Upset Recovery Training with Sean Tucker’s Tutima Academy of Aviation Safety
I had the distinct pleasure of taking an abreviated version of Sean D Tucker’s Tutima Academy of Aviation Safety Upset Recovery Training this week. It’s not often one gets the opportunity to put an Extra 300L through its paces in the process of gaining practical experience in the safe recovery from stalls, spins, and inverted attitudes. Every pilot owes it to himself and his passengers to get this training!
While Sean Tucker is best known for his high-addreneline airshow routines in high performance biplanes, he actively manages the Tutima Academy (also known as the Sean D Tucker School of Aerobatic Flight), in King City California. In his own words, the Tutima Aviation Safety Academy is one of his ways to give back to the general flying community that he holds dear.
Tutima offers a wide variety of aerobatic course work from basic upset recovery (5-7 hours), intro to aerobatics (10 hrs), to individually tailored advanced aerobatic instruction. The school fleet includes a Pitts S2-B, Pitts S2-C, and the recent addition of an Extra 300L. The ‘L’ stands for ‘low wing’ which provides slightly better visibility on landing.
Our instructor was Ben Freelove. Ben learned to fly in the Dayton, Ohio area before his interest in aerobatics drew him to central California and Sean Tucker’s school. After completing his ratings, Ben stayed in California to instruct and compete. Over the years, he’s gained familiarity with the 152 Aerobat, Citabria and Decathalons, various Pitts, and the Extra 200 and 300. When he got an offer to come back to Sean’s school as an instructor, he jumped at the chance. Ben has the distinction of having given over 500 hours of aerobatic instruction without a single airsick (to the point of losing their lunch) customer.
Ground School
As with any flight training, our session began with ground school. Topics were discussed somewhat in order of the flight training plan. Ben was careful to assess background and experience early-on to maximize the training benefit. Highlights included:
- Stalls and their relationship to angle-of-attack
- Proper aircraft control while stalled (use rudder only in most aircraft including the Extra)
- Spin entry and recovery
- Base-to-Final skidding turn spin scenario
- Basics of inverted flight and the ballistic ‘roll’
- Proper roll techniques for upset recovery
The Flight
After waiting out low ceilings for most of the day, we finally got a break about 2:30 in the
afternoon to get out flying. Ben was careful to preflight the Extra both out and in - and made sure the cockpit and our pockets were clear of items that might become airborn during manuevers. Once we had the airplane out on the ramp, Ben walked me through suiting up in my parachute and gave me a briefing on proper egress procedures in the unlikely event of abandoning the aircraft from altitude. Finally, I got situated in the Extra and Ben walked me through adjusting and securing the 5-point safety harness.
Initial Familiarization and Basic Stalls
Taxiing the Extra seemed conventional for a tail-while aircraft. Visibility is somewhat limited over the nose and S-turns were required. Ben handled the takeoff due to my nearly total lack of tail-dragger experience. As one would expect, the Extra gets moving pretty quick and can produce impressive climb rates. After takeoff, Ben relinquished control so I could start to get a feel for control forces on the way to the practice area.
The Extra is very ‘brisk’ on the controls. The elevator was slightly less sensitive than the ailerons, but not overly so. Due to the symetric wing with a zero angle of incidence, nose attitudes are a few degrees higher in most flight regimes compared to normal light aircraft. Given a light touch, the Extra was very easy to fly.
After clearing the practice area, we started out with a set of power-off and power-on stalls. During this training, the Extra’s stall warning horn was disabled to remove distractions (since we would be spending a fair bit of time in stalls). Rather than pay attention to airspeed, we focused on stick position at stall and noted that this remained the same for both power-off and power-on applications. The Extra stalled with little-to-no warning with a quick-onset control buffet and a clean break to one wing or the other. Recovery was a simple matter of using rudder to level the wings while relaxing the stick to reduce angle of attack to reattach airflow.
Getting to Know the Stall
Our next exercise was to perform accelerated stalls. We set power for ~90knots and then briskly increased pitch until stall. By loading the aircraft at ~1.5G’s, the stall occured at higher airspeed - but importantly at the same stick position as before. We did the same from 45 degree steep turns to reinforce the importance of angle-of-attack (and related stick position) to stall onset. Given this knowledge and less aggressive practice in our own aircraft, we should be aware of dangerous angles-of-attack by reference to control position rather than airspeed.
By now, we were pretty good at stalling the aircraft, so now it was time to ‘fly’ in the stall. We started off with a power-off entry and worked on keeping the aircraft level with rudder alone. The key here was to take it easy on the rudder as control response had a lag ~1/2 second or so. I thought it felt similar to driving a small v-hull boat at idle - they tend to wander and it is easy to overcontrol.
Power-on this maneuver was more impressive (the basis of Sean’s famous Harrier prop hover). Here, I had to look to the side for visual reference and found that it was much easier to over control and get into the oscillatory ‘falling leaf’ mode with the Extra. Ben noted a primary lesson in this - even though we were getting strong oscillations and I was somewhat behind the airplane, we did not spin. Getting into a spin would require very concious effort on our part - and this is generally true for most aircraft.
As a final stall exercise, we flew the aircraft ‘below’ stall speed by flying a parabolic trajectory. We gained speed and then pulled 60 degrees. Just shy of the stall, I released stick pressure and allowed the aircraft to fly over the hump. Since we were under 1G, the aircraft continued to fly well below ’stall speed’. With practice, zero indicated airspeed is achievable without a stall.
Spins
A climb to 5000′ put us in position to try out some spins. Ben led off with a demonstration of the classic base-to-final skidding turn. In the common set-up, a pilot attempts to increase the rate of turn without increasing bank angle by applying rudder into the turn. As the rudder comes in, opposite aileron is required to maintain bank angle, eventaully leading to a situation were the ailerons are ‘crossed’ out of the turn with the rudder fully in. This situation also increases drag and more and more aft stick is required to hold the desired glide rate.
As Ben demonstrated, one of the dangers of this situation is that everything appears normal in terms of the visual sight picture, even as the controls get very crossed and angle of attack gets dangerously high. The combination of crossed controls and bank angle provide scant warning of the impending stall which occurs with a rather violent roll inverted and into the spin. From pattern altitude, it is difficult/impossible to successfully recover once the spin starts. Key lesson - never skid a turn!
Following this rather dramatic presentation, we regained altitude for ‘normal’ spins entered from power-off stalls. I performed a set each direction. Entry was attained by applying and holding full rudder in the desired spin direction along with full aft stick once the stall was acheived. Recovery was a simple matter of full rudder opposite the spin to stop rotation (which happens very fast in the Extra) and then a release of back pressure to unstall the aircraft.
Rolls and Upset Recovery
Quite a few high-profile accidents have occured when aircraft became inverted unexpectantly near the ground and pilots were untrained in how to recover without large loss of altitude. The goal of upset recovery training is to gain confidence in using roll rather than pitch to recover from most upsets. While the use of roll seems intuitive during hangar talk sessions, in the absence of flight training most pilots are more likely to attempt a split-S (1/2 loop). This is because we tend to instinctively increase stick pressure to stop altitude loss when we see a windscreen full of ground, its more natural to ‘pull’ than push in a panic, and most pilots have never rolled an aircraft past 60 degrees. Unfortunately, a split-S recovery from an inverted upset takes a lot of altitude - especially if it is to be accomplished without overstressing a normal category aircraft.
Rolls on the other hand are easily conducted in coordinated 1G flight - keeping wings and tail attached and limiting the potential for altitude loss in a proper recovery. For upset recovery the Ben teaches a maneuver called the ‘ballistic’ roll. The ballistic roll is entered from roughly a 30 degree nose high attitude during training to minimize altitude loss. Once the 30 degree pitch angle is achieved, the stick is relaxed to neutral stick force and a coordinated application of aileron and rudder is applied to complete a 360 roll. For upset recovery, the same idea applies - only this time the goal is simply to neutralize stick force (limiting overall g forces and altitude change) and smoothly use coordinated rudder and aileron to return to level flight.
Ben was paitent while I practiced rolls both directions. I’ll need some practice before the airshow circuit as I seemed to miss wings level by about 5 degrees every time. Once I was comfortable, Ben took control and put the Extra in different inverted attitudes and from which I would recover. I was managing pretty well so we snuck in a set of 720 degree rolls in both directions, 10 seconds of inverted flight (it feels very strange), and a 3G loop before heading back to the airport.
More to Come
Our training was a very condensed version of the current 5 hour course. The full course adds additional content in unusual attitude recovery (nose high, nose low, …), lots more practice with inverted recovery, and some basic aerobatics - which according to Ben leads to lots of ad-hoc unusual attitude and spin recovery as maneuvers go wrong.
An exciting component that in development will be the inclusion of a Lancair Columbia 400 into the training sylabus - this will increase the course to 7 hours. Sean has been flying a 400 as part of his airshow tour this summer and a special set of procedures is being established to use the 400 for upset training. The current 5 hours of training will continue in the Extra or Pitts, but the final hours will culminate with the Columbia 400. This will provide students the chance to apply upset recovery skills in an aircraft with power and roll-rate more typical of common general aviation aircraft.
For more information on the Tutima Academy of Aviation Safety please visit their website. When you schedule your training, please tell them you heard about it from PlanePlaces.com!
The happy customer - with Ben’s unbroken no-vomit streak intact!
