Aerobatics on my Own

It just occurred to me that Steve Wolf might have been willing to go up with me to try aerobatics in my “Big-bad-Green” (paint color) Citabria the first time. But it didn’t. I took my plane out of the hanger, fueled it up, put my parachute on, and went off “into the wild blue yonder.”

You are required to wear a parachute for aerobatic flying. If you need to use the parachute, you need to get out of the plane quickly too. The Citabria’s door is designed to drop away with the pull of a lever. All that’s comforting, but I was a bit nervous about trying aerobatics without an instructor backing me up.

I knew that with enough altitude there was no attitude that you couldn’t recover from, but that did not completely assure me.  Oh well, there’s still the parachute.

I tried some stalls and spins first. They may sound hazardous, but they are easy to recover from. A spin is the only adverse thing that a stall can induce. And remember, Steve and I had tried some recoveries from upright and inverted spins using the Gene Beggs method of spin recovery. Dead simple from a stall induced spin.

The spins went well, so I decided to try a roll. That’s the least disorienting aerobatic maneuver, so I pushed the stick to the left and the roll began. When the wings were vertical (90 degrees to the horizon), I sensed that the roll rate had slowed to the point where the 270 degrees left to go were in doubt.

“Do not do anything for which the outcome is in doubt,” is a cardinal rule of flying. So I leveled the wings and thought about what happened. In theory, nothing could go wrong, but the fear of becoming disoriented was a little too strong for me to continue.

It wouldn’t hurt to try again, though, but be more observant of how things went. I tried two or three rolls and decided it was something I’d put aside for the time being. I knew aerobatics in a Citabria are quite a bit harder than the video-game ease of a Pitts Special. But I knew I was missing something.

Flying a (nice) loop is more challenging than a roll, but I decided it would be OK to try one. The physics of a loop are simpler in a way than those of a roll. I didn’t care how pretty the loop would be, I just wanted to get the feel for a loop in a Citabria. Needless to say, it was successful or I wouldn’t be writing this.

I decided to return to Henley after a few more loops and a spin or two. I don’t mind admitting that my stress level was quite elevated. The landing was easy for me because a Citabria is just a beefier version of an Aeronca Champ. I had landed one of those dozens of times. Nobody asked me what I’d been up to when I was back on the ground. 😉

I now realize that I didn’t rehearse getting out of the Citabria quickly and using my parachute before I went up. I might have had more confidence if I had done that — or not.

To be continued…