The Instructor's Corner When Am I Going To Solo? By Jim Hurst To be qualified to solo, a student must have the necessary flying skills, but what is equally important is whether the student is ready to "take charge" of the aircraft. In the first few flights the instructor does most of the flying and makes all the decisions. The instructor decides when to get off tow, which way to fly, when to head back toward the field, when to give up working thermals and start the landing pattern and where to land. As training progresses, the thoughtful instructor will wait to see if the student gets nervous about being too far from the field, or being in a poor position to enter the pattern. The instructor can only wait so long to find out if the student is going to do the right thing, because the instructor can get nervous too. After all, off field landings are no picnic, for the pilots or the crew which has to get the glider back to the field. Student pilots who are beginning to be able to find the glider landing area consistently, should get the message that it is time for them to be making ALL the decisions about their flight. When you get a license you will be the pilot in command, and in fact, when you take the fight test, you ARE the pilot in command, and the examiner will be expecting the license candidate to be in charge of the aircraft. If he gets nervous enough about anything and feels it necessary to take over the decision making, you will flunk the test. Nobody is expecting a student to be a dare devil, and to press on with any phase of a flight and put himself in an awkward position. Don't let an instructor suggest maneuvers which throw away altitude if you think you don't have any to spare. If you get too low to make it back to the field, make it be the instructor's fault, not yours. When you begin to feel that you have the skill to solo, be sure you begin exercising the good judgment which must go along with it. Don't be afraid to say: "Wait a minute, let me see where the field is before we do this spin entry", or lets give up on this weak thermal, because I don't like starting the landing pattern from where we are or I'm going to leave this thermal because it's too crowded for me", or "the glider landing area is all cluttered up, so I'm going to land on the main runway". You will be the only one available to make these decisions after you get your license and you have Aunt Minnie in the back seat. You will learn more about flying after you get your license than you did before. To get the license, you only have to be safe. To be a safe pilot, you don't have to have the skill to handle EVERYTHING. You just have to be aware of your own limitations and be wise enough to avoid the situations you can't handle. Stick & Rudder Revisited by Jim Hurst I just finished reading Langwische's classic for the second time and was amazed at how much I had forgotten in 25 years. His great message is "whenever anything goes wrong, push the stick forward. I have noted that this is slightly contrary to the accepted spin recovery procedure, which is "stop rotation with rudder first, THEN stick forward". The difference is whether your are spinning or not. If you are spinning, you are either spinning on purpose and you are holding the stick back to the stop to keep the wing stalled, OR, you have stalled in a turn and panicked and pulled the stick back to keep the nose from dropping. In either case, it seems right to stop the rotation first before you push the stick forward, allowing the speed to increase. Our instruction ought to be aimed at "not spinning" rather than spin recovery. Langwische's recommendations are aimed at "not spinning, and I interpret his advice to push the stick forward when some goes wrong" to mean when the airplane does something you didn't make it do, or it fails to respond to the controls. If the nose drops when you are pulling the stick back, you have the wing stalled. If a wing drops and does not respond to opposite aileron, you may have stalled the wing tip. In either case you are in a good position to spin if you do the wrong thing. If you push the stick forward first, you will unstall the wing and the aircraft cannot spin. You will lose some altitude, but you won't spin. The new Blanik gives some good lessons in "spinning or not spinning". If you hold the stick back, it will readily spin from a stall in a turn, as the nose drops and it begins to rotate toward the low wing. If in the stalling turn you use full opposite rudder, it will go over the top and spin in the other direction. Yet the spin is very easily prevented by pushing the stick forward. The Blanik is a good addition to our fleet. Everyone making the transition from trainers to any higher performance sailplane should do some spin entries in the blanik. The 2-33's sometimes spin and sometimes don't depending on the loading, and the Grob is sometimes difficult to get to spin and when it does, often it's a nasty surprise. Langwische's advice still works, but don't test it too close to the ground. While making "S" turns in a 1-23 preparing for my first off field landing many years ago, I found myself flying at about 4Omph at about 200 feet off the ground. Believe me, it is very difficult to push the stick forward when your are already skimming over the top of trees and wires. If I had hit a gust and stalled, I may have instinctively done the wrong thing. Fortunately, I did have enough altitude to increase my speed and make a safe landing. We used to say that it wouldn't hurt to drop the nose a little in every pattern turn. That advice is not all bad either. Landings By Jim Hurst When a student has landed a 2-33 and is rolling along on the main gear steadily approaching the end of the field, I instinctively push the stick forward jamming the skid on the ground and slam on the brakes. Many students tell me that other instructors don't want them to do it like that. As is usually the case when our students get conflicting instructions, there are good reasons for doing it both ways. If you have Aunt Minnie on board or any other uninitiated passenger, it will probably impress them if you do a nice full stall landing, floating over the ground as long as possible, before finally settling to the turf, and holding the nose up until the glider comes to a stop. It's like landing a tail wheel airplane. I can still hear my instructors saying "hold it off - hold it off - hold it off". With this type of landing. you try your best to keep the aircraft in the air, so that it finally touches down at -the slowest possible speed. There is nothing wrong with that procedure when you have plenty of room. I tend to teach in a manner which prepares the student for an off field landing, when perhaps the field is short. In such an instance, floating the glider over the ground eats up a lot of space. If you want to get down quickly and stop with the shortest landing roll (or skid!) you should fly the glider into the ground at nearly approach speed. I don't mean that you don't flare at all, I mean you hold your approach speed until you are very close to the ground, and then flare enough to fly level initially, but then just let it land. Seems like I remember Phil Wills describing it as "smashing it into the ground"! This may be kind of unceremonious and ungraceful, but it will get you stopped in the shortest possible space. Now don't quote me as saying this works 100% of the time. This works well for gliders whose C.G. is ahead of the main landing gear like Schweizers. You can tell this group of gliders by the fact that the nose is on the ground when the pilot is aboard. Not so with the Blanik L23 and some other high performance sailplanes. When you land on the main gear, the nose goes down because the C. G. is forward, reduces the angle of attack, which reduces lift, and the airplane can't fly anymore. In the Blanik, where the C.G. is behind the main gear, if you land it too fast on the main gear, the tail will tend to go down, increasing lift, and you may find yourself flying again! I haven't experimented much with the tail heavy gliders, but stall landings are more in order with them. Even hitting the tail wheel slightly first will not hurt you. It would seem that approaching at the slowest speed consistent with the wind conditions would allow you to get down and stopped in the shortest space. Good dive brakes help a lot in the tail heavy airplanes. You can get the nose up into a two point landing attitude at a higher speed and still maintain your descent.