Terrence,

I have the AOA Pro mounted in my panel on my Legacy.  I am not flying yet…Soon??!!

What does your AOA look like?

Bill B 

Hi Matt,

I applaud your interest in trying to understand your flying.

You might look at the December 1998 issue of Kitplanes magazine, page 96.  There's a 6-page article i wrote on Angle of Attack indicators.  I flew P2V s in the Navy until 1957, getting out the year after the US Navy first put AOAs on every carrier-based aircaft, which cut landing accidents FIFTY-PERCENT -- 50% -- the first year.  Being in a Patrol Squadron we didn't have them, but when I bought the last Waco project I restored it and began test flying it in 1963,  and I found I needed to know what the wing was doing in slow-flight.  I had two years of aero-engineering in college and learned in a wind-tunnel session one day that wings can stall at ANY airspeed, but always at ONE angle of attack.  So, as there were no non-military AOAs on the market in the 60s, I made an AOA indicator for myself.

I immediately learned that although I thought I  'knew' a lot about flying, I didn't UNDERSTAND what controlled what. 

I was surprised to immediately learn that I, the pilot, directly and instantly controlled the wing's AOA with my elevator control.  The little free-floating vane on my AOA moved as though it was connected with a string to the elevator.  And that the wing's AOA could remain the same in any flight attitude.

I found I could fly for an hour holding my Waco's wing just one degree below the wing's stall AOA, while climbin it, zooming, making 90-degree banks, etc., just by watching my AOA vane.

I learned that making steep approach turns in hot, gusty wind, to land ,was 'no sweat', since I could SEE exactly how close I was flying my wing to its stall AOA.

I took-off once when the pitot line pulled off the tube and I noticed zero airspeed on the A/S indicator, but just glanced out at my AOA and relaxed... flew the AOA for climb around and landed, and reconnected the A/S pitot tube.

I also noticed that I became uncomfortable when flying in planes with no AOAs... which back then was almost every GenAv plane.

Like a kid with a boom-box I wanted to spread the joy, but quickly found that most pilots were comfortable with what habits and instruction that'd expensively learned from the FAA-guided courses and -- ho-hum -- said 'that's nice', and what else was new.

When I researched safety records I found that about one-fourth of all GenAv fatal crashes resulted from stall-spins, and nearly a third of all Experimentals.  So I wrote the '98 article for Kitplanes, eagerly accepted by Editor Dave Martin who was an ex-Navy ROI in F4s and understood exactly how critical AOA info was for sale slow-flight.

Going another step I contacted the FAA's head then, Najeeb Hallaby, who lateralled me to his FAA Safety bureaucrat, whose people wanted the indicator mounted on the instrument panel, where a pilot should NOT be looking during a landing approach.

The FAA had a lot inertia in their training curriculuum about airspeeds, and the AOA idea faded away.

So I still felt philanthropic and crusaderish and tried making and selling them.  More education: advertising is very expensive.  One-off or short-run production makes parts and labor costs high.  But over the years I sold about 120 of them, the majority to ultra-light guys who don't 'know it all', and some to ex-Navy jocks, and guys flying for the few (then) airline companies that put AOAs on their aluminum tubes.

Over the years I had to admit that 'safety' was a hard-sell, and it was was disappointing and certainly unprofitable, all that bother and work and selling them for less than $150.

I mentioned their availability a time or two on this list but someone accused me of self-interest with a hint of  snake-oil-salesman-ness, so I just stopped making them altogether.

But you can make a completely adequate and functional one like mine, yourself.  I still make them for my own planes, the Waco tail-prop AristoCraft, my Model W, the Jake, the Magnu V8 PickUp,  my modified Mitchell B-10 'flying wing', our Dragonfly, and have one on each wing-stub of our Lancair 235/320.

They are 'pilot information' and can be put on any plane, with no FAA STC or PMA if you don't 'invade' the plane's structure or systems.  For experimentals you just do it yourself.  For TC'd planes just a mechanic's logbook entry.  Some have been clamped to Cessna or Aeronca wing struts.  They could be glued to wing skins.  Only weigh a few ounces.

Before ANY instruments were put an the newfangled 'airplanes', Orville and Wilbur put a floating piece of yarn on their biplane, with marking to tell them at what angle they were flying their wings. That was the first, and the essential, flight instrument.  They understood what they learned in their own DIY wind tunnel ... that wings stall at an ANGLE!

You could DIY.  FWIW.

Terrence

L235/320 N211AL

at KGRE