My Experiments With Flight Mechanics
It was a final year course during my B.Tech in Aerospace Engineering, but many a times I feared it would actually turn out to be the final course in my life.
As the name suggests, this was a lab course, but the lab, my dear friends, was a small, dilapidated, four seater Cessna aircraft, flying mid air at the varying height from 1000 ft to 4000 ft. For the record, I must inform the readers that it was a Cessna in whose crash John F. Kennedy junior died with his wife and sister-in-law. So did Hansie Cronje, and many others.
The labs usually took place post lunch every Friday. But mind you, those guys who dared to take any sort of lunch that day were sure to eject every shred from their stomachs during the course of flight. More so those ones, who had some nausea problem during bus or car travel in their child or adulthood. So we use to have heavy breakfast, and skip the lunch.
To call the pilot of the flight as eccentric would be gross injustice to his sadistic tendencies. He was a sadist to the core. See, it was plain that most of us were first timers on the flight, that too on notorious Cessna, and that too a twenty year five old one, which had outlived it's retirement age by a long shot.
So it can be easily guessed how precariously delicate our psychological condition was. But still the pilot played his cruel games with us. Take some samples.
During flight, while he would be discussing things with us, and we would be busy jotting down the readings from many of those meters present in the cockpit, he would suddenly, without notice, change the direction and lean the aircraft to one side. As a result, we would be thrown to the side of our seats with a jerk. After seeing the look of horror on our faces he would chuckle"Maza Ayaa".
During one of those experiments he took the wind out of us. The plane had just reached a fixed height, when, while looking at the readings, he suddenly blurted "Arey". All of us froze. After a few moments he settled to "Oh, Achha Achha, Koi Baat Nahin". We all heaved a collective sigh of relief, wondering was this guy nuts!
Then came the icing on the cake. There is a phenomenon called 'Stall', where pilot can deliberately make a plane to take a free fall. Usually fighter planes do it regularly, but passenger ones avoid it. Once we were patrolling at the height of 4000 ft, when he suddenly announced that he was going to take a stall. Before we could protest, the aircraft suddenly went into free fall of 800 ft. All of us were shaken badly, a few of them started vomiting. Pat came that now familiar wily grin "Maza Aaya".
It's sad that it's not legal to strangle lunatics. Anyways, I had decided that I have had enough, and that was going to be my last experiment on that Cessna, and with that pilot. Later I pleaded my stand to the course instructor Dr Gosh. I never boarded that plane again.
As the name suggests, this was a lab course, but the lab, my dear friends, was a small, dilapidated, four seater Cessna aircraft, flying mid air at the varying height from 1000 ft to 4000 ft. For the record, I must inform the readers that it was a Cessna in whose crash John F. Kennedy junior died with his wife and sister-in-law. So did Hansie Cronje, and many others.
The labs usually took place post lunch every Friday. But mind you, those guys who dared to take any sort of lunch that day were sure to eject every shred from their stomachs during the course of flight. More so those ones, who had some nausea problem during bus or car travel in their child or adulthood. So we use to have heavy breakfast, and skip the lunch.
To call the pilot of the flight as eccentric would be gross injustice to his sadistic tendencies. He was a sadist to the core. See, it was plain that most of us were first timers on the flight, that too on notorious Cessna, and that too a twenty year five old one, which had outlived it's retirement age by a long shot.
So it can be easily guessed how precariously delicate our psychological condition was. But still the pilot played his cruel games with us. Take some samples.
During flight, while he would be discussing things with us, and we would be busy jotting down the readings from many of those meters present in the cockpit, he would suddenly, without notice, change the direction and lean the aircraft to one side. As a result, we would be thrown to the side of our seats with a jerk. After seeing the look of horror on our faces he would chuckle"Maza Ayaa".
During one of those experiments he took the wind out of us. The plane had just reached a fixed height, when, while looking at the readings, he suddenly blurted "Arey". All of us froze. After a few moments he settled to "Oh, Achha Achha, Koi Baat Nahin". We all heaved a collective sigh of relief, wondering was this guy nuts!
Then came the icing on the cake. There is a phenomenon called 'Stall', where pilot can deliberately make a plane to take a free fall. Usually fighter planes do it regularly, but passenger ones avoid it. Once we were patrolling at the height of 4000 ft, when he suddenly announced that he was going to take a stall. Before we could protest, the aircraft suddenly went into free fall of 800 ft. All of us were shaken badly, a few of them started vomiting. Pat came that now familiar wily grin "Maza Aaya".
It's sad that it's not legal to strangle lunatics. Anyways, I had decided that I have had enough, and that was going to be my last experiment on that Cessna, and with that pilot. Later I pleaded my stand to the course instructor Dr Gosh. I never boarded that plane again.
posted by Unknown at 10:03 AM
<< Home