"The Road to Recovery" (OCF)

"....many tactical situations dictate that you fly the aircraft to the limits of its controllability. Reluctance to fly in this regime because of possible departure from controlled flight not only limits the maneuvering capability of the machine but greatly reduces its effective employment as a weapons platform." (CNATRA, T-45TS OCF FTI, May 2006)
"Out of Control Flight" may seem like a bad thing to most people accustomed to airliners never deviating outside a gentle +/-30 degrees of bank angle in turns, but I can't wait to "Depart Controlled Flight" in the T-45C. The OCF classes, Sims and flight are a sub-set of the FAMs syllabus and I hope to finish them this week.

I've already had the chance to take off, land, fly under instrument rules, loop, barrel roll, aileron roll, wingover, Immelmann, split-S, half Cuban-8 and stall the aircraft. It's been great, I can't tell you how powerful it feels to pull 4Gs straight up at 380kts and keep pulling around while the horizon comes back at you from the opposite direction and then you finish the loop with the same 4Gs crushing you into the seat as you reach the same horizon you started from. I also can't tell you how exhausted I was after my first full aerobatic "FAM hop." I had the air conditioning on full cold and I was still pouring sweat down my face... in late December (which feels like mid-Fall in the NE). I also felt sick as a dog, but thankfully didn't re-vist any "Bananas" which I both wrote about last winter and ate that morning for breakfast.

The strange thing is that the next day I had a more grueling and aerobatic intensive flight, but felt great afterwards, as if my body's gotten used to having to quickly get used to these horrible things I'm starting to routinely do to it.

Anyway, the Out of Control Flight syllabus seems like the next natural step. I've already stalled out the aircraft numerous times which is definitely unsettling. Stalls involve slowing the aircraft down and pitching it up to the point where the wings can no longer produce lift. It is not like a car running out of gas where it slowly sputters and winds down, it's pretty violent. It's kinda like stumbing around your house in the dark and suddenly falling down a small step or two. It's quick, violent and unless you fix the problem you're going for a long fall. Unlike your basement stairs there are a few warnings prior to the point where the wings suddenly give up, the aircraft has a warning system that beeps loudly and shakes my rudder pedals (studies have shown that tactile sensations work the best apparently). Finally when I'm only about a knot of speed away from the stall the aircraft itself shakes and vibrates, much like riding an angry and tired horse that's seriously considering bucking you. When it happens it's pretty smooth but swift, a wing will usually drop quickly, sometimes the jet will just hang while you literally fall out of the sky and sometimes the nose will pitch down rapidly. Recovery is easy, it's just minimizing altitude loss that's a pain.

Un-like in the civilian world where (if I remember) stalls are viewed as the worst thing that can happen (and spins un-conscionable), we definitely avoid them but also see them as merely the first of 5 steps in entering Out of Control Flight. I love how we say "depart the aircraft" to describe much of what is in the preceeding paragraph, it makes it seem more like you and your plane are merely taking a break from flying, maybe stepping out for a smoke rather than seriously toying with the laws of physics in as Tom Wolfe described them "hurtling machines."

In any case, if it's anything like the T-34C it will involve pushing the airplane outside the flight envelope and enjoying an incredible roller coaster ride on the way down while trying to accomplish both simple yet vital steps to safely recover before breaking our 10,000 "hard deck" below which, if still OCF, we will eject.

I won't spin the jet like I did in the T-34C, so no crazy backflip following the stall, but I will launch it into the sky until it stops, literally stops (airspeed=0) and then recover it as it turns into a lawn dart, obeying the only force left acting on it, gravity. I'll also "adverse yaw depart" it by getting into a high-performance turn one way, with the aircraft almost stalled and then attempt to instantly reverse course which will stall one wing and then have the aircraft do a flip-roll in the opposite direction from where I put the stick.

I think it's going to be a blast and one hell of a roller-coaster ride so long as I keeping doing a good job of staying in the right part of the sky and by doing the maneuvers I don't disturb the airflow into the engine intake so much that the engine stalls out, but even that's not that such a huge deal.

We started with a class today which featured a retired instructor who said everything but the possible fact that he may have had more time in OCF conditions than I've had in any aircraft to date. He showed us a video made a few years back, in the 90s, entitled "T-45 Spins: The Road to Recovery" with a cheesy soundtrack and an awkward close up of a test pilot/actor giving a 5th grade Sex-Ed video talk about how to protect and recover the T-45C from an inadvertant spin (inverted and upright) and thus prevent premature ejection. It was very educational.