It’s been a very busy couple of weeks at work, as I’ve been assigned a new position while still keeping the plates spinning on the old one and trying to find a replacement that can plausibly step in, get the work done and guard the company’s equities. Things were much easier back in the day, when an enormous bureaucracy existed for just such a purpose. In a lean, entrepreneurial company, a lot of that falls on the incumbents.
But by 1500 Friday afternoon, I’d pretty much had it, so it was off to the aerodrome to polish crosswind landing skills in tailwheel aircraft with CFI Glenn.
Glenn is a bluff, hearty man, whose characteristic Irish humor is only partly offset by his New Yawk provenance. Damned good instructor though, technically astute in the nature of aviation and gifted with a calming pedagogical style. Flies the Travelairs for the weekend company and actually makes an honest living as a CFI, which is nothing if not remarkable.
Shortly before I arrived at Gillespie, an F4U Corsair had landed, escorted by divers and sundry manners of gaily festooned YAKs flown by members of the RedStar Pilots Association, a group about which I hope to some day learn more.
Over 12,000 Corsairs were built between 1942 and 1952, and some dozens are thought to have survived. It was the first model aircraft I made as a boy, Glenn’s too. I still remember running my fingers across the gull wing design with a kind of joy and wonder. The 2000 horses under the cowl seemed to call for 60 degrees (!) of flaps to get the beast back on deck. Carrier suitability issues meant that the Marines flew the vast majority of F4U missions in the Pacific War, but at age 9 I neither knew nor cared. She was – and is – a beauty. Lethal too, racking up an impressive 11:1 kill ratio. Nor to be trifled with: Only 189 were lost in aerial combat, while nearly 700 were lost in non-combat operations.
Ground operations in the 7KCAB Citabria have become unremarkable, and I am even getting accustomed to the heel brakes. Stayed in the pattern and flew a nice 3-pointer, followed up by a tolerable wheel landing. Which was when things got kind of interesting.
Glenn negotiated the use of Runway 35/17 at Gillespie for crosswind use – the winds were 260/10. Aircraft were still taking off and landing on the parallel runways 27, so traffic pattern scan was heterodox: Instead of scanning ahead for traffic, we were required to watch for folks landing 90 degrees across our flight path.
Lifting off Runway 27R we made a ninety degree turn to crosswind and stayed on that course until Sarah the Tower Controller (who did a marvelous job) cleared us for a touch and go on RW17. There are two methods to land a tricycle gear aircraft; crabbing into the wing, or using the wing-down, top rudder method. In most light aircraft the wing-down/top rudder method is preferred since it avoids sidestressing the landing gear on touch down. (In the FA-18, and I believe in large body aircraft, the crab is preferred. In the Hornet you were advised to take half the crab out with a stab of rudder on touchdown.)
In a conventional tailwheel aircraft you must never land in a crab, not unless your intention is to ball the thing up. But, as CFI Dave pointed out to me a few weeks back, an initial crab into the wind on final is useful to determine what you’re dealing with. Yesterday it required about a ten degree crab angle to track down the centerline, before easing the aircraft into the wing down/top rudder attitude.
If you’ve read about or personally flown tailwheel landings, than nothing I’m about to say will surprise you: It’s not that they are inherently harder to fly, but they are terribly unforgiving of inattention, and you’ve got to fly the aircraft about all three axes until you’ve got her shut down. Land with a drift – any drift at all – or land in a crab, and it’s off to the races.
Without my being aware of it somehow, Glenn had negotiated a 180 pattern to come back and land on the runway we’d just departed going the opposite direction. It felt more like a strafing pattern than a landing pattern, and I noticed that both the my seat back and control stick were starting to sweat a bit. Had to be, because otherwise it would have been hard to explain the moisture in my palm and shirt. Runway 35 has some hangers to the west that make for turbulent airflow approaching ground effect, so even more attention than usual had to be applied. We did the same 180 degree turn coming back around to land towards the south, but my attempted wheel landing ended up in a bounce. I wrestled with the Citabria for a moment before deciding that there were very few problems that can’t be solved by the application of full power. Yanked her off the deck, accelerated in ground effect and noticed that the cabin heater seemed to have gotten stuck on full hot. Glenn was chortling merrily in the trunk, seeming perfectly at ease.
More traffic arrived than could safely be dealt with, so we flew two more landings on Runway 27L that seemed trivial by comparison to the crosswind work. Converted the last lift off to a left 270 to land crosswind again on Runway 35. Good, clean fun and an excellent workout.
After shutting down and parking the plane, the F4U took off, both preceded and followed by a swarm of YAKs. Her pilot accelerated her gradually at first before cobbing on full power and lifting gracefully into the sky. An arcing right hand turn to the north showed the Corsair in planform – the last sight that many a Zero pilot would ever see.
It was a pretty good day.
Always good “flying” with you Lex. Conventional gear landings in a crosswind are a little like trying to balance a pencil on your finger. It only works if you constantly keep the controls moving (*small* inputs).
Nothing takes your mind off the day job like trying to prevent a ground loop.
Lex:
Two questions: A) What is it about the Citabria’s heater system that makes it go to “full hot” whenever a student/PUI is in the front seat? The very same thing has been happening to me in the Citabria I’m flying! B) Crab onto a runway in the Hornet at the field I kind of understand, but at the boat? Maybe it’s the Whale/Intruder ‘FO in me, but I know that Line Up is (almost) everything, so I distinctly recall wing-down,top rudder the whole way in the groove. In fact I had to really work at un-learning that in the Cirrus until short final when flying it in any sort of stiff crosswind.
VR,
Comjam
The Mustang gets all the fame, attention and glory, but I am a Corsair man. The models with the 4 bladed prop, they can make the hair on my arms stand up.
Lex, if the happy day arrives when you find yourself in commmand of a Corsair, I will meet you at the airport with my Nikon and my fast glass, and I will take pictures until all my memory cards are full. Leather jacket de riguer attire.
2 points:
1. I want me one of those Ercoupes.
2. I got to stand behind an F4U when the Double Wasp was started, to get the full sensory experience. It was wonderful.
Well, three points.
3. The SBD was my earliest love, as Monogram model, and in pictures. I read a Robb White story about an SBD crew when I was about nine, which left an impression on me. I remember he mentioned the dogtags on string instead of on chain so as not to melt into you in a fire, and the discussion between pilot and rear-seatman about how broken bones looked when poking out from the wounds.
I betcha they don’t let kids read stuff like that these days.
Holy cow! Robb White? SBD pilot, took a 20mm in the cockpit, slowly working his way back to the boat with a busted leg bleeding out, kept dreaming about “A stopper. With a long, beaded chain.”
I *remember* that book! The school library had it in paperback, I must have been in second or third grade when I read it. I certainly remember that the kindergarten baby rhyme was changed to:
Kindergarten baby, enlisted in the Navy.
Four tried to fly an SBD and now there’s only three!
(Hey! I was a kid! I didn’t say it was an epic!)
One of those childhood reads I’d like to read again, ‘cept I didn’t remember the author, the title, or much else besides the highlights of the story.
Some day I ought to pay more attention to who and what I’m reading rather than just the story.
– Max
P.s. According to Wikipedia, White was a 1931 grad of USNA, and a Naval Aviator in WWII.
I leaned taildragger in a 75-hp Fleet Canuck. No flaps – it didn’t need them since it always flew slow as hell anyway. Did the same thing as you about practicing xwind, but I lost it a bit. The resulting excursion into the gravel off the concrete edge culminated in a horrific thump that sounded like splashing a runway marker light with the tailwheel (which was about the size of the casters on a grocery cart, except it had less control authority). Back into the air, we flew down the runway counting lights – yep, one was missing and there was a shitload of glass all over the place. My instructor realized we had a problem – the left seat had the only brakes, and that’s where I was sitting, for the first time. Pretty soon we are flying around with him wedged out the right door, looking to see if we have a tailwheel. But the seatbelt would not let him hang out far enough and low enough, so eventually he undid it, and I held onto his belt, and of course, flew the plane.
He never got out far enough to make sure he could have seen the wheel if it was there (gosh, I wonder why not…) So I had the bright idea (actually) to divert to a nearby grass strip. He flew the landing, counting on being able to stick the stump of the tailwheel into the turf to assist in keeping the noisy end in front, as it were. It was an anticlimax when it turned out we still had a tailwheel after all, but it was an interesting day! Yes, I eventually soloed in the little bugger, and actually got passably handy in landing it.
Taildraggers always work better on grass, and better yet if there’s a skid to give some drag behind the C of G, instead of a silly wheel.
Really, I betcha there were no ground loops before paved runways and tailwheels were invented.
P.p.s. White also wrote “The Lion’s Paw”, which was one of my favorite books when I was a kid, and supposedly the most popular out-of-print book ever, with copies going for $500. It has recently been republished privately by his family.
My grandfather was a Marine mechanic for Corsairs; he deployed on Tico, right near the end. He once claimed that, at some point after the war, they deployed nukes on Corsairs. I never knew whether to believe him on that one; the mental image of an early nuke slung underneath that giant radial just does not compute.
Dad flew the F4U-5N at night on the Okinawa Picket line, with a later deployment to Iwo. He said the only reason he survived the war was that he flew from airfields and not carriers, because when you put the Corsair into a landing attitude, the only thing you could see in front of you was aircraft nose — and the only thing you could see in a landing attitude at night was *nothing*…