Takeoffs in a taildragger, by the way, can be exciting too. If you allow a little sideways drift to develop the bird will crow hop of the runway (if it doesn’t groundloop first) and you’ll do a little off-roading before you get airborne, assuming you don’t hit anything. I flew a T6 down at Gillespie Field that had been restored twice–the second time after the know-it-all owner tried to fly it without any recent taildragger experience. He never got to demonstrate his landing prowess, he rolled it up in a ball on the first takeoff.
Apropos #13, here you go: And Then There Were None. I liked the one about the guy landing on the dam…
-SJS
I’ve been looking for that SJS-
A friggin classic! Shoulda been a movie.
b2
A few notes from above the Cheddar Curtain:
Fond du Lac (FLD) is the Warbirds HQ during the EAA Air-Venture show in Oshkosh and we also host overflow air-camping that doesn’t fit at OSH.
Went to high school with the trooper, good guy. Used to drive around at night in a Mercury Lynx with all exterior lights extinguished and the dome light illuminated, with occassional e-brake applications on icy roads — probably makes him a good trooper!
Two troopers were dealing with a disabled RV, so were on scene ASAP, bouncing over the RV was the reason for the crop-duster move. Driver also pulled over because the trooper had the cherries & berries & siren on (I suspect Luke selected the Whoop Whoop alert sound), expensive ticket to ignore. RV was apparently owned by friend who had flown in said T-6…
Luke has neither confirmed or denied that his Trooper Trousers got a third stripe.
Plane landed 1/4 mile East of FLD runway, which was occuppied by EAA traffic… merging with highway traffic was the safest alternative to a runway occupied by non-moving aircraft. FLD sent truck with a tow-bar and pulled the T-6 from N-bound lanes to S-bound, then the highway dept. cut the fence and dumped a load of gravel to get through the ditch onto the frontage road over to FDL.
Plane is hangared awaiting outcome of the FAA investigation — engine trouble is repariable, leading edge of right wing sustained “minor” damage due to black & yellow sign marking small bridge (railing visible in video).
Product placement for the local Visitor’s Bureau to be in the background of most still pictures, priceless!!
re: R985
you’re right of course (Stearmans on the brain)