Golf Hotel Whiskey

Golf Hotel Whiskey: for pilots and aviation enthusiasts

How a non-pilot can land an aircraft

We have just posted a story (Can a simulator pilot with no real flying experience fly a perfect pattern?) about how a flight simulator “pilot,” or rather someone with extensive flight simulator experience and no real flying GolfHotelWhiskey.com - Flight Simulatorexperience, confounded an airline pilot by flying a perfect pattern and landing on the first try in a real aircraft. But how could a non-pilot land an aircraft in an emergency situation?

Blogger, software engineer and pilot Eduardo Mourão attempted to answer that question on his blog by first writing that history shows someone with X years of flight simulator experience “will probably die:”

Probably not because it is difficult but because you don’t know what you don’t know. Flight simulators distort important aspects of landing airplanes: your awesome 200 degrees/3D vision, the muscle mechanics of flying and the notion of distance. In fact, flight simulators are harder than the real thing.

On the other hand, Eduardo was quick to concede that “many in the flight school I teach landed without the need for intervention in their first flight” – just like the guy we wrote about in the previous post (Note: There have been a few real life incidents where passengers were forced to take control of a general aviation aircraft after a pilot became incapacitated and with help of ATC, they were able to safely land). Eduardo also landed an aircraft for the first time when he was just 11 years old.

With that in mind, he went into considerable detail about the following steps a non-pilot needs to take in an emergency situation:

    1. Stay calm, take control
    2. Inform the situation
    3. Flying straight and airspeed
    4. Making turns
    5. Approaching
    6. Landing

Near the end of the post, Eduardo pointed out that playing 10 minutes with a flying simulator will make someone more comfortable maintaining an aircraft in the air, but it won’t help on a landing with the biggest mistake most first timers do is to come in too slow and too low.

Nevertheless and if you fly regularly with family members as passengers, having them play around on a flight simulator might be a good idea to get them comfortable with the basics of flying should they ever need to take over the controls in the event you are incapacitated.

Can a simulator pilot with no real flying experience fly a perfect pattern?

Steve, the blogger behind a mile of runway will take you anywhere, has posted a story and video about how an airline pilot named Steve Satre (who is also a blogger and the author of two of the “greatest aviation threads in internet history”: Two Plus Two and FlyerTalk) met a guy named Tyler with a huge amount of flight simulator experience who wanted to see if that type of experience could turn him into a real pilot in a real aircraft – on the first try. Of course, there were some rules in the experiment e.g. Steve could not say anything unless Tyler was endangering their safety or the aircraft and then he would have to relinquish control.

You can read an introduction to the whole story here on Steve Satre’s blog along with a detailed follow-up post about the flight itself. Tyler has also put together a lengthy 14 minute long video where he begins by talking, talking and talking some more for the first several minutes of it with the airport action starting at the six minute mark or so:

To spoil things a little bit, Steve already had his mind made up in the very beginning about how the experiment would end:

There was no doubt in my mind that I’d have to take over the plane, but I wanted to see just how well he could do on his first time in a plane.

However, Steve ended up writing that he had to congratulate Tyler because he had just made a “mockery of my entire life” while the later acknowledged that the real airplane is “a whole lot different than flying the simulation software, but it obviously gave him the basics.”

Mid-air bat strike leaves a pilot bleeding (and getting rabies shots)

A North Queensland crop dusting pilot named Josh Liddle has recounted a bizarre incident where a bat smashed through his aircraft windshield, leaving lots of “blood and guts” all over the place that he thought may have belonged to him:

Apparently, Josh was coming back from a spray run over sugar cane crops and he made the mistake of flying through the middle of a colony of bats as it was just after dark when they head out to hunt.

As bad as having a bat smash through a windshield and hit you in the face can be, it could be worst as bats can carry rabies and Josh was covered in bat blood and guts (it looked like a “homicide scene…”). In fact and since its discover in 1994, lyssavirus, a close relative of the rabies virus, has killed the only two Queenslanders who became infected with it as both suffered influenza-like symptoms before slipping into a coma from which they did not awake from. So it was six needles in the face and the chest, one in the arm and two in the bum for Josh as a precaution.

Josh also told the Brisbane Times that the bat colony is massive and it blackens the sky out when they depart. Moreover:

‘‘Their flight path is straight over the local airport. We can’t have this happening too often. We’ve got limited hours [in which] we can do our jobs and they’re during the early morning and late afternoon and that’s when the bats do their thing.’’

For that reason, he would like to see the bats moved on though methods previously endorsed by Premier Campbell Newman that include smoke bombs, noise and helicopters rather than a culling efforts. However, the Queensland Conservation Council has warned that bats are likely to have higher virus loads when stressed by harassment or destruction of their feeding and roost sites. Not to mention, they might take up residence some place else where they aren’t going to be any more welcomed.

Dramatic video of a helicopter crash while filming “Top Gear Korea”

A dramatic helicopter crash was caught on video during the filming of the Korean version of the hit British TV show “Top Gear” as reported by several British papers like the Guardian and The Independent along with GrindTV which picked up the video from Top Gear’s YouTube channel.

In the video, “Top Gear Korea” presenter Kim Jin Pyo was racing an AH1 Cobra helicopter while driving a Corvette ZR1. At around the one minute mark, the helicopter does a loop in the air with the pilot apparently losing control and coming down hard on the ground – kicking up a huge cloud of dust. Apparently, no one was seriously hurt, but we can probably assume that the helicopter will be grounded for awhile or perhaps permanently.

Its a bird, its a plane, its a flying rooster!

Hat tip to David Cenciotti for bringing our attention to the “Aerogallo” or “flying rooster” aircraft designed by Italian aircraft designer and homebuilder Ottone Baggio which apparently has been making the rounds at Italian air shows:

GolfHotelWhiskey.com - Aerogallo or Flying Rooster Image credit: Daniele Beltrame and the Aviationist.

According to Flight Journal, Ottone’s homebuilt flying rooster design was first hatched on a bar room napkin of all places (naturally after a few drinks led to a challenge) and consists of wooden wings and a steel tube fuselage covered in fabric. The rooster’s neck and head contains a 100-horsepower Rotax 912 engine while the control stick comes down from the cockpit roof – meaning the pilot must push forward to go up and pull back to go down.

However and on the initial test flight, the flaperons on the inboard two-thirds of the trailing edge of the wings were less than satisfactory to the test pilot – forcing the rooster back into the coop for some “molting.”

 

Nevertheless, one does need to give Ottone Baggio some credit for coming up with a homebuilt aircraft that’s as creative as the flying rooster and perhaps the only thing more creative would be a flying Ostrich, Dodo or Penguin as Flying Journal suggested – something to think about next time you are in a pub having a whiskey after a flight!