You are here: Home / Archives for Steve Tupper

First Motor Glider Flight

August 16, 2009 by 1 Comment


This is a regular blog post. Looking for show notes or links to show audio? Please check out the other posts.

I’ve always thought that motor gliders are cool. Really long wings. Crazy glide ratios. And engines.

Yeah, the purists probably have their issues with the motors, but not me. It a motor in the froint is the price for not having to have a tow plane, tow pilot, and at least one wing runner in order to go soaring, I’m good with it.

Crazy-skilled glider and powered pilot Mark Grant flew the demo. He has access to the two Schweizer SGM 2-37 motor gliders owned by the Tuskegee Airmen National Historical Museum and we went up as lead in a formation of two.

The Schweizer SGM 2-37 is a two-place, side-by-side, fixed gear, low wing, motorized glider. These two represent a sixth of the total production run between 1982 and 1988. None of them saw service with the Air Force Academy, which flew them under the designation TG-7A until 2003.

It’s about 28 feet long, 57 feet wingtip to wingtip, and eight feet tall at the tail. The Lycoming O-235-L2C engine puts out 112 hp, plenty to get us up to 3,500 feet above the airport.

We launched as a flight of two and flew a loose right echelon for the first thousand feet or so. Maybe 200-300 feet of clearance between aircraft.

You solo the SGM 2-37 from the right seat and that’s where Mark was most comfortable, so we flew the right echelon for his visibility and because we were going to make right turns in the climb. Here’s a show of the other aircraft in the formation.


Above about 1,000 feet AGL, Mark accelerated his right turn so that we ended up climbing in a large circle, wingtip to wingtip. You can see the other ship pretty clearly in this shot just before we got to 3,500 MSL.

Here’s a good shot of Mark and the landscape just after we cut the engine and went into the glide phase of the flight. We stayed in a roughly circular rotation over the airport until we descended to pattern level (about 1,800 MSL) and then entered a left downwind for 27L. We lead and the other ship followed about a half mile behind.

Here’s the view as we rolled onto final. A formation of five T-6’s did two or more sorties consisting of low passes with smoke on. We coordinated with the tower and glided in behind them. Kind of cool to see the smoke down the runway from this perspective.

I gather that a lot of gliding is understanding the sight picture, being able to judge your sink rate, and having a good stick-and-rudder feel for the aircraft. Once we shut down the engine, I felt pretty good about the glide. It was stable and the maneuvering was a lot of fun.

But then I had that immediate power-pilot urge to turn directly for the airport and set up for a huge slip to get it down on the big runway. Gliding is hanging it out there and knowing what kind of ground the aircraft will cover given the winds, density altitude, and lots of other factors. I’m sure that that will come with experience. You just have to know the sight pictures and develop a new set of decision points to assure that you can make it to the airport and land gracefully when you get there.

Motor gliders have some of the best of both worlds to offer. In any case, it was a great transition to flying something with no engine at all.

Which, by the way, was the very adventure that I had (twice!) within the next few hours.

Stay tuned to the feed for video and audio from the flight!

Filed Under: Stephen Force Tagged With: , , , ,

Back Up with Barry – Acro Stills from Saturday

August 16, 2009 by Leave a Comment


This is a regular blog post. Looking for show notes or links to show audio? Please check out the other posts.

It occurred to me last week that I hadn’t been upside down since May and that that was a problem. So I got up with Barry Sutton for a little acro Saturday morning.

We flew a few combos and then headed back to the airport for some pattern work. My acro tolerance is back to crap (about 20 minutes), but that’s okay. You can’t knock it off for almost 90 days and still expect to have any real tolerance. But I have a ride with Greg Poe in the MX-2 this Wednesday and I at least wanted to get an idea of what, if any, tolerance I had left. I probably won’t be challenging Greg to wring me out.

On the other hand, I landed that airplane like I had built it. Holy crap! Two near-perfect three-point landings. And I think I finally got the hang of wheel landings. I’ll need to demonstrate the wheel landings again a few times, but I had a “A-Hah!” moment with respect to power use and I think I now have all of the tools I need to nail them consistently. It’s now just a matter of dialing in the right power and attitude from a box of possibilities of which I think I now know the boundaries. I love that part of training! Love, love, love it!

Anyway, I wanted to post some frame grabs from the flight, so here they are!


Wingtip buried, here we go in a wingover.


The initial pull in the loop that proceeds into a roll and a split-S. I like the sun in the Scheydens here!


Knife edge in the first quarter of a four-point roll.

Filed Under: Stephen Force Tagged With: , , ,

Video Episode – JATO Ride in Fat Albert

August 9, 2009 by Leave a Comment


Subscribe to Airspeed using iTunes or your favorite other podcatcher. It’s all free!

These are the show notes to a video episode. You can watch right here or download the video from http://media.libsyn.com/media/airspeed/AirspeedVideoFatAlbert.m4v.

I was fortunate enough to get one of the last Jet-Assisted Take-Off (“JATO”) rides in the Blue Angels’ Marine-flown C-130, Fat Albert. The JATO bottles are getting more and more scarce and it’s unlikely that there will be many more rides like this.

Really interesting ride, mostly because of the lack of outside references. I’m used to unusual attitudes, but it’s a little off to experience them when your only outside reference is an 18” window on the far side of the aircraft.

I mounted the camera just above and behind my head. You can see my WTHR ballcap in the lower right-hand corner of the frame. Query the wisdom of clamping the camera to the airframe of a JATO-boosted C-130. The jitter and vibration is really pronounced in several places. But it stabilized whenever the aircraft got to less than about 0.5G. And those were the best sequences anyway.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. The media hospitality at the Indianapolis Airshow was spectacular. I remain indebted to Roger Bishop for the up-close opportunities as the show.

Filed Under: Stephen Force Tagged With: , , ,

Frame Grabs from the Remos GX Demo

August 7, 2009 by 3 Comments


This is a regular blog post. Show notes and links to show audio appear in the other entries.

I’m still unpacking and sorting the audio and video that I captures at AirVenture Oshkosh last week. An amazing amount of content in a week!

In addition to the Cessna Citation Mustang flight, I got my first flight in a light sport aircraft (“LSA”), namely the Remos GX. As with other experiences at Oshkosh, I’m going to be awhile in putting together the episodes so that I can devote reasonable attention to them. But I wanted to get some frame grabs up to when your appetite.


Here’s the departure from KOSH. Here’s the one drawback to using the 0.3 semi-fisheye lens. You can’t really pick out the six or so other aircraft visible through the windshield. We took off in the hairball that is the usual departure scheme for KOSH during AirVenture. It should be more obvious in the video episode, where movement will show you the other aircraft.


Steep turns over some farmland about eight miles north of KOSH.


The approach back in to KOSH. Eyeballs outside and bracketing airspeed aggressively.


Just prior to touchdown. We asked for the orange dot and got it. Then left a little tire rubber right on top of it. Great control on the landing.

More to come on this one. My particular demo pilot didn’t seem too interested in letting me fly the aircraft. I flew a little enroute and then did some steep turns. After that, I said, “okay, let’s slow her up.”

At which point the demo pilot said “my airplane” and proceeded to deftly demonstrate slow flight and a gorgeous stall all the way into a falling leaf. Being that the demo pilot’s briefing stated that the flight controls his with no quibbling whenever he asked for them or took them, I took it to mean that demo riders wouldn’t be allowed to stall the airplane. A little disappointing, so I told him that I was done and that we could head back.

After talking to some of the other demo riders, I found out that others got to fly the stalls and other maneuvers, so it apparently wasn’t policy. And it could simply have been a miscommunication with the demo pilot. In any case, I’m going to invite a couple of the other demo riders onto the audio episode so that you guys get a full first-hand account of what it’s like to fly the aircraft through a little more of the envelope than I did.

Stay subscribed! Cool stuff coming!

Filed Under: Stephen Force Tagged With: , , , , ,

Meet FOD

August 3, 2009 by Leave a Comment


This is a regular blog post. If you’re looking for show notes or links to show audio or video, please check out the other entries.

So Cole Force got himself a callsign this week at Oshkosh. It’s “FOD.” The acronym for foreign object debris or foreign object damage. The kind of small stuff that you don’t want to get sucked into your turbofan. Cole is the smallest of the aviation new media crew. And he tends to create a fair amount of FOD, whether in the form of gum wrappers, bits of balsa wood, etc.

Anyway, congratulations, FOD, on your new callsign!

Filed Under: Stephen Force Tagged With: ,