Hold the Humor just plane stupid!

A student pilot once told me some things that went on in a flight school. You will be amazed how stupid some pilots can be. A small group of flight instructors while teaching pilots would take Cessna 152's up and do loops in the aircraft. They would climb up and then dive the aircraft to pick up speed and then doing a loop.

Here is the story of one of those loops as told by a student. During the loop as the aircraft was reaching the top of the loop the aircraft went into a flat spin upside down! The instructor tried repeatedly to apply rudder and yoke correction with nothing happening. Note: The problem here was they had an aft center of gravity and lost airspeed and stalled at the top of the loop. The amazing thing was the aircraft spun about eight thousand feet and slowly the nose started to recover downward. The student claims the aircraft recovered only hundreds of feet above the tree tops. They were very lucky!

I once watched an FAA demonstration video of a test pilot in a Cessna 172 do repeated stalls with the aircraft weighted so that it had a center of gravity 1/2 inch aft of the allowable limits. On the pilots first three stalls he made a recovery with very little difficulty. On the fourth stall the aircraft went into a flat spin. The aircraft was set up with a video camera in the aircraft which taped the whole event. After repeated tries to recover the test pilot left the aircraft and parachuted to safety. The video camera continued to tape the aircraft spinning until it crashed in the desert.

So a lesson to learn is if you are going to do acrobatics, do it in an aircraft designed for acrobatics wear a parachute and make sure the weight and center of gravity are within limits.

Robbie Johnson
Aviation Training Us LLC