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Old 07-21-2010 | 04:12 PM
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Bryce Watson
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Default RE: Stall Characteristics of the Bug

ORIGINAL: David Searles
Properly balanced though, my experience is that they just stop flying and descend at a frightening rate. At that point you've gotta be quick to get added thrust back into the equation to avert disaster!


This is what happened to me once with a Superhornet, a number of factors contributed to the situation below, most notably, first flight on a brand new slower spooling turbine which I had been used to, and ultimately overall, pilot error in forgetting to reset the elevator to flap mix from prior trials with the ailerons being lowered along with the flaps which required more up elevator (3/4)up, and simply being behind the power curve. As you can see in the video the jet remains controllable, but begins to wing rock and becomes a bit pitch sensitive. As mentioned by David above, the descent rate will increase fairly rapidly. Believe it or not, I began to increase power toward full at the beginning of this video because I could sense the jet getting a bit slow. The turbine installed at the time took approximately 11s from idle power (which is where I was due to a slightly high approach) to max thrust. After this flight I sent my turbines in to have them upgraded to faster spooling versions and my models with those turbines in them (including the SuperHornet) have been a joy to fly ever since, especially due to the turbine spool times on those engines being approximately 5.1 seconds from idle to full thrust.

Bryce

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bV9uXHl2P0k[/youtube]