If I were to ask you how to control an airplane, most of you would quickly answer that you maintain control with your brain, your eyes, and your hands—in that order—which is not necessarily a wrong answer. It is not the entire answer, however.
Having complete command of the airplane means bringing all of your senses into play for total communication between both the airplane and the medium through which it is traveling. This means you use your vision; the tactile feeling of your hands on the controls; the sensations being created within your body by motion; your hearing; and last, the Big Kahuna—the interface where you touch the seat (if I may be crude, your butt). About the only sense that isn’t used to actively control the airplane is smell, and even there, it takes only a tiny whiff of smoke for you to tell whether it’s electrical or mechanical in nature—and set your mind and hands into action accordingly.
The reason I’m referring to the posterior/upholstery interface as the “Big Kahuna” is because, in terms of importance, it ranks right behind the eyes and hands as being the best source of terrifically useful aircraft control information (see “Eyes and Ears,” opposite page). Unfortunately, however, your butt may well be the most-ignored instrument in the airplane. What it feels is instantaneously transmitted and exactly parallels what the airplane is doing at any given time.
At one time, saying, “He’s flying by the seat of his pants,” wasn’t a clichéd insult. It suggested that a pilot was controlling the airplane through a form of organic connection with the craft. It’s interesting, and maybe just a little sad, that we’ve come to consider this natural way of aviating to be something bad.
This says something about the way in which we now define the skill of flying as everything that is more standardized (a good thing) and more regimented (maybe a good thing), with less emphasis placed on the art of flying and more on the technology (a bad thing to many).
The net result is that many pilots spend entirely too much time with their heads in the cockpit, reading instruments that tell them things that actually happened several seconds earlier—much of what you see on the instrument panel is historical, because it happened in the windshield and to your butt first.
The centered ball. First, let’s agree on one thing—keeping the ball in the middle is of prime importance at all times while in the air except when intentionally slipping the airplane. On climbout, P-factor always tries to drive the ball to the right, indicating that the airplane is no longer climbing straight. The amount and the overall effect of P-factor will vary from airplane to airplane, but in 100 percent of the cases, letting the ball get off center ruins efficiency. Because the airplane is yawing, it is not perfectly streamlined, and drag goes up considerably. When this happens, horsepower is consumed overcoming the drag, which is another way of saying you’re not climbing as fast as you should be and you’re wasting gas in the process.
On approach, when the power is off, that same P-factor will try to drive the ball to the left and the effects, if it is allowed to go uncorrected, will be the same as on climbout but in reverse: Because the yaw’s drag makes the airplane aerodynamically “dirty,” it won’t glide nearly as far. Also, when in gliding turns, with the ball to the inside of the turn and the nose to the outside, the airplane will take much longer to get through the turn. More time is spent in a dirty, wing-down situation and even more altitude is lost unnecessarily.
In all turns, if the adverse yaw isn’t countered with rudder during the period of time that the ailerons are displaced during the roll-in and rollout (everything is neutral while the turn is in progress) and the ball isn’t centered, the drag will go up, the speed will suffer, and the airplane won’t travel nearly as precise a path as it would if the ball was centered. Precision in an airplane depends very much on an aerodynamically clean airplane and that, in turn, only happens with a centered ball.
Two Bs. Substitute “butt” for “ball” and this has the same meaning. You want to keep your butt centered for all the same reasons; the inclenometer's ball is doing nothing but telling you what your butt already knows—assuming you’re listening to it.
The butt talks to you because it acts as if it is sitting in a shallow V with equal pressure on both sides. As the airplane is yawed and your butt moves sideways, the sensation you feel is as if it is being forced to move up one side of that V. You feel more pressure on one side than on the other, and the heavier pressure is on the same side to which the ball is displaced. So, just as you step on the ball to center it, you also step on your butt (the heavy side) to center it. The sensations associated with yaw are felt all of the time in all aircraft, but in some aircraft they are difficult to detect. For that reason, a little butt training is called for.
The next time you’re flying with a safety pilot (you’ll see why a safety pilot is needed in a minute), try a few butt awareness and training exercises. You need to have three points of reference: the nose (better yet, a point on the nose, such as a screw or hinge line), the ball, and your butt. While flying straight ahead, establish a baseline for your posterior sensations and step on just a little rudder with no aileron, intentionally causing an uncoordinated yaw. Look at the nose, then the ball, with one corner of your mind focused on what your butt is feeling: There will be a slight sensation that you’re moving sideways across the seat and the side that’s downstream of the movement will feel decidedly heavier than the other.
Now, induce the same feeling with just the ailerons: Look at the nose, the ball, and pay attention to your butt while cranking in a significant amount of aileron—absent any rudder. As the aileron goes in, you’ll see the ball slide out in the direction you’re moving the aileron. At the same time, you’ll feel your butt trying to move across the seat, in the same direction. Left aileron, left butt movement.
Repeat a few times, moving the controls in a deliberate, uncoordinated fashion; continually keep track of how the ball and your posterior are reacting. You’re using the ball to calibrate your butt so that you will know what the ball is doing without looking at it.
Now, close your eyes and do the same thing (hence the safety pilot). With all other sensory inputs taken away, you can better concentrate on what your body is actually feeling. Let your safety pilot fly the airplane from turn to turn, nose up and nose down—without using the rudder. You’ll be given control of the rudder, and you’ll only know what to do based on what your butt is telling you. So, when you feel your butt slide to the left, you put in a little left rudder pressure. In that situation, most pilots fly with better coordination than they do when their eyes are open.
The goal is to develop an innate feeling of when the airplane is yawing by becoming aware of what your body is telling you at all times.
Flying by the seat of your pants means that, eventually, you won’t have to look at the ball to know something isn’t right. This is a critical addition to your flying skills because it will eliminate half of the cause of stall/spin accidents: If, when it’s stalled, the airplane isn’t yawed, it won’t spin and make the out-of-control situation even more out of control.
It’s all part of being aware of what the airplane is telling your body before it shows up on the instrument panel. Your body is talking—all you have to do is listen.
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