TWO MONTHS ago I wrote about my five least-favourite flying machines. Which was, with hindsight, not a particularly difficult job.
Now I sit down to pick my most favourite five – and find myself prey to finger- drumming indecision as I pore over a shortlist of at least a dozen. As I slowly cross off excellent – or at least fascinating – aeroplanes to winnow down to the final five, the task becomes ever more difficult. Indeed, in the doing of this list, it is born upon me that I have been unreasonably favoured in my life aloft. I have, through no merit whatsoever of my own, been smiled upon most lavishly with wonderful flying machines.
And so my hand hesitates as I eliminate some very old friends and some very fine aeroplanes. I feel profoundly guilty. What right have I to put a line through the beautiful Chipmunk; or the Sukhoi 26; or the Pitts S2A; or the Decathlon; or the Jungmann; or the Yak 52 or the Harrier, or the Hunter? Or – on a more idiosyncratic level – the Sopwith Camel or the Beech 18, both of which I loved for no visible reason.
But I have done it, and laid down my pen. The following result is – inevitably – a selection of aerobatic aeroplanes. Most I have flown for around 1 000 hours and sometimes many more per type – but one of them for less than one hour. This is a highly personal list, and as forewarned, logic does not particularly enter into it…..
#5: The Pitts Model 12
Logic certainly plays no part in my choice of the Model 12, Curtis Pitts’s swansong design. In his twilight years, Pa Pitts conceived a fascination for the 360 hp Russian Vedeneyev radial engine, until in the end nothing would do but he must create a typical Pitts biplane around it. The result was the Model 12 – possibly the most startling-looking biplane of all time, with its massive eight-foot prop spanning well over a third of the entire wing-span, and endowing the beast with a climb-rate of some 3 700 fpm when flown at typical display weight.
Walking around this aeronautical thug gives the distinct impression of an aircraft which is going to be a handful. Why, a man can’t even raise the tail on takeoff without that huge propeller hitting the ground. You just open up to full grunt then sit there in the parked attitude until the Model 12 simply leaves the ground, obeying not so much aerodynamic laws as sheer tight T-shirt muscle.
With that little weight and that much power you are going to levitate in a very few seconds more or less whatever you do. In the air, however….. Well, in the air, the Model 12 proves quite astonishingly lovely. Still a thug – but a thug who carries little kiddies across the road with a ferocious grin. The roll-rate is faster than any other Pitts. The flick-rate is faster than any other Pitts.
The control forces (thanks to not having to comply with full-certification FAA stick-force-per- G rules) are as sweet as an S1S. And despite the obvious potential for awesome gyroscopic manoeuvres, the various propeller forces quite surprisingly equal themselves out in normal aerobatics. Well, nearly, anyway…. I do not suggest for a moment that the Model 12 is a competitor to the modern monoplanes. It isn’t. But were I looking for a new solo or team display aeroplane, then that would be my choice. Make no mistake – it would take an age to learn how to wrest the most out of it. But once you had, it should be an awesome lowspeed Olympic gymnast of an aeroplane.
I flew it for a whole 40 minutes and it was like falling in lust during a first dance. Forget logic…..
#4: The Stampe SV4B
Imagine you are a millionaire who owns a collection of cars. Imagine you have modern Ferraris, Aston Martins – and a vintage Bentley. And people keep asking you which you prefer to drive…. There is, quite simply, no answer. If the questioner cannot appreciate that they satisfy quite different dreams – why, if the clod doesn’t have an inkling of that, you could talk all afternoon and never explain it.
The Stampe was my vintage Bentley. I have never been – and most certainly never will be – a millionaire, so all my aeroplanes had to earn both their own living and mine. The modern machines were infinitely more practical in this slightly-important endeavour – but the Stampe held a special place in my heart.
(Well – except on freezing cold days when you had to fight the slight temptation to shove the thing down in a field and set fire to it just to get enough warmth into your bones to rejoin the human race).
For one thing the Stampe was such a good teacher. Aerobatically it would do just about everything you could reasonably expect – including flicks and negative manoeuvres – but to achieve elegance, not to mention safety, you did have to get it right. Not just a bit right, but right.
It would do a clean up half-vertical roll if you got it right – but if you tried to heave in control inputs on the way up to correct a less-than-perfect vertical attitude, then it would hmmph at the extra drag and embarrass you by running out of energy at the top. So perforce you had to get it right. Period.
In the same way it taught you energyconservation – another way of saying seat-of-the-pants flying feel. If you could learn when to pull hard, when to pull soft, where to float out figures teasing zero-G for minimum drag – why, then, the Stampe would keep aerobating with a base height of the deck all day. If you couldn’t learn that, it wouldn’t. Simple as that. So you bloody well learned it…..
#3: The Extra 300L
If this was logical, the Extra 300L would unquestionably come first. For one thing, if you want a very high performance monoplane with two seats and full Public Transport certification, there is no contest. There is one of it in the world. The 300L. Certainly, there are a handful of singleseaters which will out-perform it. Extra’s own new 330SC comes to mind. As does the CAP 232, the Edge 540, the Sukhoi 26 (especially with the souped-up 450 hp engine), and a couple of others. They will all pee on the 300L – but not from any great height. An excellent pilot in a 300L can still beat a nearly-excellent pilot in any of ‘em.
No small achievement with a fully-certificated two-seater…. Possibly more importantly, the 300L is a gorgeous aeroplane to fly. It is not harmonised in the classical sense – no Unlimited aerobatic machine with a roll-rate of 400 deg/sec ever can be, or anything like it – but a lovely, lovely handling aircraft. And as safe as you’re gonna get. In something like a decade of flying 300Ls, never once did the aeroplane frighten me. Oh, I frightened myself a few times, but that’s a different thing. If you try some grisly new manoeuvre and it all goes to a crock of …. er, manure…. then in a 300L you just centralise everything and most of the time it will then just snarl away in whatever direction it happens to be pointing. This is an oversimplification, of course – but the thing really does have no nasty aerodynamic traits that I ever discovered. And I provoked it sorely.
It has some altogether different nasty traits, of course – one being that it is not exactly cheap, and another being that the Ferrari set will insist on buying it and flying it without adequate conversion training, so that a number of multi-millionaires have wiped off the gear for no good reason whatsoever. Take no notice. Could be a buying opportunity….
#2: The Pitts S1T
More than 40 years ago a small thunderbolt impacted on the aviation world. It was called the Pitts S1S Special, and the aerobatic icons of the day could only watch, cowlings agape, as it changed everything with its hooligan roll and flick rates.
The S1S, however, had one major flaw, which was that every determined S1S aerobatic sequence was punctuated by a series of unearthly shrieks. Not the Heavenly Host applauding – but the fixedpitch propeller over-revving the 180 Lycoming to a quite appalling degree, with the blade-tips going high-transonic in the process.
Pa Pitts solved this with the S1T. He bolted in the 200 hp Lycoming and Hartzell constant-speed prop from the S2A, moved the wings four inches forwards to re-balance the extra weight – and called the result the S1T. This is the shining Pitts of all time. Not much known in our part of the world – but THE Pitts of all time. The S1T had 95% of the sweet handling of the S1S, much more usable power, and 0% of the enginehandling problems. You could pull up from cruise and do a double-vertical flick…. Nowadays, of course, the S1T is passé – the monoplanes have long since overtaken it. What once seemed the T’s flashing roll-rate of 220 deg/sec has been doubled by the monoplanes, and likewise its flick-rate.
Well, I don’t care about that. What I remember is the S1T’s absolute obedience, particularly in the flick. One of my party tricks was to hold it on the ground on take-off to 90 mph, snatch it off and roll inverted, count to four, push the nose up, simultaneously hit a one-and-a-half outside flick, and then climb away.
This is clearly not a procedure you explain to your life-insurance agent, in the unlikely event that you have one. But the S1T was the only aeroplane, before or since, which I ever trusted enough to do this.
#1: The Extra 230
When Walter Extra produced the EA 230 it was the Pitts-buster of its day. When I brought the second one into Britain an aerobatic judge said: “That thing’s incredible. You seem to get halfway up a vertical line and then just change down and keep going….” Ah well, that was then – a long time ago. Powered by a 200 hp Lycoming swinging an MT constant-speed prop, the 230 was, in fact, destined to be just about the last of the aerobatic wooden-wing monoplanes. Carbon fibre wings took over; power increased universally to 300 hp, and the 230 was eclipsed. Eclipsed in sheer performance, maybe – but to me, never eclipsed in pure, delightful handling.
Why? Actually, it is rather difficult to define. Perhaps a part of it was that you sat so close to the pivotal centre that it felt like wings on your shoulders. Perhaps another part was the un-fussy way it took to the – then very new – knife-edge spins and tumbles of the day. Or perhaps it was simply that towards the end of the time I had it the ever-fickle runes of sponsorship were being even more than usually cantankerous.
Sukhois and Extra 300s were starting to appear on the display circuit, and in order to keep up I had to wring every last ounce out of the 230 with a savagery I have never applied to any other aircraft before or since. It was perhaps the most tense period in my flying career. The Extra 230 bore it. And is still the aeroplane I fly in my dreams.
I said there was no logic.
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