How to Fly an Airplane on Skis | Winter Flying Intro

[Music] [Applause] [Music] um welcome to ski flying now be warned this is some of the most fun you can have in your airplane especially in the winter time this video is really just an introduction into the world of flying on skis there's a lot we could talk about and a lot we could show you in airplanes this video is designed just to give you a brief overview of some helpful information that is good to know before you embark on this new type of flying now while there's no endorsement required or actually any training required legally before putting your airplane on skis and going out and flying on snow it is of course a great idea to go ahead and put in a little bit of time and effort on the ground studying as well as some good flight instruction time with a cfi onboard to get used to flying your airplane on skis and it can certainly help avoid some costly mistakes and make the overall experience a lot more enjoyable plus your insurance company is probably going to want you to get a little bit of time with a cfi before going out on your own now like we said there's a lot to talk about here but think of this short video as just an introduction and a quick little preview of our online skate flying course coming to fly at my calf.com here in 2021 click on the link in the description below for details on that today we'll simply introduce you to the different types of skis that are out there and available for your aircraft we'll talk a little bit about takeoffs just briefly about the landing procedures as well as taxing around how to move your aircraft around on the snow and ice let's jump into something funnier to start with and start talking about takeoffs now takeoffs and ski flying are one thing that remains relatively constant regardless of the type of surface you're on or the type of snow that you're on snow has a large effect on what kind of landing you'll be doing and the type of surface whether it's slanted a glacier a lake all that has a big impact on your landings not so much on your takeoffs anytime you're taking off on skis it's going to really be the same idea a soft field takeoff is what it's most similar to on your wheeled airplanes if you think back to our online tailwheel course on our website the idea here in a soft field takeoff is to keep that tail wheel or keep the tail of the aircraft as close to the ground as possible throughout the takeoff roll that's going to put as much lift as possible on the wings of the aircraft making it as light as possible and decreasing the drag of the snow against the skis the whole problem here is that the weight of the aircraft is pushing the skis down into the snow causing much more drag than wheels would on pavement what we're ultimately trying to achieve here is to get the aircraft up onto snow step or basically in float plane terms when the floats of an aircraft get onto step so we can see this flow plane here accelerating the bow of the float rises and then you can see the float going from displacement from sinking in the water all the way up to riding on top of the water we're trying to do the same thing with our skis we don't want our skis to be sinking into the snow what we're ultimately describing is here where you can see a lot of weight on the skis and soft snow pushing the skis down causing lots of drag perhaps you'd be taxing or trying to take off with your tail too high or in this case it's just very powdery snow compared to this where you can see much more the weight is supported on the wing the tail is nice and low trying to keep the tail as low as possible keeping your angle of attack as great as possible to produce as much lift as you can on that takeoff roll making the aircraft a little bit lighter taking the drag off the skis and allowing the aircraft to accelerate and then of course staying in ground effect and climbing away at a nice safe speed at vx or vy once you've achieved that we can see here where the tail of the aircraft well is just a little bit higher than we would want it to be now why is that perhaps you're trying to get better visibility perhaps you're taking off down glacier and just that optical illusion you want to go ahead and raise that tail a little bit more to try to look down the glacier look at that ground that's kind of falling away in front of you that's descending in front of you so it might be a natural reaction taking off downhill to actually want to raise the tail too high ultimately we're trying to just skim that tail wheel just above the surface of the snow if it's too low and digs into the snow that will cause drag and extend the takeoff roll if it's too high we're going to be putting too much weight onto the skis causing too much drag and extending our takeoff run a lot longer than it needs to be if you're already flying on floats you probably know this as finding the sweet spot on step some of the more common mistakes for the new ski plane pilot will be trying to take off her land with the tail too high trying to get back to that more familiar wheel landing attitude from flying on wheels that doesn't work so well in skis potentially for getting to use flaps a lift flap setting for takeoff and not using the board point potentially ignoring it or just forgetting to set one in the first place altogether you should always have an abort point on skis whether it be a time-based support point or a actual physical point in space down your runway so to speak to stop your takeoff if you're not off of the snow by then very easy to be taking off downhill and think any minute now any minute now any minute now i'll get airborne and well you start burning up a lot of runway perhaps you get into a area that you did not really scope out or lay tracks down in in the first place to really know what the quality of the snow is and there could be some serious obstacles down there like crevasses rocks frozen ice chunks that could rip off a ski or tear off your landing gear all sorts of bad things so stick to an area that you know well and make sure when you're scoping out your landing area just go about a much larger area than you think you need because you may need a lot more room on takeoff and finally the last common mistake made is uh when you're getting out of the airplane make sure you have snowshoes and don't sit too close to the airplane when your buddy drops you off to go ahead and get those camera shots because uh snow hurts next up we're going to talk about landings now this is just a very high level overview of landing on snow with skis there's a lot of different types of snow and different types of ice that you can be landing on on ski equipped aircraft and a lot of different factors that go into it depending if you have wheel skis or straight skis and etc we'll cover all that stuff in the online course but for now let's just cover the basics we're going to break it down into five simple steps the first step is going to be a pass over our intended landing area that we'll go ahead and call the recon pass or the survival pass what we're doing here is flying over at 500 to 1000 feet agl to locate any sort of cabins roads rivers anything nearby that if something goes wrong and we get stuck out here which there's a good likelihood of getting stuck out here well then you're going to want to know what is your way out you're going to be doing this on foot in the cold you're going to need to have a good plan of what is your way out to help because help may not be coming to you so that's our first idea here flying around the general area getting an idea of what is available to us if something goes wrong and what is the easiest way to hike out next up we're going to have the drag pass so we're going to go ahead and fly over about 20 feet or so agl 20 to 50 feet whatever you're comfortable with and try to get down low to observe any sort of obstacles or any hazards up close to the surface now if you have slightly flat light conditions or you're not quite sure well you could go ahead and start this at say 200 feet or 100 feet or 50 you'll eventually want to get down to very low to the ground in that 10 to 20 foot range making so it may take several passes because you want to make sure that there are no obstacles there are no big snow drifts there are no covered up rocks or anything like that you may be missing from 50 feet away good eyesight is really key here clean plexiglas also really helps the third step is going to be the rolling pass so we're gonna actually go ahead and land on the surface now and keep it rolling keep the power in there dragging those skis through the snow laying down some tracks keeping a little bit of weight on the mains or on the skis but we're not going to stop and we're not going to get so slow that we cannot just add full power and pop back off and get out of there this isn't just one single pass it could be if conditions are really great and you've been into that spot before and it's really well known you know everything about it and there's no obstacles and all that great stuff but this pass could be duplicated many times to lay down more and more tracks to help firm up the snow to continuously get an idea of what's going on and keep in mind you're going to want to lay tracks far in excess of what you need to land two to three times as much as what you need to land you should have quite a bit of room to work with when you're flying on skis anyways and you're going to want to do that because you're going to want to have tracks long enough to take off in at least one and a half times what you think it will take you to take back off once you do make a full stop there so after you make that first drag pass through your tracks you could come back around start laying more tracks or you could simply go ahead and jump onto step four and then lay more tracks after that step four is going to be the inspection pass so as we fly back over we're not going to fly directly over top of our tracks we're going to slightly offset to where we had just touched with our skis perhaps 50 feet or 100 feet to the side so we can look doesn't matter left or right whatever works for you you may try doing it both ways so that you can have different lighting conditions and observe the tracks from different sides so you may go ahead and fly upwind with the tracks on your left and then fly downwind with the tracks on your left again observing them from both sides allowing the sun to hit them from different angles and really inspecting for things like overflow if your tracks were getting dark indicating that there's actually liquid water underneath that snow that could get you stuck or if there's any sort of obstacles how deep those tracks are any sort of cracks crevasses anything that doesn't look quite right that you don't want to be walking around on or putting your airplane into that's the time to figure it out so after we've done that inspection pass we then have the option to go ahead and lay some more tracks or go ahead and come back and land preferably uphill with a full stop into those tracks now let's take a quick little detour here to talk about overflow so overflow is when you have a nice lake and the water freezes on the surface and then it snows and all that snow weighs down the ice eventually pushes on that ice so much that it sinks and cracks and now that ice is below the water line well the water is going to seep up through the cracks and you're going to get liquid water beneath the snow and when you land in that snow well you're going to get stuck in that really slushy water because it's going to freeze once it's exposed so what we're looking for here as we fly over and lay down those tracks not so much on these hilltops but if we were landing on a frozen lake we would be looking for those tracks to get dark as water seeps into those tracks and it is important to note that can take up to five minutes for water to wick its way up through the snow and actually darken up so here you could lay down a set of tracks and perhaps come around for a full stop if everything looked good on a lake or anywhere there could be liquid water nearby overflow present and it's not just exclusive to lakes but anywhere that water could exist underneath the snow you're going to want to give it time and perhaps use that time to lay down a few extra sets of tracks to really know that you're not going to be landing in that soft slushy stuff that will definitely get you stuck now let's say you made all those passes everything looks great and you're ready to go ahead and make a full stop landing it doesn't have to be a full stop if you touch down you start getting slow and you say oh i don't know about this there's really no wind out here i'm going slightly uphill i feel like i might get stuck well think about going ahead and making that 180 degree turn and getting back out of there if you don't have the power to take off straight ahead and perhaps there's no headwind to really help you making the 180 return to take off downhill could be the best thing make sure that you're not making that turn too tight with too much centrifugal force tipping the airplane outboard that's a good way to get that outboard ski stuck it's a good way to break off a ski by making a turn too tight or too fast so if you want to make a fast turn make it real wide if you want to make a tight turn keep the speed slow but realize the slower you go the more likely you already get stuck be sure you know everything about your entire operating area because we can see we left tracks here on the left side of the screen but if we had made that turn any wider perhaps because we're trying to make it faster we might be encountering that snow drift there so keep up your situational awareness know everything that is going on around you in case you do have to get out of there have lots of plan b's have plan b c d and so on if you don't like it make that 180 add full power take off and go find a different place to land now we'll cover a lot more about landings in the course but in an effort to not make this video an hour plus long we're gonna go ahead and skip on into taxing now so taxing is a little bit different on skis than it is with wheels and there's just a few basic principles we're going to go ahead and cover here whether you're on regular straight skis or skis with wheel dollies or if you're potentially on hydraulic wheel skis well that makes life a lot easier right so when we're on any type of a hydraulic wheel ski or wheel penetration ski where we have a tire touching the ground well assuming that's good dry ground not ice not snow well it works just like when you're taxing on wheels right we can use differential braking to turn the aircraft except for when we get onto snow here whether you have wheels or wheel penetration skis or straight skis it's going to be a little bit different so once we are on snow and or ice we're just getting along here we're going to be relying much more on our air rudder and we have to remember that we basically have no brakes the only way we're going to stop the aircraft is the friction on the skis now this does work especially in snow and taxing on a nice layer of four five six inches of snow or more can be really nice around the airport if you're trying to get from the hangar out to the runway now if it's really icy out it could be a lot lot worse because those skis on the bottom we're going to talk about all the different ski types and construction here in just a few minutes but on the bottom of all skis there's going to be some sort of skeg or runner or some sort of strip typically two strips even and those will be either steel or plastic but the idea of those strips is to help the ski track straight the problem is it helps the ski track straight it doesn't let you turn very well and if you can imagine how figure skates would be on ice well those steel strips on the bottom of your ski work very much the same way when you're trying to taxi on ice so let's look at just taxing on regular snow when we want to get going somewhere while we just apply a little bit of power break through the friction and we can start taxing forward if we want to make a turn we have some friction from our tail wheel or tail ski if it's so equipped to help us make that turn but ultimately the air rudder is going to really come into play here so when we want to turn the airplane we'll want to actually allow the airplane to decelerate or perhaps even come to a stop that way we can use a large burst of power with full rudder application to actually use the air rudder most effectively the problem is if we're scooting along at 6 8 10 miles an hour and we want to go ahead and turn the airplane and we press on the rudder pedal well the air rider's not really doing a whole lot with 8 or 10 miles an hour worth of airflow over it if we want to add a whole bunch of power to make it more effective well now all of a sudden the airplane's doing 15 20 miles an hour and our radius of turn increases drastically we have no brakes and if you misjudge anything you might be mowing down some taxiway lights not a fun day so allow the airplane to slow down and then use a large burst of power with full rudder application to turn the aircraft in the direction you want once you're turned in the direction you want then you can go ahead and use a normal power setting to taxi along nice and slowly slow is the biggest key here when you're taxing now it could also take multiple rounds of this procedure of a large burst of power turns the airplane a little bit then it starts tracking straight on you so you go power to idle you allow the airplane to come to a stop then you go ahead and use another large burst of power to try to get the airplane turning again it could be several rounds of that so plan well ahead and do not allow the airplane to get going faster than you're comfortable with so cautious with those bursts of power if there's any doubt in your mind it's icy the airplane is not really slowing down for you very well it's not turning very well simply go ahead and shut down get out and pick up the tail and turn the aircraft as you need to that's going to happen there is no way around it especially when we get into this next situation here which we're going to start talking about which is taxing on a mix of snow and pavement obviously the pavement has a lot more drag than the snow so every time that ski touches the pavement it's going to want to turn the airplane you can very easily get turned in direction you want to go the only positive here is because of the drag of that pavement if you're only going a safe speed like five six miles per hour well the airplane will come to a stop pretty easily so you'll be able to actually get out and turn the airplane before you mow down a taxiway light or hit somebody else's airplane now the other side of the coin is if you're going to be skimming across ice and snow and pavement keeping your speed at a decent speed five six eight miles an hour no faster but keeping momentum in the aircraft can help keep the airplane gliding forward friction will actually increase on that pavement right as you get really slow in that two three mile an hour range so keeping a little bit of forward motion there can really help you tracking straight especially if you're in a big wide open area there's no obstacles around you like other airplanes or runway edge lights taxiway lights stuff like that it is not uncommon to use wheel dollies which simply slip into the side of a straight ski and then are rotated to support the weight of the aircraft on this tiny little tire it's not uncommon to use those to taxi out from your hanger out to the actual runway or the ski strip and then go ahead and remove them to the side and then taxi out onto the snow or where there is more snow to actually get going they certainly help a lot getting the airplane in and out of the hangar if you don't have wheel dollies and you're on straight skis and a hanger well you can drag the airplane in or out it's not preferable kind of tears up the floor in the skis a little bit so wheel dollies really help if you don't have wheel dollies then well simply shoveling some snow underneath the skis can also really help create a nice sliding surface to move the airplane out of the hangar onto the rest of the snow like you see here and same thing when you're putting the airplane back in the hangar you might have to shovel a little bit of snow in there to push it in the only problem with that is well it actually slides really well doesn't stop very well when you're pushing the airplane back into the hangar if there's any sort of humps it's kind of hard to get the airplane over that hump of snow as you get in and out of the hangar plus it melts and leaves a lot of water everywhere if you're lucky enough to have a heated hanger you may think that's not a problem at all except that water will typically in your heated hanger pool towards the door and then get very cold right at the edge of the door there and then freeze the door to the ground or potentially form a little ice dam so that when you open the door it'll freeze and then as you try to close the door there's a bunch of ice you have to chip away before you can actually get the door back down moral a story if you're on straight skis wheel dollies are a good investment if you're going to be taxing on lovely wonderful snow stick to just skis get rid of those wheel dollies they're not helping you at all if you're taxing on a mix of pavement and ice and snow wheel dollies can certainly help keep the speed at a steady speed to keep going straight so you're not getting jerked around by that pavement five six miles an hour eight at the most if you are going over that mix of snow and ice and pavement so you can kind of skim over that and you don't get excess friction from the pavement if you are losing control of your plane at any point quickest way to shut down the engine mags off pull out the mixture don't pull the mixture and wait for the engine to shut down just kick off the mags and the airplane will come to a stop well as soon as it's gonna come to a stop there's really nothing you can do at that point so manage your energy clear the area just like being on floats before you fire up you'll look at the area and you figure out where you're going to put this airplane because you have no brakes so you better have a clear place to put it the airplane should stay in place when you fire up even though you don't have brakes there is a good bit of friction between the skis and the snow or ice even if it is straight up ice but under the right conditions if it's nice glare ice and you fire up even at idle the airplane may keep on trucking so be ready to kick off those mags and pull that mixture if need be when you're taxing to turn around for takeoff well it might be tempting to use a big burst of power and really swing that tail around and throw snow everywhere and look super cool you can very easily side load the gear on a ski plane there's a lot of force on the side of that ski and if that thing buries itself in snow just like bearing a float on a step turn you can damage the landing gear and damage the ski on your aircraft possibly tweak the fuselage where the landing gear attaches so be cautious not to be going too fast and be cognizant of what kind of centrifugal force you have or centrifugal force you have in that turn as you make say a 180 degree turn to go ahead and turn around for takeoff if you take away nothing else from this section of the video just remember practice for your very first time in a very big wide open area and anytime you change surface types so perhaps you practice for your very first time in a big wide open lightly snow-covered area that's great as soon as that melts a little bit you see a little bit of pavement showing through all bets are off it's a new surface i don't care if you've flown 20 flights on skis all with nice light snow-covered taxiways in ramp areas well now it's something totally different you're back to square one it's just like your very first day on ski so every time that surface changes the aircraft's gonna behave differently until you get the experience make sure that every time you're on a different surface that you're giving yourself a big wide open area to experiment with and go slow manage your energy use large bursts of power at slow speed to make that air rudder effective to turn your aircraft don't hesitate to shut the engine down and get out and push your airplane around where it needs to be that's just part of ski flying it is a lot of work now let's go ahead and talk different types of skis available for your aircraft three types we've got wheel penetration skis we've got straight skis and we have hydraulic wheel skis what are the pros and cons of each of them here well in this case if you have a lightweight aircraft uh and especially an underpowered airplane so something like a nice lightweight cub you want really good performance well you might go with straight skis you want to keep it nice and light or if you're underpowered you need to keep the weight down and get good performance straight skis are good they're cheap here we have wheel dollies which bolt on temporarily to those straight skis to make the aircraft a lot easier to move around on pavement and move around in and out of the hanger until you get to a snow covered surface the next kind of in between between straight skis and hydraulic wheel skis would be wheel penetration skis that's what these are and the idea here is the tire is still touching the ground it protrudes below the ski the ski is just mounted with this little bracket that gets welded onto the oleo type gear or if you have spring steel gear you can actually bolt it on just with bolts and what's nice about this is you get to actually have a tire touching the ground and supporting the weight of the aircraft so you can use differential braking you can actually use your brakes on pavement and if you're operating from a plowed surface that's pavement or even plowed gravel this can be really nice you have that little wheel in back there to support the back of the ski so it doesn't get chewed up dragging on gravel or pavement the problem is the tire is protruding through the ski there's a little bit less floatation for the ski because of that cut out for the tire and that tire is protruding down into the snow causing extra drag plus it weighs more because you have the weight of the tire the brake assembly the caliper and all that plus the weight of the ski so a little bit heavier but a nice compromise if you are going to be operating on dry pavement as well as snow covered surfaces lastly is the best of both worlds aside from the weight issue we have hydraulic wheel skis here a hydraulic cylinder that you're going to either pump or perhaps have an electric switch in the cockpit to actuate will actually move this ski forward and back and also down underneath the tire so that the tire is resting on top of the ski to get the tire out of the way of the snow so you have a nice clean bottom a nice efficient surface so there's no extra drag you might even have a setup like this from air glass where a door comes in and forces the tire up to force the aircraft up and then that door closes so you have good flotation very little drag the problem is well the cost and then the weight because we have hydraulics now involved as well all of these skis regardless of what they are nowadays are covered in this plastic on the bottom which is uhmw it's a nice low friction plastic coating that can easily be replaced if it wears out you'll also have skegs so you'll have these strips running down the side either in plastic or steel steel is great and durable but it generates a little bit more heat and is more likely to freeze to the snow and ice and get you kind of stuck there if uh after a landing the plastic is less likely to do that but it's not quite as durable as the steel all of these skis nowadays are built as frp fiber reinforced plastic so some sort of fiberglass carbon fiber kevlar basically vacuum infused with vinyl ester resin or epoxy resins and then there's a few metal parts and pieces that go on to tie them all together maybe attaching the metal skegs on the bottom keep in mind dissimilar metals will cause corrosion and keep a close eye on those brackets that attach the skis to the aircraft if you're mixing things like carbon fiber and metal brackets and especially any sort of dissimilar metals between steel aluminum and all that sort of stuff they're also gel coated typically when they're going to be coming out of these molds some of them could be painted or clear coated but gel coats pretty common now and looks nice and shiny with these plastic skis fiber reinforced plastic you can still get metal skis but wood is pretty much all gone away and we're just left with either metal or the more common plastic or fiber reinforced plastic which is a fancy way of saying fiberglass carbon fiber and kevlar that is our three main types of skis and that is where we'll go ahead and end this video there's a lot more to talk about we'll cover everything else lots of other stuff in the online course at flightmikealpha.com but this video is getting a little bit long so we'll go ahead and wrap it up i don't think i need to give you guys any more reasons to get out there and try out ski flying i mean just look at this shot look at the places you can go on skis i promise you the one thing i can absolutely promise you if you put skis on your airplane you will have fun provided you have the right training and the right aircraft for it other than that guys you know what to do any questions on this thing go ahead and leave them in the comments below or go on to fly my calf.com click on the ask question tab at the top of the page there and we will get back to you thanks so much for following along and remember if you cannot fly every day then fly eight mike alpha dot com we'll see you all in the next one you

Channel: FLY8MA.com Flight Training

Views: 42,749

Keywords: aviation, aircraft, flight, flight training, flight training videos, ski flying, fly8ma, wheel skis, cessna on skis, cessna on floats, cessna, super cub, snow ski, alaska, alaska state troopers, pa18, airglass, airglas, skis, aircraft skis, hydraulic wheel ski, wheel dollies, wheel dolly, pilot, student pilot, alaska flying, alaska flying cowboy, alaskan bush pilots, bush flying, bush pilot, bush pilots alaska

Id: xheKJ3up0vQ

Length: 26min 42sec (1602 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 25 2021