JohnBuckner

My Feedback: (1)

Hi Kman, I believe that attempting to setup some sort of deliberate slip is virtually impossible. Also I setup fail safe on all my airplanes but do it differently according to what type of airplane, for example: The vast majority of my various sport airplanes large and small I set all the controls to default to neutral and the throttles to idle cutoff. This even applies to my turbines (which by the way are required by AMA regulation to use fail safe) which I always set for idle cutoff, I do not want those airplanes to go far and they don,t .

Now back in my racing days (pylon) after witnessing an incident in Los Angeles I became a believer in fail safe and I set all my of racers for idle cutoff and about 25% DOWN! An OSS (out of sight) loss of one is completely unacceptable with any loss of control I want it to crash BEFORE it ever leaves the race course.

That incident I referred to was some years back and a fellow competitor was on the course during a practice session and he experienced a complete loss of control and he yelled out the dreaded warning. That airplane was seen to be traveling in a straight line at about a hundred feet and a hundred and fifty mph. It passed over our heads back in the pits and vanished over the giant old oak trees.

A search proved fruitless until a someone brought a chunk of the wing back to the field, It was covered in tire tracks. Well where that airplane decided to hit at terminal velocity was in the middle of the #605 freeway interchange with the interstate #10 freeway which was about three quarter of a mile away. At the time that interchange was gridlocked typical for that time of day.

The fellow who returned the chunk of wing said the airplane hit vertically between the lanes some distance ahead of him and as he reached the spot he just opened the door a grabbed that wing chunk.

I never heard of any repercussions and apparently a very nasty situation was avoided just by pure luck, Any way it made a believer out of me about using fail safe.

John