Guy Leitch
There are some things about flying which fill me with awe and wonder.
Flight is the most beautiful synthesis of physics and dreams.
I get all choked when I hear the music from the twelve organ pipes of a Rolls Royce Merlin. SpaceX has the ability to regularly tear me up: when they simultaneously landed two Falcon Heavy side boosters back on their pads – or when they caught the Starship Super Heavy rocket booster in mid-air with the ‘Mechazilla’s chopsticks’. This is a perfect synthesis of man having overcome the combined challenges of space and flight to bring the whole thing back to a perfect landing.
At an individual person scale, the script writers for the cult movie “Waynes World” recognised the God-awful power of flight by having the two maladjusted anti-heroes getting their thrills by lying on their car directly under the glidepath of landing jets.
On a more prosaic level the sweep of an Airbus A350 wingtip and the elegant slimness of the pylon engine mounts is art at its most functional and arguably, its best.
When 500 tons of A380 thunders down a runway and ponderously heaves itself into the air, it is an event possessed of an awesome grandeur. Even to an informed mind this experience can lead to a sense of wonder and creates an almost reverential homage to the seemingly supernatural power of flight.
It’s said that anything we don’t understand we instinctively fear. Do we as puny human beings really understand the power and the forces at work in flight of this magnitude and do pilots really understand their equipment?
And, if we don’t, do we then not secretly fear flying? Watching the wing tip of a 787 flexing through 2 or 3 metres in even light turbulence makes me wonder about where all that bending is coming from, and just how much strain all the brazillions of rivets – or bonding – can actually take.
Jet engine mounts are another source of amazement. I am amazed that there are not more engine separations than the infamous Nationwide Airlines Boeing 737-200 engine falling off during takeoff in 2007. The twisting forces on the spar of an airliner with underslung engines must be incomprehensible.
As an impressionable youth I remember gazing up with rapture at the tail of that most beautiful of all airliners, the VC-10, and wondering how it’s elegantly slim pylons could hold up, not just one, but two engines.
I try to convince myself with the thought that aircraft design must be an exact science with all the stresses and strengths passively allowing themselves to be computed into unbreakable rules. But nature and physics are not to be controlled that easily.
It is perhaps in primeval recognition of this fear that, when the designers do get it wrong and things like engines or hatches fall off, then the pulp press capitalises on our repressed fears and launches into orgies of sensational journalism.
As for that perennially vexatious subject of lift, I suspect that many private pilots (and a significant number of commercial pilots) have given up trying to resolve – or even just decide on their own view – on the Bernoulli vs Coanda / Newton’s second law debate.
I reckon many of these pilots secretly consider flying to be somehow a bit supernatural. While training and logical thought tells us how wings produce lift, I think that in the primal and usually sub-conscious recesses of our psyche we secretly wonder at the magic of nothing but air holding up hundreds of tons of metal.
I wonder if people would feel comfortable in an airliner if they knew that less than an inch of flimsy aluminium was between their posteriors and the thousands of feet of empty air beneath them.
For long after I learned to fly, I used to wonder about the structural integrity of a Cessna 172’s seat. It somehow always seemed that locked in the back corners of my mind was the fear that the skin would someday suddenly just split and my seat and I would go plummeting earthwards. Gliders with their thin fibreglass skins are even more worrying – so I never thought about that as I was too busy looking for that other great faith leap of faith; invisible lift.
I only overcame my fear of having to trust my life to a few millimetres of aluminium when I took up microlighting in weight shift trikes. When your bum is supported by nothing other than a seat squab strapped to the top of a skinny tube running between your legs, and when the whole contraption is suspended from a single bolt (the Jesus Bolt) you quickly learn to have faith in the basic integrity of materials.
And so the chance of your seat suddenly and inexplicably falling through the floor of an aircraft cabin comes to seem remote and just a little silly.
If perching on a pole and hanging on a Jesus Bolt from a fabric wing helped beat my deep-seated psychoses about aircraft structural integrity, a quick course in basic aerobatics will go a long way towards reassuring the average closetly suspicious pilot that Bernoulli/Coanda are not just theories. When the windscreen is full of nothing but mother earth going round at dizzying speed and your stomach is in your mouth, the demons of doubt and fear are doing their best to reduce you to a jibbering wretch – or a whimpering child.
Like Chuck Yeager, you have to be made of the right stuff, and have a blind faith in the effects of controls. Faith such that when you push the stick forward in a spin, the ground obediently stops going round. (Yes – it’s the stick forward that stops the spin, not opposite rudder – see Jim’s main article on spinning for more on this).
Anyway – back to the spin; as you calmly but forcefully ease back on the stick and the ground recedes back to where it belongs at the bottom of the windscreen, your belief in the design of the aircraft, and indeed in the whole idea of flight, is strengthened.
And so dear reader, the moral of this essay is, like Jonathan Livingston Seagull, to always be growing. Learn new skills, expand your envelope, and find out what you and your plane can do. As you find out more about what your plane can do, so you will find out more about what you can do. And what is maturity if it is not putting the child in yo