This is a follow-up to a thread on the old board about learning to land a Pitts.I've just returned from a week of "land-a-Pitts" training with guru Budd Davisson. After 14.2 hours and around 160 landings, I think I was starting to get this landing-a-Pitts thing.
We had about four hours of ground school on the first day. Budd described the "standard" Pitts approach and landing that he teaches. The approach is based on the fact that the visibility straight ahead and down is pretty bad in a Pitts, so you need to keep the runway off to one side and visible until you are low enough to see the edges (maybe 20 feet AGL or so). Budd had me pull the power abeam the numbers on downwind, and fly basically a continuous downwind-to-the-runway 180 degree turn, with a short break in the middle (not even enough to really call it "base") to check for traffic. There is also a lot of slipping, and turning slips, involved here, because the attitude in the slip makes for better visibility also.
Budd explained that the Pitts is a very honest (some might say brutally honest) airplane, and it rewards you for three things: coordination, precision, and smoothness. And I can tell you from personal experience that it punishes you for messing up on those counts, too. Forget to keep the ball centered when you pull the power on left downwind, and the nose wanders 15 degrees right, leaving you slow and too far out. Let the nose drop for two seconds on that steep "base" turn, and you're 10 mph fast. Yank your nose up when coming out of the slip on 100-foot final, and you get 5 mph slow at the roundout, and primed for a slam-in carrier landing.
We flew two "hops" each day, one at around 9:00AM, and the other between 3:00 and 5:00PM. For the first day's hops, I sat in the front, but I moved to the better visibility of the back seat after that. On our first flight, we took a few minutes for air work- Dutch rolls and a couple of stalls. I was suprised to find that the airplane is quite controllable when you hold it in a stalled condition. Budd had me turning with the power off, and the stick in my lap, as fully stalled as it'll get at 1G, with rudder and aileron. Because the upper and lower wings are designed to be stalled to a different degree, the lower ailerons are still somewhat effective. But I think it would not have been a good thing if I'd let the turns get uncoordinated.
After this brief intro to the airplane, we began the landing work in earnest. The first day was almost all "bounce-and-goes" (literally), but we did mostly full-stops after that. As the week progressed, my proficiency improved, along with my comfort level. I was starting to catch up to the airplane, finally.
Then, on Wednesday afternoon (the 6th hop), Budd decided we should start working our way down to the size of the runway I'd be operating from back home (1981 x 50 feet). Luckily, that runway happens to be the place in NJ where Budd taught for many years before moving out to Phoenix, and he knows the local conditions very well. We began doing all our takeoffs using only the left half of the runway.
Starting on Thursday morning, and from then on, we would also be landing on the left half, and the first 2000 feet, of the runway. The bar was now raised well above my head, and I felt like I was falling behind the airplane all over again. But I also gradually began to see little things I'd never noticed in flying before, like the tiny tradeoff among aileron, rudder, and elevator as you increase or decrease the slip. Or the way the airplane can maintain a slight right aileron slip with no rudder at all.
By my last hop, in the Saturday afternoon wind, I felt like I was catching up to the airplane again. If the wind hadn't been so damned gusty, I might have actually been happy with that last flight. But I felt well prepared to operate in calmer conditions.
All in all, it was a very successful trip, and also a heck of a lot of fun. Budd is a great teacher, along with being an all-around nice guy. I stayed at the bed-and-breakfast Budd and his wife Marlene operate, and their hospitality was also first-rate.
I have a few pictures posted at www.avquiz.com/pittspics/pittspics.html , if you're interested.
Tom P.
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