Slip-slidin’ away

On my epic journey to Greenbank, I found myself on final to the-strip-of-grass-that-is-allegedly-a-runway, far too high for comfort. Bob drew from his “blindingly obvious” bank of helpful advice and told me, “you need to bring it down, WMAP”

Obviously my hand meandered to the flaps lever, but of course I’m setting up for a soft field landing, I’m already at 30°, fully powered back as well. No help there then. Okay at this rate I’m definitely going to miss the target for sure; options? I could overshoot, always an option, and I’ve nothing really against that as a course of action, I approach pretty much every landing as a potential overshoot. But I’ve got one more trick left in my bag, not really one I’ve ever tried without prompting from Bob, let’s give it a go…

“forward slip, nice choice WMAP, a touch more rudder and I think you’ve got it,” approved Bob. For the less aerodynamically minded of you, in a forward slip you turn the ailerons one way and use opposite rudder, balancing the two out so that the plane gives up and decides to go straight and down instead. You can pick up a pretty decent rate of descent doing this. I’ve done slipping turns in the circuit before and gotten the VSI around the 1000 fpm descent rate or higher. I’ve certainly popped my ears on the way down.

This is really the first time I’ve really felt the balance point in the slip, the magic sweet spot where the ailerons and rudder kind of cancel out. To be honest the reason Bob needed to prompt me to add more rudder was that I was playing around with the feel of the plane, letting up on the rudder and , quite frankly, seeing what happens.

I’m a world away from where I was a few months ago that’s for sure, the concept of messing around on final and seeing what the plane does would have sent me running crying in panic. The truth is though that you have more time up there than you think and if it all goes horribly wrong, I know what to do to fix it. Maybe all those screw-ups have paid off after all!