On May 14, 9:40*am, wrote:
On May 13, 11:50 pm, HARRY POTTER wrote:

I agree with you on Bertie, but not MX. I honestly think MX posts here
because he genuinely wants to learn about piloting. All his threads starts
on a reasonable tone. Its other people who turn it into a ****fest, which
he then responds to. His "trolling", I feel, is mainly caused by his
frustration of the fact that people judge his opinions solely on who he is,
rather than what he posts. If people treated his opinions like they would
anybody else, he'd stop being so blatantly obtuse.

I have at least hinted that the pilots here might try that, and each
time they claimed that I was trolling.

* * * You haven't been here long enough. Many times Mx or Le Chaud
Lapin will ask a question, get the right answer in a polite manner,
and then argue endlessly against that answer, belittling the teacher.
What reaction would you expect?

I know of two specific examples were the answer was wrong. And also,
some of the stock answers are still under debate, like what causes
lift, probably one of the most fundamental, theoretical questions a
pilot might ask about flying.

Also, speaking for myself, I never said I was right. I was simply
exploring possibilities. There is nothing wrong with exploration of
topics still under debate.

* * *Many of the physics and other things in aviation are not
intuitive; that is, they don't make sense to the uninitiated, and
without well-rounded groundschooling and flight instruction they never
will make sense. Flight simulators don't teach these things. Add to
that the fact that there are people who are certain that they're much
smarter than the average bear and so they have "new" answers to
aviation's problems. Those new answers killed a lot of guys a long
time ago but they don't know that. To them, "well-rounded
groundschooling" is equal to standard party propaganda and therefore
false.

I agree with Harry. Though I have disagreed with Mx on one point, he
has never been rude, condescending, or hostile to me in any way. In
fact, I took a look at many of his posts a while back, and the
rudeness and hostility were coming from elsewhere. There also seemed
to be people who tend to vacillate between being helpful and being
hostile, depending on their given mood.

Secondly, I do not agree that there are things that necessarily do not
make sense to the "uninitiated."

A big part of flight dynamics is based upon Newtonian physics, and I
do understand Newtonian physics, and I personally know of people who
received advanced degrees in aero/astro who do not have a pilot's
license. Some of these individuals might know a bit about flight
dynamics too.

Also, there are some people who are both heavily-experienced pilots
who also understand the underlying physics: I was watching television
one day about Blue Angels, and the commentator mentioned that "only a
very few special pilots get to fly these aircraft, and precisely at
that moment, the camera panned to a classroom blackboard for only a
few hundred milliseconds, and behold, on the board, was none other
than a moderately complex transfer function H(s).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfer_function

I thought..."Hmmm...Transfer functions...impressive...probably talking
about instability."

Most pilots I would imagine eventually develop an intuitive feel for
oscillations caused by instability, but they would not know where the
poles of transfer function governing that instability lie.

And as far as flying, from what I see, a large part of it is what one
knows, and there is a lot that can be learned from a simulator, like
VOR practice, which would be far more expensive if learned solely from
cockpit at $100/hour than using fixed $50 product from convenience of
home.

So the question becomes...how much theory can be learned in the
absence of actually flying, and how much requires being in the plane
(or having a groundschool instructor present while you read the book).

I think that quite a bit can be learned [and understood] before ever
leaving the ground, far more than what can only be learned by being in
the aircraft.

-Le Chaud Lapin-