Halfway to Upside Down

When I started this blog it was with the intention of writing regularly about aerobatics - hence the title. But you know how things are... I got involved with learning to fly the heli, which dramatically reduced the amount of acro I fly.

But today I flew the Pitts, and I took my camera with me. It's hard to take pictures of aerobatics while flying solo, I can tell you - trying to fly a tricky manouver left-handed while holding the camera with the right and trying to get it to focus on the right thing.

I did however manage to get a nice picture of a knife-edge. That's when you hold the airplane in a 90 degree bank, which means that the wings aren't providing any lift. So the only way to maintain altitude is to hold a very steep fuselage angle and let the fuselage provide the lift, which means LOTS of top rudder - in the Pitts S2C, full top rudder. Of course the drag is huge, so you slowly lose airspeed and eventually you will fall out of the sky. But you have long enough to take a nice pic, like this one.

Full size photo, and others from the same flight, here.