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Fun it was; the perfect Walter Mitty fighter plane! Wonderful control harmony, intuitive response, easy to land, and hell for stout; practically impossible for a clumsy or foolish pilot to get hurt in. Seriously underpowered; you had to plan on altitude loss on every aerobatic maneuver akin to a C150 Acrobat with two big guys aboard. The T34A Air Force version can be STCd up to 285 and even 300 HP engines. I don't think that's so for the Navy B version. Those up-engined birds are supposed to be great performers. Never flown one, but I sure would like to!
That was the fun part of instructing, making believers out of skeptics.
What variables increased the gimbal-limits of artificial horizon?
I was always under the impression that high wing-loading only affected stability at high airspeeds/low altitudes?
When you say two different sets of wings, do you mean they altered the geometry of the wing? Or they merely replaced the wings with ones that are new, but of the same shape?
You'd think, but I guess the attitude is: As long as it keeps working, why bother?
Well, I could imagine being a hard-ass would have not made you well liked among students, but you probably saved at least some of their lives down the road by heavily emphasizing it.
You have an adventurist spirit, which is the right kind of mind you'd want in an aerobatic pilot.
On the contrary, bringing them along gently, helping them through the "upset willies", and building their comfort zone in aircraft maneuvering enhanced their confidence and their sense of command, for which they were usually grateful. The last thing in the world you want is a pilot who panics and hauls back on the yoke when the windshield fills up with rotating trees. It's a terrifying sight the first time you see it just after the world's gone suddenly topsy-turvy on you. You're better off if you've "been there, done that".
Zipper, here's an experiment for you. Put an empty five gallon plastic pail upright in the bed of your pickup, back by the tailgate, and drive 35-40 MPH down a bumpy dirt road. Note its behavior. Now fill that pail 2/3 full of sand and repeat. See the difference? lbs/sq ft are lbs/sq ft, whether they're the wing loading of a sand bucket or a T38.
Ouch...
I could respect that!
Well, it had to do with gyroscopic instruments in general: As I grasp it, the attitude indicator seemed to undergo a controlled precession once you went above +82 or below -82, which just flipped the ball.
Well, what I meant was that if you have a top, the bottom of the top would be pulled down by gravity (1g), and down is basically towards the source of gravity which is basically the core of the earth (since our own brains work by sensing gravity, and since the curvature of the earth is so gradual, we simply interpret it as "down", not "aimed to the core of the earth"). I was under the impression that centrifugal force made it stand up and provided the stability, the bottom of the top simply responded to gravity (i.e. pointed down).
Well, I actually never took a formal physics class (I'm not all that fond of this to be honest).
No, I get that: length, width, height, which allows you to go left-right (X-axis), front-back (Y-axis), up and down (Z-axis); I was talking more to the relationship of the force of gravity to the core of the earth. Yeah, I have a tendency to be misunderstood a lot.
That's good.
Yeah, generally if you do something enough, you become desensitized to it.
In my physics classes I was taught that centrifugal force does not exist, it is a human construct to explain a sensation or apparent effect, the true force is centripetal force.
Right you are. I too was taught to use the terms "centripetal force" and "centrifugal" or "inertial" reaction. Guess I just slipped into the vernacular.
It's not so much a matter of being desensitized as learning to cope with and master the situation. All these years later, it's still a thrill to see the windshield full of trees going round and round, it's just no longer an overwhelming threat.
Understand, the sphere in the indicator provides heading as well as pitch and roll information; the meridians on the sphere depict the aircraft's magnetic heading. Now envision flying a loop. As you pass through the verical, both up and down, your magnetic heading reverses, so the sphere has to rotate 180° to properly depict your new direction.
That was probably the navigation bombing system periodically correcting the inherent precession drift of the gyros. Remember, these were D model Buffs, not the latest and greatest, and no longer part of the strategic deterrent. They probably weren't up to date and probably using an archaic analog computer nav system. True relics. Some other folks on here (Token, maybe?) are surely more knowledgeable than I on this.
The point of the top is NOT pulled down by gravity; it points "down" because that's the way it was oriented when it was spun up, and it's just complying with its hereditary mandate to maintain rigidity in space.
