How An Old War Vet Helped Me Understand How To Fly

When I initially started my flight training, it was more intense going up in the plane than I expected. The noise of the engine. The way the plane bounced around in the wind. I had flown many times before, but actually taking the controls myself added a new dimension to things. I admit, there was some fear I experienced, and it manifested itself as tension. I can hear the echo of my instructor emphatically repeating, “Right rudder! Right rudder!” I had a death grip on the controls and I was constantly fighting the airplane. I even doubted whether I would be able to continue flying. I thought it might just not be for me. 

One day I was rolling down this path by the river in town. I noticed a really small airstrip. At first, I thought it might have been an old one that was used for small planes way back in the day. As I kept looking, I realized it was too small for a real plane. What was this place? I later found out it was an RC plane airstrip. One day I was rolling by, and there were people flying their RC planes there. I talked to some of them and just watched for a while. One of the guys there was this old war vet who said he had flown all kinds of planes. 

The other people eventually left, and it was just the old war vet and I left at the airfield. He started pointing at some turkey vultures that were flying nearby. He said, “Look at that. They haven’t flapped their wings in minutes. They just naturally know how to soar.” As the old war vet talked about the birds, it suddenly clicked for me. I realized that I had been fighting the plane, but I needed to let things flow. From that point on, flying became natural for me. I was able to relax. I stopped trying to resist every little bump of turbulence. Everything seemed to just click.

What I hadn’t realized is that small training aircraft are designed to be extremely stable. There are two types of stability when talking about aircraft. The first is static stability. This term relates to how the aircraft behaves when it is initially disturbed. There are three types of static stability; negative, neutral, and positive. Negative static stability means that the disturbance to the aircraft will tend to increase. For example, if a pilot inputs right aileron, the aircraft will want to roll to the right at an increasing rate. Neutral static stability means that the aircraft will tend to stay in the state that it was put in by the disturbance. If the pilot inputs right aileron, the aircraft will stay in the degree of roll that it was put in by that input. Positive static stability means that the aircraft will tend to return to its previous state after a disturbance. So if the pilot inputs right aileron, the aircraft will tend to return to straight and level flight. Positive static stability is the type of stability that most trainer aircraft are designed with. 

The other type of stability is dynamic stability. Again, there are three types, being negative, neutral, and positive. The concept is similar to static stability, but dynamic stability is about how the aircraft reacts to a disturbance over time. There are certain oscillations that happen when an aircraft is put into a new attitude. If those oscillations increase over time, the aircraft has negative dynamic stability. If the oscillations do not increase or decrease, the aircraft has neutral dynamic stability. If the oscillations decrease over time, the aircraft has positive dynamic stability. Again, trainer aircraft are designed to have positive dynamic stability.

Having a very stable aircraft means that aircraft is very easy to fly. It doesn’t require the pilot to make huge inputs or fight the plane. It will tend to stay in a level attitude if you just let it do its thing. The vultures I was watching with the old war vet are also extremely stable in the air. They have wings with something called dihedral, which is also a feature in aircraft that increases stability. Dihedral is the upward horizontal angle of the wings. It creates a slight V shape if you are looking directly at the front of the aircraft. This feature causes the wings to tend to return to level. The vultures use it to rock side to side in the air and use thermals to stay soaring. I could go even more into things like how the angle of attack for each wing increases or decreases as it is lowered or raised, but the point is that there are certain characteristics of training aircraft that make them want to fly straight and stay in the air.

Flying is about working with the forces that act on the aircraft, and using them to gently guide the plane through the sky. It wants to fly if you just let it. Once I understood that, flying made a lot more sense and I was able to fully step into my role as a pilot.