NOW THIS is a flying club which knows how to treat a guy. It has laid on a nice warm day, given me a comfy chair in the sun, and provided me with a temporary secretary to dictate to. The members even tactfully averted their gaze when I so far forget myself as to light my pipe for a couple of surreptitious puffs, which will hopefully disperse before the airport fire crew decide my head has combusted and act accordingly, which could conceivably lead to earache.
And they have provided dancing aeroplanes. For I am here as Guest Judge at a Beginners’ Aerobatic Competition. Not a formal affair run by the excellent British Aerobatic Association (BAeA) – no, no, much smaller than that. This is an entirely internal club-cum-flying-school competition. There are a whole five competitors and only one judge – me. Sadly no-one has proffered a respectable bribe, so I have to fall back on judging fairly.
I have no idea what to expect. They may be shambolic. They may be wildly inaccurate. They may fall out of manoeuvres or lose their place in the sequence. They may even be dangerous, in which case I will have to come over all heavy and probably get conked on the swede for my efforts as I try to leave.Well…
Well, they are not shambolic. They are not wildly inaccurate – oh, there are quite a number of points I’ve picked up. Of course there are, but these are polishing-up matters, not wild inaccuracies. Nobody falls out of anything, and nobody loses their place. Some of the positioning is a wee bit… er, novel – but, of course, it will be at Beginners, positioning being by far the most difficult thing to keep up with. But nobody disappears into the next county, or anything like it. And most importantly, nobody is dangerous – at no point am I sucking my teeth and frowning. Walking back to the clubhouse I find myself thinking – what a good day.
I do not write “puff” articles. But praise is due where praise is due. I am guest of the Tiger Airways Flying Club, run by old mates Chris Rollings and Tizi Hodson, at Staverton. (Oh, sorry… mustn’t call the place Staverton any more – the joint has undergone an image make-over and now styles itself Gloucestershire Airport.)
So a bouquet for this same Gloucestershire Airport. It is notoriously difficult to persuade aerodromes to allow aerobatics in the overhead, but Gloucestershire has had the good sense to realise it’s perfectly safe if
properly organised, doesn’t need to interfere with other air traffic, and is, in fact, a real asset, being a sort of aerial advertisement for the place. So well done Gloucestershire Airport – may your traffic figures multiply.
What a good day. The pilots flew well, and the results are a remarkably close-run thing. At the Chief Judge’s de-briefing – and, of course, it’s easy to be Chief Judge when you are also the only judge – I am able to say with complete sincerity that all folk present are perfectly well up to a national Beginners competition, no question. And that a BAeA Beginners comp will of necessity be a tad more formal, but is also cheery and amiable. You can do it.
What I do not say, out of sheer personal ineptitude, is just how much of a good thing this day this has been. Good for the flying club because practise for the up-coming competition has done no harm whatsoever to the club aircraft utilisation rate. Good for the airport. And above all, good for the pilots. They have had a target which is challenging but not too daunting. They are not among strangers. They have not had to face what they might have feared – wrongly, but might have feared – a line-up of granite-faced judges capable of donning the black cap at any moment.
They have not had transit costs – indeed the most expensive thing about the whole shebang has probably been the road killburgers at the post-competition barbecue. I have also not, in my de-briefing, said the most important thing of all.
That this, of course, on a tiny scale here, is exactly the way to improve piloting skills. I say this most sincerely. If every flying club / school did this then the standard of pilotage in this world would rise significantly. That is the fact.
The more so because this is not a one-off event. Tiger Airways plans to repeat its little contest every six weeks or so during next summer. The formula is so very simple. Announce the comp to your own members, invite some bumbling idiot like me to be a guest judge – and Bob’s your uncle. No clutter, no big expense, and if the weather forecast looks duff you simply bin it the day before and go for same day, same time, same place next week.
It doesn’t replace or usurp national competitions. But it makes a solid start at the grass roots level.
Of course, Tiger Airways is not entirely alone. A handful of other clubs / schools are doing much the same thing, and to them also I unreservedly raise the tit-fer-tat. Okay, I’m fully aware that most flying clubs / schools can’t do it because (a) they don’t have an aerobatic trainer on the fleet, (b) they may not have any decent aerobatic instructors, and (c) their home base may be run by those who faint away at the horrific notion of aerobatics over the field. Well, it’s their loss. What does your flying school do to promote repeat-custom past the PPL stage…?
I even get to have a mooch around myself in the club’s Slingsby Firefly, an aeroplane I have not flown before. Not exactly drunk with power with its 160 hp engine – and most certainly not drunk with roll-rate – it is nonetheless nicer to fly than I expected. The ailerons are sad, but the elevators light and not over-trimmed, and the rudder surprisingly light and powerful. So much so that I find my feet sort of fiddling with it – oh, all right, overcontrolling it – during pitch manoeuvres. But no matter. Give it a bit of time and the twitchiness should evaporate without a chap even being aware of what he’s doing differently.
It certainly does a good stall-turn. And it is possessed of a nose-wheel, which makes typeconversion easy. And it’s also practical as an ab initio trainer.
Later, full of barbecued cow-pat – sorry, sorry, burger – and a red wine only faintly reminiscent of Chateau Hydraulic Fluid, I sink back in my comfy chair and remember my own days as an aerobatic instructor. The evening BBQ is much the same as it always was. The babble of conversation is much the same. Only difference now is that some of the competitors today were not even born when I was instructing… But I smile as I remember some of the teaching tricks I developed. For example, I learnt not to actually teach the students slow rolls, daft as it may sound. I taught them by the divide and conquer method.
First teach them how to fly upside down until they got the inverted attitude nailed, could make gentle turns, and pitch up and down and return to that correct level inverted attitude without getting all in a tizz-wazz about the minor detail of the green bit and the blue bit having swapped places.
Then I’d teach them four-point hesitation rolls, for the simple reason that if you hesitate the two median points at 90 and 270 degrees of roll you have time to absorb the correct nose position – and you have to get it right. Then I’d say: “Now just roll without hesitating” – and usually they’d be slow-rolling reasonably adequately within four or five goes. And loops. The only difficulty about early loops is that asymmetric prop blade affect tries to yaw the thing one way while gyroscopic affect attempts to haul it the other, and the dominant factor changes around the circle according to aircraft type and what you had for breakfast. With the result that perspiring students tend to arrive at the top with bank or yaw on. (Same thing in the end).
Solution – ignore the whole thing. Just get them to throw their heads hard back as they lose sight of the horizon during the pull-up so they re-acquire the inverted horizon reference almost immediately – and the problem simply goes away.
And stall-turns. People have this fixation that kicking on rudder is all-important. It isn’t. The really important things are (a) hitting the perfect vertical in the up-line, then (b) kicking on rudder at the right moment, just as the aeroplane stops. So I used to spend real time getting the up-verticals right – even to the extent, given the aircraft performance, of getting them to do an up-quarter vertical roll, which shows up errors like nothing else. I’d then take over at the top and push, pull, stall-turn – it didn’t matter. The vertical was the thing. And once they’d got that reasonably cornered it was a matter of when to kick. Some aeroplanes talk to you – particularly Pitts Specials – by vibration or other seat-ofthe- pants inputs. But most don’t.
So I’d teach them to glance in at the ASI towards the top of the vertical, and kick as it sank down through 38 knots. The thing isn’t doing 38 knots of course – this is ASI-lag – but I’ve found it quite amazing how many different types it works with. Don’t ask me why… What a useful day. I say again – if every flying club/school did this then the standard of pilotage would rise significantly. Period. Er… anybody want a long-in-the-tooth aerobatic instructor…?
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