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
From:
Lancair Mailing List
[mailto:lml@lancaironline.net] On Behalf Of
terrence o'neill
Sent: Monday, June 02, 2008 3:50
PM
To: lml@lancaironline.net
Subject: [LML] Re: AOA and flight testing
tid bits
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!
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