HERE COMES THE PITCH

Writing about a fatal accident that resulted from the pilot’s mishandling of a balked landing, I reflected that I had never assessed the behaviour of my own aeroplane in that manoeuvre. My idea of flight testing is to take trips and wait for something strange to happen, and, as luck would have it, I have never yet had a balked landing in Melmoth 2.

- PETER GARRISON

IN THE ACCIDENT IN QUESTION, the pilot selected full flaps, allowed speed to decay to the vicinity of the stall, and then, feeling she was still too high to land, decided to go around. She retracted the flaps without first gaining speed. The minimum flying speed went up along with the flaps, and the aeroplane, a Cirrus, stalled and spun.

This seems like an elementary error, but changing configuration at low speed is not always an easy thing to do. Early Cessna 150s and 172s, for instance, were notoriously unable to gain speed with full flap; you had to bleed the flap up very carefully while you waited for the diminishing drag to allow the aeroplane to very gradually accelerate. If you had to turn or climb to avoid an obstacle, you were in a bad fix.

This characteristic was not confined to low-powered personal aeroplanes; the Boeing 727, with its fantastically complicated and powerful triple-slotted flap, had it too. Both the Cessnas and the Boeing had 40-degree flap positions that many operators eventually disabled because of the drag they entailed.

The first aeroplane I built, Melmoth (1973-1982) had a double-slotted Fowler flap that deflected 45 degrees. It produced a tremendous amount of drag. One of the tricks with which I would amuse or appal passengers was to stay at pattern altitude on final approach until the runway disappeared from view under the nose. I would then chop the power and land on the numbers.

On one memorable occasion, with Scaled Composites test pilot and civilian astronaut Mike Melvill riding in the right seat, I began the flare a little too abruptly and the nose did not come up. Thus, in accordance with my philosophy of flight testing by random events, I learned that with a forward CG and full flap the stabilator could stall.