Pull Up To Go Down

It is often said on TV programs that to make an airplane go up, pull back on the control stick and to go down, push forward. That only works in a very narrow range of flight attitudes. Keep pulling back and the airplane slows to a point that the wings suddenly quit producing lift and down you go, very rapidly. Add full left rudder as seen in this photo, and you spin round and round while falling out of the sky.

The only way to get out of this spin is to pop the stick forward (NOT pull up) and apply opposite rudder. This gets the wings flying again so you can round out to level if you have lots of soft air between the airplane and the ground. An ordinary production light aircraft may lose 500 feet of altitude with each complete rotation. This biplane, however, rotated so fast that it lost less than half that per turn but after a five-turn spin, it took a full turn and a half to stop spinning and recover.

With plenty of altitude and the right kind of aircraft, such as this biplane, spins are great fun, but it is strange seeing the world whirling round and round directly in front of you and structures on the ground growing larger by the second.

#biplane #spin #aerobatics