How to Turn About a Point in an Airplane

Video Transcript

"Lookout for runway 27, number 2 we have a traffic on final." Hi, I'm Dave Pressy with St Charles Flying Service on behalf of Expert Village. What we're going to do now is called is doing a "turn around a point". What we're going to do is find a good spot to do that without any obstacles, not near houses or big stands of trees, something that is going to be very safe. We're going to look around here below us as we're descending to find a good safe area, and also something that we want to think about is that, and here's a good place to do it because there's lots of open fields in case we do have an engine problem, we're going to be in a low altitude. We won't have a lot of time to find a place to land. So we're doing it right over a top of a good landing field, all we have to do is just turn right towards our field and land if we have a problem. I'm going to go ahead and use that bridge down there on the waterway. Now what I'm going to do is come up about half mile to three quarters of a mile out to one side and we're going to basically turn around that point. Now we have a wind from behind us. At the surface there's a tailwind right now. But we have to start with a fairly steep turn so we don't get blown away from the point and then we have to gradually decrease our back angle. We're going to beam that point. We're going to go ahead and put the wing down on that point and a nice steep turn off to the left. Keeping the airplane coordinated, now we're going into a relative crosswind, ground speed, speed along the ground is decreasing and so we're slowing down our forward movement. As we slow down our forward movement, we're going to decrease the bank angle. That decreases the rate at which we're turning. If we try to continue at a fast rate, we're going to go right into that point and go right past it. So we're going to decrease right now, we're going directly into the wind, this is our slowest ground speed. As you can see now, as we move along the ground, we're going fairly slowly. So we're almost level here, but we want to continue to increase our turn, because now as we start to turn from the up wind to a crosswind again. So from a head wind into a crosswind, we're going to have to start increasing our bank angle as our ground speed increases. Now as you can see, we're starting to get pushed towards that point a bit. So we're going to increase the bank angle to compensate for that drift. Even at our steepest point we've got a hawk down there. Okay, so here's our steepest point. We're going to continue around here. We're actually adjusting that bank angle, there's a little bit of a bump. Actually we're going to start decreasing our bank angle here. Bank on to the upwind side because this side takes a lot longer because our ground speed is much slower.

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