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Ray,
Sounds like your procedure works. One of the tow
pilots where I used to soar would basically chop power and go into an
inverted military break to the left after release and then some sort of Walter
Mitty full flap super slip to landing. The last part looked about like a 100 ft
rope break drill except worse!
It saves time and looks impressive as hell
until the engine needs cylinders 1000 hrs before it should! Tow planes are one
place where liquid cooling would have some huge advantages. I think there was a
club over in Europe that put a liquid cooled auto engine in a Pawnee. In an
ideal tow plane you could do what my former tow pilot did with no problems....It
would also be nice if they had dive brakes. It might be more fun to fly the tow
plane than the gliders at that point...;-)
Ideal tow plane pattern.
Establish release end of downwind @ 3Kft or
so
Chop Power
Roll inverted
Pull back on stick
Deploy dive brakes
Dive for end of runway
Pull out of dive
deploy flaps
Flare and touch down dirty
bleed off speed and stop ready to hook up the next
glider.
clean up do over.
I realize this would give the 5 mile final types a
heart attack...but it would be fun. Maybe make it a two seater so you could
charge for rides ;-)
Monty
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Thursday, May 20, 2010 12:06
AM
Subject: [FlyRotary] Re: tehachapi [off
subject]
Hello Monty,
This discussion brought back thoughts I had
when I was active in our local Soaring group. I thought a three rotor would
work well in the nose of our Piper Pawnee for towing. Your are correct in that
the 0-540 engine does not make full TBO standards. The trick is at release to
dump full flaps and slowly reduce power as the engine cools while diving for
the runway. In a perfect launch, the temps and the flare occur at about the
same. It is amazing that for the most part we were getting pretty good engine
life.
Good to see your post.
Ray
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