Plane Lands/Takes Off in Only 20 Feet (2013)
kottke.org
kottke.org
The airplane, that the owner, Tom, called a “Cessna 170 BXP,” had a power-modified Continental TSIO-360 engine taken from the front of a Cessna 337 Skymaster, big drooped wingtips, and STOL flaps and ailerons modifications. The STOL mods included various aerodynamic seals between the wing skin and control surfaces and, most significantly, an aileron droop mechanism where the degree of droop was linked to the degree of flaps deployed to vastly increase the low-speed effectiveness of the ailerons.
It was on big tundra tires.
(Edits: various idiotic-grammar fixes)
We were young and stupid.
Once you're airborne you're part of the airmass and moving with the airmass. Your ground speed becomes irrelevant for purpose of lift, as you've amply demonstrated.
"Wind died" implies that wind speed relative to the ground would change.
But whatever caused the massive airmass to alter velocity would impact you as well, right?
So my intuitive assumption is that while sudden air motions might disrupt you and flail you around, I'm not sure you would actually stall and fall down from loss of lift strictly because "Wind died down". (though you might be slammed into ground).
Any thought from anybody with more flight hours and aerodynamics theory than me? :->
Instead, if the airmass suddenly changes velocity, the plane stays in position, stalls, and drops like a rock. It's the rate of change that'd get ya: if it changed velocity very very slowly, you'd end up just zipping forward and not stalling at all. But the airmass suddenly reversing, that'd stall you immediately.
Then I went to his channel, and it turns out Mike built the plane.
(And likewise, the landing is less dangerous than it looks because even if the pilot overshoots, he has plenty of time to get the plane back to powered flight after it falls off).
It's very easy to get a plane off the around quickly that weighs less than 1300 pounds and has a 100 horsepower engine.
And for those that think getting your pilots license is insurmountable because of cost or medical issues, you can get a sport pilots license in as little as 20 hours of training with a drivers license as your medical to fly these aircraft. Limitations are one passenger, total weight of 1340 pounds, daytime good weather only, but you can still fly pretty much anywhere in the United States and Bahamas and to almost any airport, including Class B airspace and airports (read: largest airports in the country)
I'm pretty sure that I can get the light sport aircraft that I fly (Vashon Ranger) off the ground in a few hundred feet with full fuel (23 gallons) and a 170lb passenger on board and a decent headwind.
But when you do it on an 11,000 foot runway with full fuel and a passenger it's almost comical to fly almost two miles down the runway centerline. :)
You could do this in 1940s aircraft as well. Biplanes can also do short-field takeoffs with impressively short distances.
Strikingly, the pilot didn't really bother to line up with the runway at all prior to his landing. He just kind of flew toward the airport and then made an almost automobile-style turn in the air at the last minute from his approach vector onto the runway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonov_An-2
> As such, pilots of the An-2 have stated that they are capable of flying the aircraft in full control at 48 km/h (30 mph)
Some are still flying, according to the Wikipedia page
This is not enough training to operate safely, in my opinion. Even in VFR conditions, I think it would be negligent for an instructor to turn a 20-hour pilot loose without further oversight. Even if a student pilot has flown solo by that point in their training, their instructor still needs to sign off on all cross-country flights. Entering Class B with 20 hours is out of the question in my view.
I also disagree that the Sport license meaningfully decreases the cost of general aviation. The largest expenses are fuel and aircraft rental fees or maintenance, neither of which are mitigated in the long term by a shorter training period.
It sounds like you are probably more experienced than I am, so maybe I'm wrong.
Oh, and it can't land in sandy conditions. Literally they have to secure the LZ and then hose it down before they can "assault" it.
Boeing's military group has a culture that is seriously problematic when it comes to profit vs safety, and frankly safety vs performance.
(1) https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/40289/watch-this-cv-22...
(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidents_and_incidents_involv...
On a separate note, while I was in a flying lesson once, my instructor flew the plane backwards. The plane, a Cessna 172, was moving backwards (the ground was moving forward underneath us).
Same principle as the STOL contests in Alaska- steong headwinds.
In our case the headwind was greater than our stall speed, so the airspeed was greater than our stall speed and the wings generated enough lift to keep us in the air; we idled the throttle so our airspeed would not exceed the wind speed.
If headwind is greater than your takeoff speed then there’s no reason you can’t take off and land in very short distances.
Has this ever been done? Excluding VTOL aircrafts of course.
I found this: https://youtu.be/vas0nVTLyCM
If the wind is strong enough, the wings are just sails; you can catch it like a kite, and up you go.
Headwind is a significant consideration of pretty much every take-off and landing. For instance, battle-ready aircraft carriers constantly maintain a position with their catapults launching into the wind.
The land of truly YOLO pilots. Glacier Pilot: The Story of Bob Reeve is a great book about one of the early ones in AK.
Was an incredible experience of immense beauty. Highly recommended.
Then you get to the end of it and it just stops - nothing beyond it but wilderness.
Pretty wild compared to even the Western US where the road network even in the empty parts of Nevada is pretty good and you can cross through it.
In Alaska some roads just end because there is nothing beyond it.
14 CFR 103.1(e)(1)
[If powered:]
Weighs less than 254 pounds empty weight, excluding floats and safety devices which are intended for deployment in a potentially catastrophic situation;
It seems crazy to me some rules are so relaxed.
I remember asking if there were any limits on where they could flight their experimental planes, say urban/densely populated areas, the answer was "nah".
Imagine engineers designing a car would have to write about the design rationale of their touch interfaces...
Automotive EE here, I can explain that.
Its cost. Done.
There is design and engineering in buttons and micros that are responsive, durable, perform how the user expects.
There is designer placement. Ergonomics and accessibility. This button is perfect and looks great here, but for a 5-percentile height Female it is outside the limits so, let’s redesign a ton of things to move it done here where it is stupid for everyone.
Digital buttons have almost zero cost and could be changed at will. There is also no holding a vehicle on a lot for weeks because the micro that switch bank X uses is unavailable.
For annoying reference, some of the new GM trucks have no fog light buttons. You need to access that through the primary screen. It’s all cost.
It’s basically an afterthought now. If they get enough complaints they can change it, otherwise, it must be fine and within expected grumpy user margins.
https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a42953152/the-2023-chevy-c...
> Katcherian claims that his team removed all possible bugs from the infotainment system.
OK I get the cost - if that's the case, let us configure it! E.g., essential to have the windsield defrost in an upper corner of the button array so when it fogs suddenly in traffic at night, I can just reach and hit it, instead of fumbling around blind....
Plus, they need it to look fancy. If someone gets in your vehicle and the screen doesn’t look good, they might not buy the same vehicle.
It’s all cost, and digital isn’t free, but it’s way cheaper than physical buttons.
I suppose the market is clearly moving away from anyone who actually drives e.g., see the lousy uptake of manual transmissions.
Yet this seems very serious. I think the job of the automobile's cockpit designer is to reduce the driver's workload and maximize the ease and reliability/repeatability of any needed action to control the car. This now seems to have been replaced with "provide the cheapest possible controls to minimally carry out some functions".
The result is that even significant functions that are carried out while driving require multi-layer on-screen menu navigation! I can hardly think of anything more hazardous - actively reating a function that requires continuous attention for multiple seconds (when you'll go 100m in 3-4 seconds); even with actual training to rapidly rotate my gaze between windscreen, mirrors, & dashboard, this is difficult, and likely mostly impossible for ordinary drivers.
Does management just not GAF about these issues? Crazy
EDIT: My first thought is a set of physical buttons with the logo for the function (heat, defrost, rear defrost, seat heater, etc.) that we can just pull and put in the arrangement on the row where we want them. But then that's probably more expensive. At least let us move items around at the block level in the touchscreen menu tree and screens? Again, more coding, and I get why we can't just open-source it. Isn't there any way to get someone involved that has an understanding of actual driver kinesiology and workload?
The second and third videos are shot head on so you can't really tell the speed
I believe their Facebook page has some videos from a recent Iceland journey, hopping between backcountry runways.
It's weirdly exciting. And it's highly entertaining to see a crowd at an airshow going absolutely wild for a couple of piper cubs while big military planes do flybys in the background.
In the biplane era, there were some very short takeoff aircraft. The tiny Sperry Messenger [1] was a good example. In the 1920s, Sperry once landed one of those in front of the U.S. Capitol. (This was not considered a security incident at the time.)
That's a well-executed 1920s vision of a flying car.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verville-Sperry_M-1_Messenger
> Angered because the government was slow to make payments on his contracts, Lawrence fueled the plane and flew to Washington to strike a telling blow against the bureaucracy. Circling the Capitol at ground level to disrupt Congress, he landed directly on the Capitol steps and stormed into the office of the Assistant Secretary of the Navy.
I'm gonna guess this is when they started writing up some restrictions re: landing on the Capitol steps.
The article doesn't seem to mention wind at all.
Wind is a thing. Wind is real. Pilots know this.
Blog posts about his father
https://kottke.org/tag/Jerry%20Kottke
And his decades of blog posts about flying.
A Cub running with little fuel and cargo on a cold day at low altitude has a pretty low stall speed. Something like 40mph. It doesn't take an extraordinary wind to do a short take off roll.
IIRC, the US record is 231 MPH at Mt Washington. You could take off a 747 in 0 feet in that.
An article from Kottke.org on this exact topic was posted last week.
https://kottke.org/23/03/landing-an-airplane-on-a-tiny-helip...
Wait does digg still exist? I hope it is better than reddit now.
Tiny little go kart of a plane with a lawnmower engine (rotax) engine attached.
- Now exists excellent Piper and Maule, but they have comparable small range (for modern 1-motor typical more than 1000kilometers range), because high drag coefficient (non-retractable gear, textile skin).
I think, it is possible to make small STOL with big range, or for example, electric STOL.
I mean, that was a lot of head wind. That is why they could do that. It's still pretty cool, but it wasn't just the plane.
Although, for things like an aircraft carrier ship, the metric could be useful.
this one looks very cool but the consequences of getting those estimations wrong would be pretty dire. idk man
Looks like that is what’s slowing the plane when landing, and let it start without a runway
So less momentum on landing to dispose of, or to generate while taking off.
For example, typical stall speed for similar planes about 70kmh, but modified for STOL could stay at air at 45-50. With some fortunate wind, could land vertically, and even flight backward (as seen from surface).
Sure, need very reliable engine, because engine fail in such conditions could be fatal. Because of this nuance, small STOLs nearly only practice in US/EU (old US or German engines, or licensed clones).
Idea, that typical landing strip is ideal road, perfectly flat and clear from garbage, like stones, but not for STOL. And from automobiles exists empirical rule - wheel could easy deal with obstacles less than 25% of wheel diameter (some sources say about 10%).
STOL specially made for unprepared sites, like agricultural fields or just non-used wasteland, so they could meet stones or grooves, and should safety land in such conditions, and should be convenient for general field procedures.
Even happened tries to make STOL with air cushion, or even crawlers, instead of wheel gear. They fly, but was too sophisticated to be economically comparable to just big wheels.
(Some nice video on home page)
They're well aloft before the end of that rail, in my most favorite photo of history.
The Wright Flyer surely landed in less than 20 feet, too, as it just had a skid.
First, they spent few years in meteorological archives, to choose very special place for flights - with constant strong winds and with significant long descent.
Only second, they spent time to create best motor, with unprecedented power/mass ratio, and only because automobile manufacturers avoid their order (because thinking, it will not lead to big series).
And Wrights was not first to flight, but they was first to make more or less reliable controlled flight. And Wright was first to create rule - two brothers should not fly at one plane at same time, for safety reasons.