Thursday, January 01, 2009
New Year's Resolution
I'm setting a goal of taking my Commercial written test by the end of January.
Review of 2008
It's been a busy year. I accomplished some things I set out to do, made progress on others. Looking back at my log and blog, here are the highlights.
I had a total of 29 flights, including my 200th:
I had a total of 29 flights, including my 200th:
- One flight with an instructor
- Two flights with other Private pilots
- Six flights with student pilots
- One passenger flight
- That leaves 19 solo flights, two of them cross-country.
- In January-February, I attended a Commercial and Instructor ground school series run by the club.
- Bought the ASA Commercial and Instructor test prep manuals and have worked with them quite a lot.
- Bought the ASA Commercial test CD to make my self-scoring easier. On practice tests a couple of months ago, I scored 85% and 86%. I'd like to be at 95% before taking it for real.
- Bought the BGA Gliding Theory of Flight manual, which is very helpful and interesting... I've read it 1.5 times. I'll need much of it for the Instructor work.
- In Feb, I did some student teaching as part of our club's ground school. This required writing two lesson plans. I learned a *lot* about weight-and-balance calculations.
- Downloaded many FAA Advisory Circulars to study
- I've done a few flights with students, to get used to turning over the controls, observing, providing feedback... no teaching.
- I did an out-and-back flight of about 41 miles (each way) out of Tehachapi which probably qualified for Silver badge distance and altitude.
- I did a straight-out flight in the Dust Devil Dash from Tehachapi, landing safely on a dirt strip at Olancha about 84 miles away. This one was properly declared and logged, and was accepted by SSA for Silver distance and altitude. Placed 20th out of 22.
- Performed my first-ever solo spins
- Got a good look at a the structure of a disassembled Blanik, did some reading to understand how those flimsy aluminum parts form a strong fuselage
- Uploaded some flights to the On Line Contest for the first time
- Built a PC with the Condor soaring simulator, joystick and pedals, for the club to use in ground instruction
- Took first place in the club's Timed Flight event of our Family Soaring Contest (Um... not sure if anyone else entered... but it *was* within seconds of the 60-minute goal.)
- First flight in "wave" lift (though at a very low altitude)
- Had some good practice "porpoise" flying under cloud streets - pretty rare in our area
- Wrote a letter of recommendation to the FAA which helped one of our flight instructors receive the Wright Brothers award for 50 years of safe flying.
- Produced the club's "year in pictures" DVD.
Saturday, December 27, 2008
Two nice dual flights
Today the air was crystal clear, providing wonderful views of the snow on the mountains to the north and east. But due to about 50% cirrus cloud cover, it never got warm enough for good soaring. I was determined to fly regardless of lift! (Also, I got a tiny new camera recently and wanted to try it out.)
N, one of the students in the club, has passed his written test for the Private Pilot license and wanted to start to practice for the Practical test. He asked me to fly with him and tell him what maneuvers to demonstrate. I have a list of them, so after going over the list in some detail, up we went. (You can just see the towplane and the mountains in this shot.)
We found just a little lift on the first flight, keeping us up for 30 minutes from a 4000' tow. The second flight was not so lucky, essentially no lift and a 23 minute flight.
The list of tasks for the Practical is pretty long - it's quite a bit to accomplish in a single flight. N did nearly all of the tasks on both flights.
1. Aero tow
a. Box the wake when above 300' AGL
b. Slack line control
c. Signal the tow plane for turn, speed up, or slow down
2. Release at 5500' MSL (4000' AGL)
3. Steep turns
a. One 360 degrees
b. One 720 degrees
c. Complete turn on a specified heading
d. Final turn serves as one clearing turn
4. Stalls
a. Straight ahead with and without dive brakes
b. Turning (left and right) with and without dive brakes
5. Slow flight - 35 knots
a. Straight ahead flight
b. Left and right 90 degree turns
6. Straight ahead flight
a. Minimum sink speed
b. Best L/D speed
c. Speed to fly if in sink
7. Thermal soaring
8. Approach to glider area of runway 22
a. Slip on base or final without dive brakes
b. Use of radio
9. Land in designated box
So I got to fly for nearly an hour with a friend, practice some instructor skills, and split the tow fees. Not bad! The only downside to dual flights with students is that I can only log as PIC the time that I am actually flying the plane, which in today's case was only about 5 minutes per flight.
N, one of the students in the club, has passed his written test for the Private Pilot license and wanted to start to practice for the Practical test. He asked me to fly with him and tell him what maneuvers to demonstrate. I have a list of them, so after going over the list in some detail, up we went. (You can just see the towplane and the mountains in this shot.)
We found just a little lift on the first flight, keeping us up for 30 minutes from a 4000' tow. The second flight was not so lucky, essentially no lift and a 23 minute flight.The list of tasks for the Practical is pretty long - it's quite a bit to accomplish in a single flight. N did nearly all of the tasks on both flights.
1. Aero tow
a. Box the wake when above 300' AGL
b. Slack line control
c. Signal the tow plane for turn, speed up, or slow down
2. Release at 5500' MSL (4000' AGL)
3. Steep turns
a. One 360 degrees
b. One 720 degrees
c. Complete turn on a specified heading
d. Final turn serves as one clearing turn
4. Stalls
a. Straight ahead with and without dive brakes
b. Turning (left and right) with and without dive brakes
5. Slow flight - 35 knots
a. Straight ahead flight
b. Left and right 90 degree turns
6. Straight ahead flight
a. Minimum sink speed
b. Best L/D speed
c. Speed to fly if in sink
7. Thermal soaring
8. Approach to glider area of runway 22
a. Slip on base or final without dive brakes
b. Use of radio
9. Land in designated box
So I got to fly for nearly an hour with a friend, practice some instructor skills, and split the tow fees. Not bad! The only downside to dual flights with students is that I can only log as PIC the time that I am actually flying the plane, which in today's case was only about 5 minutes per flight.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Thinking about lift
I've been thinking a lot about lift lately. Not the kind of lift that glider pilots seek out (upward moving air), but the kind of lift that both airplane and glider pilots care about: the lift generated by the wing.
All pilots, and most passengers, at some level want to know "What makes an airplane fly?" The wing, obviously! Since I want to be an instructor, I should be able to explain what enables a wing to fly. I've read a number of sources, and am still unsatisfied with the explanations.
Most sources talk about Bernoulli's principle (why the top of the wing causes lift) and/or Newton's law of reaction (why the bottom of the wing causes lift). Some synthesize the two, and speculate on what proportion of each effect causes the most lift. Some introduce "circulation". Eventually they all start getting vague and say that the reason a wing accelerates air that flows over the top surface can't be easily explained and mumble something about Euler's equations, as if that will help.
Stick and Rudder, otherwise a fantastic book, simply says "It shoves the air down with its bottom surface, and it pulls the air down with its top surface; the latter action is the more important." Langeweische says a lot about how lift varies with Angle of Attack - he is much more concerned with how to fly the wing than with why the wing flies.
See How It Flies Section 3, Airfoils and Airflow, is filled with wonderful diagrams of stream lines:
and talks a lot about the timing of the parcels of air. Like other books, it tries to correct the false notion that the air flowing over the top of the wing "must" move faster in order to meet up with corresponding parcels flowing below. That makes sense - there's nothing tying the two flows together.
Later, Denker talks about circulation but never explains it. He starts with the idea of air circulating around a stationary wing on the ground (artificially stirred by a paddle), then expects us to accept that circulation continues during flight. I'm sorry, but I don't think there's any air making its way around the trailing edge from the top to the bottom and flowing forward - it's all flowing past the trailing edge. In fact he makes that point himself by discussing the stagnation point at the trailing edge. He and other sources seem to say that circulation is a mathematical construct to explain pressure differences, not a real circulation around the wing. Huh?
Aerofoils and Wings explains a lot about how different wings behave, but as far as lift generation goes, Brandon just refers us to Denker. Later, "As the air accelerates away from the stagnation line, the local airflow over the upper surface gains a greater speed than the lower." We're supposed to take this on faith? What makes it accelerate so much? OK, it accelerates upward because the leading edge forces the air up over the top surface. But why would air flowing below the wing not also accelerate? It's being pushed down, just as the air over the top is being pushed up (due to the Angle of Attack), but I suppose not as much.
In the January 2009 issue of AOPA Flight Training, "The Magic of Lift" can't seem to decide whether or not air meets up at the trailing edge at the same time. Christensen spends some time trying to explain why air traveling faster has lower pressure, using a car-traffic analogy. That's a useful analogy, but only if you assume that the air above must move faster because it has to get to the trailing edge at the same time as the air below. He starts to debunk that idea and then reverts back to it.
But at least Christensen considers the wing from what I think is a better point of view. Most texts describe a stationary wing, and a moving flow of air. I think that's because wind tunnels have been used for years to study airfoils (it's easier than observing airflow by looking down the tip of a moving wing!). But in flight, the wing moves and the air is still. Most texts would claim that the two situations can be described by the same laws. But I'm not so sure... I think the behavior of the air may be different, primarily because of inertia and ambient pressure.
The air has stationary inertia (it must be shoved out of the way by the wing), it doesn't have inertia of motion. As the air is shoved out of the way, wouldn't its pressure be increased, rather than decreased as is assumed in the air-moving-faster-over-the-wing model? He states that as the air comes back down after the wing has passed, it "now possesses momentum, causing the air to overshoot ... resulting in the downwash." I get that. But what started it moving downward - isn't it the ambient pressure of the air above it that is being shoved against? I think of the air as squishy, and once the wing gets out of the way, the air is squished back downward.
According to Bernoulli, moving air has lower pressure. But it seems to me that it may not have lower pressure in all directions. A parcel of air moving upward, being shoved out of the way by the top surface of the leading edge, may have lower pressure horizontally, but wouldn't it have higher pressure vertically? After all, it's being squeezed between the wing and the air above it. Once it gets moving at a constant rate, maybe... but as it's accelerating, it seems to me the pressure in the vertical direction would be higher. (I remember reading a description of pitot tubes and venturis that made me think of it this way... I'll have to look for it.)
NASA cops out and fails to provide a good explanation, too. They spend a lot of time explaining flow patterns and have some great interactive illustrations, but in the end they just say "The real details of how an object generates lift are very complex and do not lend themselves to simplification. For a gas, we have to simultaneously conserve the mass, momentum, and energy in the flow. ... To truly understand the details of the generation of lift, one has to have a good working knowledge of the Euler Equations."
But equations merely quantify physical phenomena. Mass is moved around by energy, not by numbers. There must be a way to explain what the air is doing, without getting into the details of how much. Langeweische did such a tremendous job of explaining phenomena and behaviors without invoking mathematics - I wish he had tackled this aspect as well.
Some texts also get into bound vortices (the full extension of what we pilots usually call "wingtip vortices"), and I think this aspect is far more important in explaining lift than most authors do. To put it as simply as I can, if some air is shoved downward (whether by Bernoulli and suction on the top, or Newton and deflection on the bottom), that displaced air must be replaced by air from above. You can't leave a hole in the air - that's a vacuum, and as we all know, Nature hates vacuuming. The most natural way for the ambient air to fill it is from a circular region above and around the hole. Then that gap is filled by air from below the circular region (all around the original hole). Then that circular gap is filled by the original shoved-down air spreading out. Viola - a donut-shaped flow of air - like a smoke ring. And due to inertia, it keeps on vortexing until it's diluted.
I have to think about this a little more, and find some good diagrams of it. It's almost got me believing in circulation again. The BGA Gliding: Theory of Flight has a good diagram of the donut shape of the bound vortex (Chapter 3 Figure 40), but again I think the bound vortex is partly a mathematical abstraction. I really don't think air flows forward under the wing!
So, writing this out, I think I've arrived at a conclusion. Why does the air accelerate over the top of the wing? Because it's been given energy by the leading edge, shoving it out of the way. Where did it get that energy? In the case of an airplane, it comes from the engine shoving the wing forward. In the case of a glider, it comes from gravity pulling the glider and wing downward-forward. The ultimate purpose of the wing is to transfer energy from the (engine or falling fuselage) into downward-moving air at the trailing edge, which shoves the wing upward. Most texts talk about the flow of the air over a stationary wing, as if the air has the energy. I think the wing has the energy, the leading edge forces the air up, then the compressed air above forces the displaced air back down past the trailing edge. The displaced air takes the energy with it, causing a vortex. Somehow Newton's action-reaction law gets invoked to cause the wing to go up - still not sure why. I think air moves the wing up, not old Newton. I'll have to think on this some more.
I have no aerodynamic training, just what I've read along the way to becoming a pilot and an instructor. If you have some insight into this topic, please comment! If I'm all wet, I'd like to know where I've got it wrong. But I really care about what mass and energy do. Analogies don't hold wings up. Equations quantify but don't explain. It has to make sense.
All pilots, and most passengers, at some level want to know "What makes an airplane fly?" The wing, obviously! Since I want to be an instructor, I should be able to explain what enables a wing to fly. I've read a number of sources, and am still unsatisfied with the explanations.
Most sources talk about Bernoulli's principle (why the top of the wing causes lift) and/or Newton's law of reaction (why the bottom of the wing causes lift). Some synthesize the two, and speculate on what proportion of each effect causes the most lift. Some introduce "circulation". Eventually they all start getting vague and say that the reason a wing accelerates air that flows over the top surface can't be easily explained and mumble something about Euler's equations, as if that will help.
Stick and Rudder, otherwise a fantastic book, simply says "It shoves the air down with its bottom surface, and it pulls the air down with its top surface; the latter action is the more important." Langeweische says a lot about how lift varies with Angle of Attack - he is much more concerned with how to fly the wing than with why the wing flies.
See How It Flies Section 3, Airfoils and Airflow, is filled with wonderful diagrams of stream lines:
and talks a lot about the timing of the parcels of air. Like other books, it tries to correct the false notion that the air flowing over the top of the wing "must" move faster in order to meet up with corresponding parcels flowing below. That makes sense - there's nothing tying the two flows together.Later, Denker talks about circulation but never explains it. He starts with the idea of air circulating around a stationary wing on the ground (artificially stirred by a paddle), then expects us to accept that circulation continues during flight. I'm sorry, but I don't think there's any air making its way around the trailing edge from the top to the bottom and flowing forward - it's all flowing past the trailing edge. In fact he makes that point himself by discussing the stagnation point at the trailing edge. He and other sources seem to say that circulation is a mathematical construct to explain pressure differences, not a real circulation around the wing. Huh?
Aerofoils and Wings explains a lot about how different wings behave, but as far as lift generation goes, Brandon just refers us to Denker. Later, "As the air accelerates away from the stagnation line, the local airflow over the upper surface gains a greater speed than the lower." We're supposed to take this on faith? What makes it accelerate so much? OK, it accelerates upward because the leading edge forces the air up over the top surface. But why would air flowing below the wing not also accelerate? It's being pushed down, just as the air over the top is being pushed up (due to the Angle of Attack), but I suppose not as much.
In the January 2009 issue of AOPA Flight Training, "The Magic of Lift" can't seem to decide whether or not air meets up at the trailing edge at the same time. Christensen spends some time trying to explain why air traveling faster has lower pressure, using a car-traffic analogy. That's a useful analogy, but only if you assume that the air above must move faster because it has to get to the trailing edge at the same time as the air below. He starts to debunk that idea and then reverts back to it.
But at least Christensen considers the wing from what I think is a better point of view. Most texts describe a stationary wing, and a moving flow of air. I think that's because wind tunnels have been used for years to study airfoils (it's easier than observing airflow by looking down the tip of a moving wing!). But in flight, the wing moves and the air is still. Most texts would claim that the two situations can be described by the same laws. But I'm not so sure... I think the behavior of the air may be different, primarily because of inertia and ambient pressure.
The air has stationary inertia (it must be shoved out of the way by the wing), it doesn't have inertia of motion. As the air is shoved out of the way, wouldn't its pressure be increased, rather than decreased as is assumed in the air-moving-faster-over-the-wing model? He states that as the air comes back down after the wing has passed, it "now possesses momentum, causing the air to overshoot ... resulting in the downwash." I get that. But what started it moving downward - isn't it the ambient pressure of the air above it that is being shoved against? I think of the air as squishy, and once the wing gets out of the way, the air is squished back downward.
According to Bernoulli, moving air has lower pressure. But it seems to me that it may not have lower pressure in all directions. A parcel of air moving upward, being shoved out of the way by the top surface of the leading edge, may have lower pressure horizontally, but wouldn't it have higher pressure vertically? After all, it's being squeezed between the wing and the air above it. Once it gets moving at a constant rate, maybe... but as it's accelerating, it seems to me the pressure in the vertical direction would be higher. (I remember reading a description of pitot tubes and venturis that made me think of it this way... I'll have to look for it.)
NASA cops out and fails to provide a good explanation, too. They spend a lot of time explaining flow patterns and have some great interactive illustrations, but in the end they just say "The real details of how an object generates lift are very complex and do not lend themselves to simplification. For a gas, we have to simultaneously conserve the mass, momentum, and energy in the flow. ... To truly understand the details of the generation of lift, one has to have a good working knowledge of the Euler Equations."
But equations merely quantify physical phenomena. Mass is moved around by energy, not by numbers. There must be a way to explain what the air is doing, without getting into the details of how much. Langeweische did such a tremendous job of explaining phenomena and behaviors without invoking mathematics - I wish he had tackled this aspect as well.
Some texts also get into bound vortices (the full extension of what we pilots usually call "wingtip vortices"), and I think this aspect is far more important in explaining lift than most authors do. To put it as simply as I can, if some air is shoved downward (whether by Bernoulli and suction on the top, or Newton and deflection on the bottom), that displaced air must be replaced by air from above. You can't leave a hole in the air - that's a vacuum, and as we all know, Nature hates vacuuming. The most natural way for the ambient air to fill it is from a circular region above and around the hole. Then that gap is filled by air from below the circular region (all around the original hole). Then that circular gap is filled by the original shoved-down air spreading out. Viola - a donut-shaped flow of air - like a smoke ring. And due to inertia, it keeps on vortexing until it's diluted.
I have to think about this a little more, and find some good diagrams of it. It's almost got me believing in circulation again. The BGA Gliding: Theory of Flight has a good diagram of the donut shape of the bound vortex (Chapter 3 Figure 40), but again I think the bound vortex is partly a mathematical abstraction. I really don't think air flows forward under the wing!
So, writing this out, I think I've arrived at a conclusion. Why does the air accelerate over the top of the wing? Because it's been given energy by the leading edge, shoving it out of the way. Where did it get that energy? In the case of an airplane, it comes from the engine shoving the wing forward. In the case of a glider, it comes from gravity pulling the glider and wing downward-forward. The ultimate purpose of the wing is to transfer energy from the (engine or falling fuselage) into downward-moving air at the trailing edge, which shoves the wing upward. Most texts talk about the flow of the air over a stationary wing, as if the air has the energy. I think the wing has the energy, the leading edge forces the air up, then the compressed air above forces the displaced air back down past the trailing edge. The displaced air takes the energy with it, causing a vortex. Somehow Newton's action-reaction law gets invoked to cause the wing to go up - still not sure why. I think air moves the wing up, not old Newton. I'll have to think on this some more.
I have no aerodynamic training, just what I've read along the way to becoming a pilot and an instructor. If you have some insight into this topic, please comment! If I'm all wet, I'd like to know where I've got it wrong. But I really care about what mass and energy do. Analogies don't hold wings up. Equations quantify but don't explain. It has to make sense.
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Some work and a sled ride
Today the weather forecast was really iffy. Light winds, and lift could go to 7000', but incoming cirrus clouds could spoil it.
The PW5 needed a little work, so I tackled these in the morning:
1. First, say who you're addressing, e.g. "Hemet traffic:" Why first? To get the attention of people who may not be fully listening. You're saying, "Hemet traffic, listen up!"
2. Next, who you are. "Glider two papa delta..." If you said this first, then who you're addressing, people would miss your call sign because they didn't start listening until they heard "Hemet traffic." Listeners aren't fully listening all the time.
3. Where you are. "Entering 45 for..."
4. What you are going to do. I get really specific because we gliders share the airport with power traffic, and they are most of the radio traffic. They're on the other runway (23) and they do a left pattern (which they don't specify). I want them to understand where I am going and that I'm not conflicting with them. "... right-hand pattern to runway two two." I emphasize the second two because they're normally listening for "two three".
5. Finish with who you're addressing. "Hemet". In case #1 got cut off, or was garbled, or they really weren't listnening at the beginning.
Once you understand the why of the sequence, it's easy to remember!
A had not flown the PW5 for a while so I went over the controls and features with him. He took off before noon and had a nice hour-long flight. Unfortunately, he used up all the lift. ;-)
I let off in lift but could not get back into it. The cloud cover had gotten thicker and there was very little sunlight hitting the ground. All I found was about 3 knots of sinking air. Near the Initial Point at about 1300' AGL I found a little weak lift but it was not even big enough to complete a circle in. I ended up with an 18-minute ride. Bummer! After about 2:00, most people were not staying up any more.
At least my landing was good. There was maybe a 4-knot headwind at most. I think I touched down right on the line, and stopped well within the first box. I think what made the difference was that I picked out my aiming point as soon as I turned base, and kept checking my angle to it all the way on the base leg. I think I've been looking elsewhere on base leg, and then not being at the right altitude when turning final. By establishing my aim point on base, the base and final legs are all part of the same glide slope.
The PW5 needed a little work, so I tackled these in the morning:
- The battery wires were fraying. A and I put new lugs on the ends.
- The gust locks for the ailerons needed new foam and bungee cord. We'd been using rags as padding for a few months!
- Replaced the long rear bungee cord on the canopy cover.
- The O2 system had been left turned on, so the battery was dead. A kindly went to town for a battery.
1. First, say who you're addressing, e.g. "Hemet traffic:" Why first? To get the attention of people who may not be fully listening. You're saying, "Hemet traffic, listen up!"
2. Next, who you are. "Glider two papa delta..." If you said this first, then who you're addressing, people would miss your call sign because they didn't start listening until they heard "Hemet traffic." Listeners aren't fully listening all the time.
3. Where you are. "Entering 45 for..."
4. What you are going to do. I get really specific because we gliders share the airport with power traffic, and they are most of the radio traffic. They're on the other runway (23) and they do a left pattern (which they don't specify). I want them to understand where I am going and that I'm not conflicting with them. "... right-hand pattern to runway two two." I emphasize the second two because they're normally listening for "two three".
5. Finish with who you're addressing. "Hemet". In case #1 got cut off, or was garbled, or they really weren't listnening at the beginning.
Once you understand the why of the sequence, it's easy to remember!
A had not flown the PW5 for a while so I went over the controls and features with him. He took off before noon and had a nice hour-long flight. Unfortunately, he used up all the lift. ;-)
I let off in lift but could not get back into it. The cloud cover had gotten thicker and there was very little sunlight hitting the ground. All I found was about 3 knots of sinking air. Near the Initial Point at about 1300' AGL I found a little weak lift but it was not even big enough to complete a circle in. I ended up with an 18-minute ride. Bummer! After about 2:00, most people were not staying up any more.
At least my landing was good. There was maybe a 4-knot headwind at most. I think I touched down right on the line, and stopped well within the first box. I think what made the difference was that I picked out my aiming point as soon as I turned base, and kept checking my angle to it all the way on the base leg. I think I've been looking elsewhere on base leg, and then not being at the right altitude when turning final. By establishing my aim point on base, the base and final legs are all part of the same glide slope.
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