you fly where the air is cool and smooth. If you've trimmed up your airplane properly (and if it is in rig), you can just fly along without touching the controls.
But once you descend below the base of those puffy cumulus clouds, the first thing you notice is that the air stinks. You'll only smell it for a little bit before your nose adapts, but the smell is distinctive. Then, because the lower air is heated and turbulent, you have to keep correcting the airplane's flight path. A wing will be jostled up or down. You'll hit updrafts (which make birds and sailplane pilots happy) and downdrafts so that keeping to your desired course and altitude takes work. If you have passengers, they may not appreciate riding over an aerial washboard.
In the summer, when I take people up who are new to small airplanes, I do it either in the early morning or in the evening. There is no point in taking someone up and subjecting them to a miserable ride.
"If you've trimmed up your airplane properly (and if it is in rig), you can just fly along without touching the controls."
ReplyDeleteYou are assuming a positive dihedral or high wing pendulum stability or both, perhaps?
F104=NOT, just to give 1 counterexample.
Well, true, but the odds of me ever flying one of those Luftwaffe Widowmakers is pretty nonexistent.
ReplyDeleteFWIW, the EE Lightning (yes, I'm that old) was the better interceptor. The only Nato fighter to have caught and overtaken a Concorde in a tailchase from a scramble.
ReplyDeleteThe only Nato fighter to have intercepted a CIA U2 at 80,000+ feet. 50,000 fpm initial climb, But only 800NM range, small, cramped, very short range radar, and the 2 AAMs were not much faster (M2,3 than the plane :-( ).
PS: My original blog about the EE Lightning was at
ReplyDeletehttp://www.savory.de/blog_feb_09.htm#20090207