Flying Clouds

[asra]

I was surfing this forum this morning and this subject caught my eye.It is impossible to fly any aircraft( Except an untethered hot air baloon ) in cloud unless it is equipped with instrumentation to give you accurate attitude and airspeed information. Then if you are in such an aircraft you "must" also have received sufficient training to be able to safely interpet the information the instruments are giving you so you will be able to control the machine by sole rererence to instruments.In the case of a gyroplane once visual reference to the ground has been lost the very first reaction will be fear, fear will produce the natural instinct to do something to escape resulting in uncommanded control movements guided by your bodys inner ear sensing movement...........however with the loss of visual clues as to your true position and attiude in space the inner ear sensations will cause you to very quickly become totally and hopelessly disorientated.Studies have shown that non instrument rated pilots suffering loss of visual reference caused by flying into cloud results in total loss of control and the resulting break up of the airplane usually within forty seconds.I have never read of any studies done with regard to pilots losing visual contact in gyroplanes however my gut feeling is that loss of control and break up of the machine would occur faster than in a fixed wing aircraft, unless the pilot immediately closed the throttle and stopped foward movement of the gyro allowing it to autorotate straight down and freezing the cyclic in the nuteral position with the rudder centralized.Let me think about this some more and maybe I will change or add to my comments.Also I do vaguely remember Birdy describing his loss of visual reference thrill, I believe it was due to popping over a hill into smoke???So these things can happen and God / Allah / Buddah / ....???only knows how or why we survive sometimes.Anyhow I am going to think about this some more and if anyone is interested in my thoughts I will add more to this very serious issue.Chuck E.

[Tim]

Chuck, I think that most experienced will agree with you 100% on this subject. I would certainly be interested in any more that you could add to this subject.Tim McClure

[asra]

O.K. Tim I shall try and simplify this issue of what happens when we fly into cloud.There are two distinct physical reactions that occur when a pilot suddenly loses visual clues to their attitude with the horizon.(1) The physical reaction of a well trained and current instrument pilot is zero, there is no noticable physical reaction for the simple reason that this pilot has already projected his/her path through space far enough ahead of the aircraft that there is zero change in the stress level of their subconscious mind and the transfer of visual clues from the outside world to the "NEW" enviorement of the instrument panel is seamless because there is no suprise factor involved in the transfer of situational awareness of aircraft attitude and its path vectors when looking from one picture to the other. This is due to having become comfortable with the different method of determining aircraft behaviour from the raw data that the mind absorbes in our natural view of the world around us to a "mechanical or electronic virtual" view of the world around us presented by an array of instruments or flat screen EFIS presentation mounted in the flight panel in front of us. With proper training and then real world immersion in manouvering the aircraft using the instruments the transfer from visual to instruments becomes quite natural and a non event.Eventually there comes a time where flight by reference to instruments becomes the preferred and most comfortable method of flying due to the increased accuracy of your aircraft handling and planning ahead without all the outside distractions of flying visual as in VFR.(2) For The non instrument trained pilot on the other hand, once visual contact with the world around him/her is lost they immediately freeze in fear and then proceed to react randomly following their senses of attitude change that has now become corrupted by loss of visual clues and the only information going to the brain now is the inner ear sensing rapid changes of direction both horizontaly and vertically...and then they die.I hope I am not getting to technical and difficult to understand, but it is a subject that needs to be understood. I have some other things that I must attend to now so will end this for the time being.If any of you are getting bored or lost in my effort to explain why you should stay out of clouds please ask me to try another tact in explaining these issues.Chuck E.

[NiqueNaque]

Let me suggest a variation on Russell's suggestion, only a little safer.With you feet planted firmly on the ground and with no hard objects within 10' of you, try the old closing your eyes and holding your hands together in front of you trick, see how long you last before you fall over.For the next but slightly less safe version, balance yourself on a ball, then try closing your eyes.. I think you'd find your time would be up very shortly.Cheers,Nick.

[asra]

In fixed wing training, we are constantly reinforced with the point that statisticily, VFR pilots will move from controlled flight to uncontrolled flight (and in most cases non recoverable flight) in approximately 70 secs. Pilots who have been in this situation and survived have stated that they simply did not believe their instruments, fear sets in as Chuck has outlined and the pilots reactions tend to contradict reality.Since most gyro's don't have the luxury of the instruments normally carried in a fixed wing, the best rule is to stay away from cloud. Ted

[Brian]

Your explanation Chuck was very well put.Hate to bore you all with old stories but this is my encounter with a cloud. I'm Fw licenced and was fortunate enough during my nav excercises that weather prevented me from doing a couple of nav excerises and I had specially planned to have this time off from work and I wanted to fly badly.My instructor suggested we do ADF and VOR instrument work if I wanted to. I jumped at the chance and had approx 5 hours of instrument work.A couple of years later while mustering here at home in a C172 I had to wait for 10 minutes while ground crew got the sheep yarded and were ready to muster the next paddock, I had my thermos, coffe and biscuits with me so I trimmed to climb .At 2000 ft it was lovely and smooth so I poured my coffee and trimmed to do some wide turns, 5 miles away and 2000 feet higher was this lovely puffy cloud that looked so inviting. I retrimmed and climbed to have a closer look, the cloud was approx 800 ft high by approx 1000 feet through it, I circled it and curiosity got the better of me as I turned and flew into the cloud delibrately, the 172 bucked and it felt like I had hit something bad and a lot of aileron controll was needed just to keep her upright. The turbulence was probably the worst I have ever experienced. Remembering my instructors words I flew the instruments, switched on pitot heat and hung on, it seemed like an hour but it could have only lasted seconds to when I emerged from the cloud and immediately the turbulence stopped. It had lasted long enough to make me sweat from fear. Had I been in the gyro without all the instruments I had at my disposal in the 172, I most likey would not have made it out the other side. I mentioned the VOR and ADF time under the hood just to state that I felt quite comfortable to flying on instruments alone and had done a few hours once I had my licence, flying on instruments [with a licenced FW pilot alongside me] so I felt competent to tackle this pip squeak cloud. Never again !!!! You never know how far you can go, till you get there !

[NiqueNaque]

So here is a lesson..Clouds indicate turbulent conditions.

[Brian]

Not always Nick.The lesson is even if you think you know everything, you know stuff all. I was overconfident and stupid and had I been in a gyro, I most likely would not have made it out alive.The C172 is a very stable aircraft and prior to entering cloud been trimmed to straight and level and conditions were perfect, not a ripple but upon entering that cloud, it was another story and took 3/4 controll inputs to try and keep right way up.Need to ask you more about the Linux operating system Nick, I'm barely computer literate so its going to be a battle getting me up to speed on what it is and why it works better so there's the challenge !!You never know how far you can go, till you get there !

[NiqueNaque]

Brian,Agree, not always, but most usually. The more you know the more you realise you knew far less than you needed to know. I have spent a whole hour in a C 152 and an hour in a Piper Tomahawk, I much prefered the cessna, even with the pilots door popping open in flight... talk about hairy instruction days, me with 1.5 hrs at the yoke - "Here, you fly and I'll fix the door", Oh, OK... I was glad I'd got through straight and level, dread to think how the same scenario would have worked out with a gyro.Then I went for a fly in Kieth McGeachie's skyfox gazelle, that was a very nice little plane, great for a novice, no complications like flaps...As to Linux, my reason for using it ahead of M$ is its reliability. I do a large amount of CAD work as you may have been able to see from my sketch of the Denman airstrip. I was using WIN 95 and IMSI turboCAD on an AMD k2 500 powered workstation with 520m of RAM, the crashmaster was in town and I was pulling my hair out trying to get a job done between BSOD's (blue screens of death). My up time was 5 mins at one point, and that was a good run, I upgraded to Win 98, same problem... At some point I went FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK! (veins and eyes popping style of computer rage) Then I went and put VariCAD on Mandrake 8, never looked back, ever. Same computer, hundreds of hours of drawing, no problems, no BSOD's, no computer rage, just productivity. I will help you with it, no problem. You have some choices, 1 - I send you a copy of the Mandrake 10.0 distro and you (cringe - you need a little extra knowledge about hard drives, partitioning and defragmenting drives) can put it on your hard drive, or, 2 - you can send me an old 6 mb+ hard drive and I'll put it on for you, or, 3 - you can purchase a distro from www.elx.com.au and do it yourself, or 4 - you'd really have to trust me - send your box to me and I'll put it on for you, e-mail me at neast@tac.com.au and advise your wishes.Cheers,Nick.

[telf]

Go the mighty penguin, Nick.

[NiqueNaque]

Telf,It has been good therapy, I feel like a balanced person all the time, I don't look leerily sideways anymore when people say 'Microsoft', instead I just laugh, and laugh, and laugh... 'til the tears stream down my face.Cheers,Nick.

[Brian]

Thanks for the help there Nick re Linux. Will let you know what option we will take thanks.We have changed our browser to Mozilla Firefox and are considering changing our mail to Mozilla Thunderbird. Has anyone else tried any of those options. We had to take puter to town and have it cleaned of a few virus's that had imbedded themselves into the system despite running a mail virus controll and a firewall as well but was told that Explore's security is fairly ordinary.Once again, thank you very much Nick ,we will be in touch and will most likely need help in the future once we start using Linux.You never know how far you can go, till you get there !

[telf]

I'm browsing this using Mozilla Firefox.Its crashed on me once in ~3 months.Couldn't say the same for M$ Internut Exploder.I don't know anything about your IT knowledge so just be warned that Linux requires you to know a little bit about computers and if all you know is the M$ approach, you will get confused.That said, its worth the learning curve.I've been using Linux since '98 and I prefer the SuSE flavour.Not at all a fan of Mandrake but then again the reason that there are so many flavours is because everyone is different.If you decide to stay with M$ Windoze, at least change away from IE and Outlook Express.telfIT network admin, Drifter pilot, Linux user and soon-to-be Gyro nut....

[asra]

Looking forward to it Mark. Just doing the annual on the single seater for you solo to in.Aussie Paul. []www.firebirdgyros.com

[asra]

Brian:Your experience is classic for any pilot entering cloud for the first time and encountering turbulence, the impressions you have formed as to what was happening are flawed by your senses causing you to over react and thus make controlling the airplane " seem " to be more difficult than it actually should have been.What I would suggest is the next time you get the chance to fly in cloud with an experienced IFR pilot you should do so.Once the feeling of disorentation becomes replaced with a calm understanding that the picture you see looking at the flight instruments is actually what it is doing you will find controlling the airplane in cloud to get progressively easier, until it becomes second nature.However, now that you have scared the s.it out of yourself don't do it again without an instructor with you.To bad I'm not in Australia as I would give you some free introduction to flying in cloud, ( as long as we were well clear of airspace that requires an IFR clearance.)I had my regular six month medical today and my doctor and I talked over the fact that I will be seventy this fall and we decided that I will be going to a heart specialist for a stress test to insure that I can keep doing high G load repetative manouvers and not have problems........remember this is not part of my regular medical but my own decision based on my doctors explaining the reasons for doing so...hell if there is even the slightest chance that my body is not up to these extreem physical forces I want to know now before I find out the hard way.My reason for passing this info on is so everyone can think about how important self regulating is with regards to safety.....better safe than sorry..Chuck E.