Category: Aviation

We’re in the front seat of a helicopter, thumping along 1500 feet above the foam-flecked waves of the Gulf of Mexico, when pilot Chuck Aaron does something you’re never supposed to do. He pulls back on the controls and just keeps pulling. When the helo’s nose rears up, I feel my body sinking into the seat as my heart crawls up my esophagus. We keep going until all I see is blue sky, then the line that separates it from the greener blue of the gulf. A little voice in my head is saying huuuunh? and the weight of an implausible yet true realization sweeps over me: The rotors are now below us, the landing skids above. We are flying upside down.

There’s a reason why you should never, ever fly upside down in a helicopter: The rotors will bend toward the skids and cut off the tail and you’ll plummet to your death. Helicopter rotors are designed to handle a lot of flexion, because each blade has to bend up and down as it moves into and against the slipstream. In normal flight, the blades bend away from the cockpit. But if you fly upside down, they flex in the other direction, giving a whole new meaning to the word chopper.

Aaron, a 63-year-old with a mane of golden hair and a bushy mustache fit for a circus ringmaster, knows all about this. He was a helicopter pilot and mechanic living in Camarillo, Calif., when he got a call from Red Bull in 2004. They’d heard that he’d assembled a U.S. Army attack helicopter from parts scrounged on the open market. They asked him: Could he build a helicopter capable of looping the loop? “No,” he told them. It was impossible. End of story.

But Aaron kept mulling it over, and he thought that if you took the right kind of helicopter and modified it in just the right way, you might wind up with an aircraft that could fly upside down. Red Bull gave him the money, and he bought a pair of German BO-105 helicopters with rugged one-piece titanium rotor heads and four short, stiff composite blades. After a year of modifications—he refuses to reveal the engineering details—he took his helo up. Continue reading Going Upside-Down in a Helicopter

Gizmodo posted a pretty incredible story on March 21, 2012, entitled “Man Flies Like a Bird Flapping His Own Wings.” It claims that a Dutch inventor named Jarno Smeets has built and successfully flown a powered flapping-wing contraption. Accompanying the post is this video, which shows Smeets apparently doing a short run-up and then soaring into the air in an urban park:

My friend John Cook at Gawker alerted me to the story by Twitter, and asked for my input. My immediate reaction was: this doesn’t pass the sniff test. At all. For a couple of reasons:

1)  The machine that Smeets built is called an ornithopter — that is, it propels itself by flapping its wings. Ornithopters are an ancient dream, dating back to the Greek myth of Icarus, but have proven incredibly hard to pull off; it’s a matter of debate whether any human-carrying ornithopter has ever truly flown. I wrote about one attempt a while ago; you can read about it here.

2) Given the difficulty of the undertaking, it would be astonishing if this guy managed to eke out a small altitude gain. In contrast, he freakin’ soars. That’s a steep climbout. This guys has power and performance to burn. First time on a back-mounted ornithopter with a short wingspan and practically no visible powerplant? I doubt it.

3) Maybe a small thing, but: why do his friends run away from his flight path? Wouldn’t they want to see what happens, and maybe help him if necessary? (Look at where people are standing in those iconic photos of the Wright Brothers taking off). Also, why are they so giddily happy? He hasn’t done anything yet, dudes.

4) My biggest annoyance with this story is all the talk about how he linked together “an Android phone and Nintendo Wii controllers” in order to accomplish this amazing feat. To me, that’s a huge red flag: to rig a contraption this way would mean being incredibly clever to be incredible stupid. If you’re going to amplify human motion through power boosting — as the Pentagon has long been investigating, in hopes of building real-world “Iron Man”-type powered suits — the biggest problem by far is the issue of latency. Basically, the machine needs to correct its output virtually simultaneously with your altered input. Sensing someone’s motion using a Wii is a ridiculously complicated and latency-adding approach when you could much more easily do it the way engineers have been doing it in aviation for more than a century: using cables or push rods.

To its credit, Gizmodo has incorporated some skeptical takes in its updated version of the story. Still, the fact that it promoted this hoax in the first place is evidence of its credulousness.

UPDATE: The perpetrators of the hoax quickly gave up the game. In the aftermath, I interviewed a real, live ornithopter pilot for the Pop Mech website about why such craft are so difficult to pull off.

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One of the more interesting responses to my recent Pop Mech piece on Air France 447 came from the Atlantic Wire, which took my description of the sounds and smells that the pilots experienced as a point of departure to discuss what the flight’s final moments must have felt like for those in the cockpit. Here is a photograph that accompanies the post, showing the electrical phenomenon known as St. Elmo’s fire. I’ve never seen such a thing in real life, but imagine that it must seem both beautiful and worrying.

Thanks to the cockpit voice recorder, we have a pretty good idea of what the pilots heard, and the instrument data gives us a pretty good idea of what they saw. But what about the passengers in the back? Their perspective was very different, so I’d like to offer a few speculations about what the final moments of the flight might have been like for them.

The plane had taken off from Rio de Janeiro at 7.30 in the evening, local time, and had been flying for about four hours when it first encountered the weather system that would precipitate the final crisis. It was nearly midnight, then, by the internal clocks of most of the passengers; a few were probably reading, or watching a video, while the majority were probably sleeping, or lightly dozing. The captain himself had just left the cockpit to go take a nap.

As the flight neared the line of massive thunderstorms straddling the Inter Tropical Convergence, any passenger who happened to be awake would probably have felt some light turbulence. Those looking out window would have watched the plane fly into a bank of clouds, then out into clear sky, and then back into clouds. At six minutes past midnight, one of the co-pilots made a call back to the head flight attendant, alerting her that the plane would shortly be entering an area of turbulence. He made no such announcement to the passengers, however.

The turbulence grew worse. In the cabin, the flight attendants would have been strapping into their seats. Continue reading What AF447’s Passengers Experienced

Lately there’s been an email circulating that purports to be from someone on the Wildfire Air Racing team who had a long talk with race pilot Matt Jackson about Jimmy Leeward’s crash last month at the Reno Air Races. The email says that Jackson was racing at the time in his own Unlimited-category plane and witnessed firsthand the trouble that Jimmy Leeward was having as he rounded the course. According to the email,

There is a video of the entire last lap of the Ghost before the crash which Matt showed me. As Leeward was coming around pylon #8 at about 480 mph after passing Rare Bear, he hit turbulence which pitched his left wing down, Leeward corrected with hard right rudder and aileron. Just as the aircraft was straightening out, he hit a second mountain of turbulence which caused the tail to ‘dig in’ resulting in a 10+ G climb rendering Leeward unconscious instantly and resulted in the tail wheel falling out. (broken tail wheel support structure was found on the course). As the Ghost shot upward the LH aileron trim tab broke loose. This can be heard on the tape, so the trim tab did not cause the accident.

This is conclusion is diametrically opposed to the conclusion that I (and many others) reached, based on the information available—namely, that the failure of the trim tab caused the steep climb, not vice versa. As the email was forwarded to me by a trusted and experienced member of the aircraft community, I was surprised and concerned by its assertions. Continue reading What Didn’t Cause the Reno Air Race Crash

Yesterday afternoon an airplane crashed horrifically at the National Air Races in Reno, Nevada, impacting the viewing stands and killing at least three people. Many more were injured. The aircraft involved was a heavily modified P-51 Mustang, arguably the most famous and best-loved fighter plane of WWII, at least on the American side. Built around a huge and supremely powerful Rolls-Royce Merlin engine, the Mustang was designed to accompany Allied bombers on the long journey from England to Germany and back, and fight off the best that the Luftwaffe could throw at them. Later, they became popular among air racers competing in the heavyweight “Unlimited” class of races at Reno. Wealthy owners spend millions to purchase the planes and heavily modify them, changing wings, lengthening the fuselage, swapping in even more powerful engines. According to racers I’ve talked to, there are two categories of Mustang pilots at Reno: those who fly to win, putting extreme wear and tear on the airplane and its engine, and those who are content just to take part, flying the plane gently enough to save themselves the expense of frequent engine overhauls.

As something of an airplane nut myself, I considered the opportunity to fly in a Mustang for a Popular Mechanics story to be one of the high points of my lifetime. In the interests of those who might wonder what it’s like to fly one of these machines, or who want to know why people fall in love with a potentially dangerous sport, I’m reprinting it below.

FLYING A LEGEND

You’re never going to forget your first 60 seconds airborne in a P-51 Mustang.

I’m strapped into the back seat of Crazy Horse II, a vintage World War II fighter plane, as pilot Lee Lauderbeck lines it up on the end of the runway at Kissimmee, Florida. I’ve got a parachute cinched around my torso and a five-point harness securing me to the airframe. Just in case worse comes to worst, I’ve been briefed in how to pop the top of the canopy and bail out.

Lauderbeck opens the throttle on the huge 1700-horsepower, Rolls Royce-built Merlin engines. The 12 cylinders rise to a throaty roar and we start to roll. As we gain speed, the tail lifts, and then we float off the runway. We hold steady, roaring along no more than 25 feet above the ground, as the airspeed indicator passes 150 mph. Then Lauderbeck pulls the stick sharply back and the nose swings up into the blue yonder. We climb like a rocket to 1000 feet.

Leveling off, we barrel along beneath the base of the clouds at 200 mph, the sun-dappled Florida flatlands sweeping past below us. “Okay,” Lauderbeck says, “Your controls.” He lifts both hands above his shoulders, open-palmed.

I tighten my hand around the control stick and nudge it to the right, just enough to feel the wing dip, then bring the plane back to level. I’ve been a pilot for seven years, but I’ve never felt a tingle on my spine like this. I’m actually flying a P-51. Continue reading What’s It Like to Fly a Mustang?

Something very cool happened last month. Early in the morning of August 2, a student at the University of Toronto took the control’s of the world’s first successful ornithopter — an aircraft that propels itself by flapping its wings like a bird — and flew for 19 seconds. As a lover of strange aircraft and impossible engineering challenges, I applaud the daring and stick-to-itevness of the University of Toronto team, which spent four years creating an incredibly beautiful machine. Here’s the video:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0E77j1imdhQ&feature=player_embedded#!]

As is obvious from even a cursory viewing, flapping one’s wings is a very difficult way to generate lift. (That birds are so good at it should only renew our respect for the astonishing engineering feats of natural selection.) So the team deserves heartfelt kudos for managing to keep the craft in the air for even a short span of time. But did they really achieve, as a Canadian newspaper reported, “sustained and continuous flight”? Continue reading World's First Ornithopter Just Flew. Or Did It?

I’m in Anchorage airport right now, waiting for my plane to take me home after a week spent reporting a bush flying story for Popular Mechanics. What, you ask, is bush flying? Well, I think this video explains better than any mere words:

 

I made this yesterday, shooting over the shoulder of veteran bush pilot Terry Holiday as he sets down his Super Cub on a tiny patch of gravel near the Knik Glacier north of Anchorage. As we were coming in, I was thinking: “Where exactly are you planning to put this thing down, Terry?” Yet oddly the experience didn’t feel that scary; Terry has such a natural feel for the airplane that I sensed that it would do exactly what he wanted. Having said that, the take off was even more extraordinary, as we bounced into the air and scrabbled for altitude as Terry guided the plane between a large hillock and the face of a cliff. Alaska — it’s always an adventure.

For those following the John Graybill story, two well-reported stories about John and his final flight are now available online. In the Anchorage Daily News, Kyle Hopkins has fuller details of what happened in the runup to his fatal crash, including quotes from his daughter. And over at Alaska Dispatch, Craig Medred has an account of the controversy that swirled around the John Graybill legend.