Bad landing

On Mar 6, 10:49*am, jcarlyle wrote:
Man - that's terrible! That must be one really difficult plane to
land, or these guys must not have many hours of experience.

-john

Note sure of present day qualifications, but IIRC, back in the 1980's
I was told that it took 1500 hours of stick time to get a shot and
three tries at landing to get accepted. You had to have the touch.

A bent wing meant a museum piece as the spars were machined from a
single billet of aluminum.

Frank

Maybe they should have gone to negative flaps after touchdown!

On Mar 7, 8:56*am, wrote:
Maybe they should have gone to negative flaps after touchdown!

We need to do that with our Nimbus 3DT unless you wantto go into the
dirt!

At 17:49 06 March 2009, jcarlyle wrote:
Man - that's terrible! That must be one really difficult plane to
land, or these guys must not have many hours of experience.

Notice that most of these landings are happening in the two-seat trainer
version of the U-2, so yes, the pilots probably didn't have much in the
way of experience.

Jim Beckman

Frank Whiteley wrote:
This might make you feel better about a few of your landings.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eamnTyfkUBY


Never saw one land but the one I saw take off at Bien Hoa
was sure a pretty picture. A few of those sequences were
during takeoff, still had the wing wheels on.
...lew...

This months Flying Magazine has a really good article on flying the
U2. They mention a number of factors that contribute to it's
difficulty in landing. It's a good read. I recommend checking it out.

Any one notice how little dihedral the airplane has? I'm sure that
doesn't help at all. And what about the spoilers? They look smaller
than a Schweizer 1-19....

-Kevin

KevinFinke wrote:
This months Flying Magazine has a really good article on flying the
U2. They mention a number of factors that contribute to it's
difficulty in landing. It's a good read. I recommend checking it out.

Any one notice how little dihedral the airplane has? I'm sure that
doesn't help at all. And what about the spoilers? They look smaller
than a Schweizer 1-19....

How does the dihedral affect the landing characteristics?

--
Eric Greenwell - Washington State, USA
* Change "netto" to "net" to email me directly

* "Transponders in Sailplanes" http://tinyurl.com/y739x4
* Sections on Mode S, TPAS, ADS-B, Flarm, more

* "A Guide to Self-launching Sailplane Operation" at www.motorglider.org

How does the dihedral affect the landing characteristics?


1. Roll stability (or lack thereof)
2. Wingtip clearance

Shooting from the hip,
-Paul

Paul, that's exactly what I was thinking. In watching the videos, it
looked like the aileron effectiveness was very poor, so if a wing
started rolling, it just kept going. That combined with the low tip
clearance meant that the airplane looked very prone to easy ground
looping. If the airplane had better roll stability, I think it would
be easier to land.

In the flying article, they comment that in order to save weight, the
airplane has un-boosted controls. The plane really only lightens up in
control forces at it's design mission. The rest of the time, it takes
a lot of strength and force to move them. Can't imagine that's very
easy after flying for a long mission, now I have to do a strength
workout just to land.

-Kevin

sisu1a wrote:
How does the dihedral affect the landing characteristics?


1. Roll stability (or lack thereof)

Why do you want it to be "stable"? Doesn't that prevent you from easily
holding it in a slip? My thought is roll response is important, not
stability.

2. Wingtip clearance

No argument there!


--
Eric Greenwell - Washington State, USA
* Change "netto" to "net" to email me directly

* "Transponders in Sailplanes" http://tinyurl.com/y739x4
* Sections on Mode S, TPAS, ADS-B, Flarm, more

* "A Guide to Self-launching Sailplane Operation" at www.motorglider.org