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Introduction. Many times the book “Stick and Rudder, An Explanation of the Art of Flying” has been recommended. Mr. Wolfgang Langewiesche copyrighted this tome in 1944 and it has become well respected in the Ercoupe community. Some of us have not had the pleasure of encountering Mr. Langewiesche’s thinking. Since my office is off the ENMU-R library, I felt the urge to extract some of “Stick and Rudder” for you readers. I have followed the extracts with some of my own thinking. You are free to disregard that, of course!
Percy G. Wood From page 6: “In the textbooks, this thing (the “key that … unlocks most of the art of flying” in the previous paragraph) is discussed under the name of the Angle of Attack. If you had only 2 hours to explain the airplane to a student pilot, this is what you would have to explain. It is almost literally all there is to flight.” I feel this cannot be stressed enough. You literally live and die by it while flying. Yet, as Mr. Langewiesche goes on to explain at length, it is hard to grasp. He states that we understand the unknown by comparing what we are trying to learn to something we are familiar with. However, “…the wing is the one thing about the airplane that is new and is peculiar to airplanes alone.” He does explain things that the Angle of Attack is not; but I’ll ‘cut to the chase’ and tell you what he says it is: “the Angle of Attack is the angle at which the wing meets the air.” Italics are the authors and well placed. He states that “the wing keeps the airplane up by pushing the air down.” Mr. Langewiesche then defines the stall as nothing more than the wing attempting to bend the air downward at a greater angle than it can take. “The wing is then no longer an efficient deflector of air.” Like taking a curve too sharply on your bicycle. The trick, as the author states on page 21, is that “…the Angle of Attack cannot be seen by looking out the window.” You have to track it with your mind, or have a specific instrument for it. I helped a design effort for an Angle of Attack meter, so I know they exist. The Wright Brothers had an Angle of Attack on their first planes – it was a piece of string. Which is used by the glider pilots to this day for yaw control. Look at most any sailboat. On top of the main mast is a feather-like vane. That is their Angle of Attack indicator. Keeping it correct to the angle of the sail propels the sailor along. Now an excellent quote from page 72: “When the flight surgeons test our eyes, ears, balance, and so forth, they are worrying unnecessarily – certainly as concerns civilian flying. A pilot needs no better vision than a blank clerk or a housewife, nor does he need better hearing, balance, depth perception, and all the rest. Our difficulty in learning to fly is not sense perception, but interpretation of what our senses perceive. We tend to pay attention to the wrong things; we miss the things that matter because we aren’t looking for them, because we do not know what they mean.” It is only an argument for Sport Pilot - 60 years ahead of it’s time! One opinion I hold is that the Private Pilot certificate has never been considered an end in itself. It is the first step up that ladder into the left front seat of an airliner, and we don’t want a sickie for a captain on the way to East Peoria! Just think of how many ways drivers licensing might have to change if the possessors there of were headed towards driving an 18-wheeler. A second point this brings up is that anyone can learn to fly. The trick is teaching what to look for. I maintain that anybody can fly most any airplane given the desire to do so and adequate training. Sure, there are some highly strung airframes out there that take a real he-man/she-woman to conquer. But you won’t catch me in any of `em. I like my flying easy and enjoyable, not a test of “man versus machine.” Starting on page 120 is the reason I “flew the `coupe:’ “What has been said so far concerning the airplane’s stability in the nose-up, nose-down sense has been an ideal picture, not a true picture. Very few airplanes, if any, actually behave quite so well; very few will actually fly, with the stick released, in straight flight, at constant speed regardless of power. The one ship that comes nearest the ideal is Fred E. Weick’s Ercoupe, which is in so many other respects, too, a remarkable airplane. It may seem absurd to set up a standard of stability which practically no airplane can live up to; at first glance, it will seem so unrealistic as to be useless. But there simply isn’t other standard of stability.” I have maintained that “an airplane too stupid to keep it’s tail behind it is too dumb for me to fly.” By playing with the forces involved, Fred Weick and his team at ERCO managed to pull it off. The `coupe is a real thinking person’s machine. The more you read about it, the more you marvel. Moving right along to the “Rudder” part of the title on page 137: “Now it is bad enough that an airplane has a rudder at all, seeing that “the only purpose of the rudder is to cover up the mistakes of the designers,” but it is even worse that this annoying effect, torque, makes it impossible to use the rudder in a consistent, simple, logical fashion; because of torque, we fly straight holding right rudder, we dive straight holding left rudder, and we sometimes go around left turns holding right rudder! And although we know it is one of the worst sins of the pilot to hold rudder during a turn, we do hold right rudder during a right turn – because of torque. Torque messes up our whole handling of the controls and is especially annoying to beginners; since correct footwork on the rudder is the most difficult part of elementary flying anyway, torque makes learning to fly doubly difficult.” After disposing of a couple ideas that may explain some of this behavior, Mr. Langewiesche comes up with a better explanation. This is the spiraling slipstream of the single, prop-driven plane. This accelerated air clings to the fuselage and impacts the center rudder. The Ercoupe had stability problems until Fred’s team put the vertical stabilizers on the ends of the horizontal one and removed the one in the middle. Mr. Langewiesche made a telling point later when he wrote: “There is no reason why those two tricks – the H tail and the slanted engine – could not be used in convention airplanes as well, except that too may pilots feel that an airplane isn’t a “real airplane” unless it faithfully reproduces all the traditional vices all over again.” One aspect of “torque” not discussed is the yaw encountered on take off. This yaw is most pronounced in “conventional geared” airplanes. You will note I did not say “conventional landing gear,” for such gear is not for “landing,” but for taking off. Look at it. The nose is already up in the air and ready to go! This turning tendency, always opposite of the direction of engine rotation as seen from the cockpit of the traditional tractor setup, is because the propeller is not perpendicular to the airflow. The tilt, more pronounced in “taildraggers” causes the downward propeller blade to meet the air at a higher Angle of Attack. The added thrust from that side causes a turn to the other side. Chapter 11, starting on page 176, is devoted to The Rudder. “The important thing to understand about the rudder pedals is that they are unnecessary; like your wisdom teeth, they serve no very good purpose but can cause much trouble. The airplane needs no rudder pedals. It should have no rudder pedals. In all probability it will have no rudder pedals 10 years hence.” And this was written in 1944. Yet there are those that maintain “happy feet dancing on the rudder” is needed for flight. I say “if I wanted pedals, I’d buy a bicycle.” Mr. Langewiesche gives the “…purposes for which the rudder is used…” including steering while taxiing and in the take off run. “However,” he continues, “tricycle-geared airplanes have been built which keep all three wheels on the ground until the very moment when the airplane breaks away from the ground and becomes controllable by the usual flight controls. Such an airplane is therefore entirely controllable, while on the ground, by steering the nose wheel; it needs no rudder. In such airplanes, the nose wheel is linked up mechanically with the same control that moves the ailerons, and the rudder pedals get the fate they deserve: there aren’t any!” He also mentions “torque,” the sideslip and cross-wind landings. Turns are discussed at length. The chapter concludes with a section on:
THE AUTOMATIC RUDDER “The Wright brothers knew what the rudder is for. They had the whole airplane figured out much more brilliantly even than most people realize even now. They knew that an airplane could not be successfully turned by rudder but would have to be turned by leaning it into a bank and lifting it around with the flippers (elevators – ed.).Their first glider didn’t have a rudder! But they also soon discovered the adverse yaw to the left, and a crash. The Wrights then fitted a rudder; but they understood the nature of the rudder better than most airmen have understood it since. They knew that it was merely a device for counteracting the adverse yaw effect. They hitched their rudder up mechanically with their aileron control. Thus giving aileron to the right would automatically always be accompanied by right rudder; aileron to the left, by left rudder; aileron in neutral, neutral rudder. What we now call “coordination of stick and rudder,” which we spend tedious hours learning, and – as the accident record shows – never learn quite well enough, was reduced to a mechanical device!” I shall not bore the reader with further quotes from this section except to say that the next paragraph is an unabashed plug for the Ercoupe.
Conclusion. This book has certainly been out long enough to have had an effect. We have seen most light planes go to ailerons that do not exhibit large amounts of adverse yaw. The rudder remains the sole vestige of earlier years. “Conventional” gear is about gone. We call it “conventional” because it was the convention – in the days of lighter planes landing on real air fields; fields where one could land in whatever direction the wind was blowing from. Rough fields, where one needed to keep the prop away from the ground. Fields that got soft in the rain; who wanted to fly then? With heavier airplanes that sink into the mud, and faster planes that needed longer distances to stop than a “field” could provide, the world moved on to tricycle landing, taxiing and yes, taking off, gear. Military missions changed to “all-weather,” so soft-after-a-rain was out. Modern air travel has become a 365-days-a-year operation, barring computer glitches, labor strikes and government action. This selective review has been for a selective audience. It is hopped that the wider audience, Sport Pilots who are getting into flying for the first time, will invest the time to read “Stick and Rudder.” You are welcome to share this review and comments.
Biography. “Stick and Rudder,” by Woflgang Langewiesche. Published by McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc. New York, London. Copyright 1944, twentieth printing. The copy I read is marked Walker Air Force Base Library, Mar. 8, 1963.
Author. Percy G. Wood has just over 500 hours as pilot in command; 270 Cessna 150, the rest Ercoupe. “Keep `em Flying!”
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