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Level 3—Advanced Upper-air Maneuvers
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Day 1
GROUNDSCHOOL INSTRUCTION (Morning)
Period I
Orientation and Safety around Aircraft.
Aircraft Weight and Balance Control.
Pre-flight Operations and Procedures.
Period 2
Preparatory Ground Instruction: Maximum Range and Endurance
FLIGHT TRAINING (Afternoon)
Air Exercise: Maximum Range and Endurance
In this exercise students learn how to establish the aircraft in a configuration that provides maximum distance (range) and maximum time (time) in the air for a given amount of fuel—besides being a safety manoeuvre, this exercise teaches students the fine-tuned pilot control necessary to establish flight using specific power settings and airspeeds.
Day 2
GROUNDSCHOOL INSTRUCTION (Morning)
Period I
Aerodynamics: Forces of Flight and the Generation of Lift; Bernoulli’s Theorem; Angle of Attack.
Period 2
Preparatory Ground Instruction: Slow Flight
FLIGHT TRAINING (Afternoon)
Air Exercise: Slow Flight
Aeroplanes behave quite differently at slow speeds—in contrast to the normal cruise speed ranges. Students in this exercise learn how to recognise when an aircraft has entered slow flight, and how to control the aircraft safely and effectively in this speed range. In learning how the aircraft behaves in slow flight, student are preparing for landing and takeoff training—where slow flight control just after takeoff and prior to landing is critical.1
Day 3
GROUNDSCHOOL INSTRUCTION (Morning)
Period I
Aerodynamics: Wing Design— Laminar and conventional airfoils, Angle of Incidence, Washout, Stall Strips, and Airfoil Variation.
Period 2
Preparatory Ground Instruction: Stalls
FLIGHT TRAINING (Afternoon)
Air Exercise: Stalls
A stall is defined as the condition of flight in which the position of nose of the aircraft is too high relative to the aircraft’s flight path—the wings are not able to produce lift, resulting in the undesired descent of the aircraft. In this exercise students learn how to recognise a stalled condition and recover with a minimal loss of altitude and while keeping the aircraft under control.2
Day 4
GROUNDSCHOOL INSTRUCTION (Morning)
Period I
Aerodynamics: Wing Design— Laminar and conventional airfoils, Angle of Incidence, Washout, Stall Strips, and Airfoil Variation.
Period 2
Preparatory Ground Instruction: Spinning
FLIGHT TRAINING (Afternoon)
Air Exercise: Spinning
Spins are one of the most exciting manoeuvres learned by students. Spin recognition and recovery requires that the students stall the aircraft, produce what is referred to as “autorotation,” and recover after one revolution with a minimum loss of altitude.3 Students must learn to instinctively recognise when a spin is about to occur and must learn the proper control input to counter a spin and produce a recovery
Day 5
GROUNDSCHOOL INSTRUCTION (Morning)
Period I
Aerodynamics: Longitudinal, Lateral, and Directional Stability, Torque, Precession, and Asymmetric Thrust.
Quiz.4
Period 2
Preparatory Ground Instruction: Spiral Dives
FLIGHT TRAINING (Afternoon)
Air Exercise: Spiral Dives
Spiral dives are quite different from spins—while an aircraft is descending in a corkscrew fashion, the aircraft is not stalled but is instead accelerating very rapidly. Students in this exercise learn how to recognise a spiral and learn how to recover, again with a minimal loss of altitude.5
Reference Notes
1 Slow flight is the speed range from just above the stall to the speed for maximum endurance. The features of slow flight include a high “angle of attack” (high nose), high power settings, poor pilot visibility, and “sloppy” controls. Like steep turns, slow flight is one of the more difficult manoeuvres to perform on a Flight Test, with the Examiner requiring the student to manoeuvre the aircraft safely and precisely just above the stalling speed. Yet slow flight is central to flying as a pilot transitions through the slow flight range on every landing and takeoff.
2 It is worth noting that stalls are not entirely undesirable as full-stall landings are in many instances proper landing technique—in all landings, pilots approach the stall just before touchdown; knowing exactly when an aircraft will stall is critical knowledge a student must acquire. At the point of a stall the aircraft controls do not function normally as there is no longer a smooth flow of air over the control surfaces manipulated by the pilot. To recover from a stall, the pilot must push the control column smoothly forward to immediately decrease the angle of attack (from a nose-high position). If one wing is allowed to inadvertently drop, the aircraft could develop a spin; while a stall takes only one to two hundred feet to recover, a spin recovery could take as much as a thousand feet!
3 Autorotation, to the observer, appears as a slowly descending aircraft that is simultaneously rotating quite tightly around a vertical flight path—to the pilot at the controls, however, the world appears to be “spinning.” Commonly, a spinning aircraft can fall a thousand feet in only a few seconds—quite exciting.
4This is a ten-question, multiple-choice quiz that is administered on the last day of Camp. The questions revolve around items learned in both Groundschool and in the air. Successful completion of the quiz leads to the issue of a Certificate of Completion by Langley Flying School.
5 Interestingly, to recover from a spiral dive, the pilot must first level the wings of the aircraft prior to pulling back on the control column and recovering from the dive—if the wings are not levelled first, the spiral dive will simply tighten up and airspeed will continue to increase dangerously.
