Today, in the Bushcat light-sport taildragger, I demonstrate one of the techniques bush pilots use to achieve their astoundingly short landing rolls, which also is the method used by STOL competition pilots to nail their precise spot landings. The technique is called "flying the wing," which means that on short final you are precisely controlling your airspeed with the pitch of the airplane. To nail a spot landing, or to have the shortest possible landing roll, you need to get your airspeed exactly right - it's 55 mph in the Bushcat. This means the nose seems unusually high; the leading edge of the wing should be much higher than the trailing edge, which is a little weird in comparison to a normal descent say in my Cessna or a Cirrus. With the nose high, you get a lot of lift, so you are constantly adjusting your airspeed by tweaking your pitch up and down. This technique gives you super-precise airspeed control. It also gives you a lot of drag, so you adjust your vertical airspeed - your sink rate - with tiny adjustments of the throttle. Notice this is very different technique when compared to a sloppy approach where you "drag the airplane" on to the runway, hanging it on the prop with lots of power. When flying the wing, you're in a very steady, stable and controlled descent, it just seems alarmingly slow because you're using the full capabilities of the wing to generate maximum lift at low speeds. Great fun, and a great technique everybody should practice.
Keywords: taildragger, spot landings, STOL, Bushcat, light sport, ROTAX, bush flying, flying techniques, Pinehurst, SOP, BQ1
30 авг 2022
