alright guys I'm gonna show you a video we put together about one of the coolest stunt formation flights I've ever done so this is the flight with Draco with wingsuit so before I get into that video I've never done a precursor to a video that says don't try this I'm gonna take Draco and I'm gonna fly it with it in full reverse and if you went to flight training flight school or talked to instructors do it there's lots of reasons you don't want to fly a plane in Reverse reverse on a turboprop can be done the blade stays rotating in the same direction but you can pitch the place to be opposite way so though they're spinning in one way you reverse it get forward thrust it is normal I have someone said you can't put your airplane in reverse in flight because it will destroy the motor that's not accurate the aircraft can actually go and reverse but you might destroy the airplane you might actually take the tail they are playing throw it over the front so there's lots of variables in this yes you could hurt something the motors not part of it also it has to do with the speed you're traveling yes if I took my race plane and I was doing 400 miles an hour and I stuck in reverse and jammed it yeah I might hurt the motor am I at the airframe I'm not doing that in Draco in this next video so the rumor that you will hurt a turboprop putting it in reverse in the inner partially true at speeds similar to a touchdown you can't hurt it if you super exceed that now you start to add an additional load so I want it I want you to notice something in the video I actually go up to altitude I practice it with a parachute on and I find the level of how much reverse when I do where I maybe have a little much flanking part of the tail were a lot of detail and I had to play with that a lot before we did the actual stunt what I found to get to work with wingsuits as I actually have the plane almost about 80 percent up elevator because so much the air coming off my propeller in Reverse is so disrupted that normally this is flight attitude if I were to do this the plane would be abruptly changing to an up direction if I pause the video you can see my elevators in this position and I'm pointing down aggressively down what's actually happened is I've lost most of my elevator but this top edge is just outside of the mushroom pouch so I'm actually tickling the clean-air yes you can put a blame not in Reverse not hurt the engine under a certain airspeed and it is unstable and challenging and some airframes can't do it so don't draw your plane in Reverse but maybe you can watch let me do it we wanted to figure out how to jump pull out of one aircraft come down and pair up with Draco transition into paired speeds and then grab onto the wing tips of my airplane [Music] now it sounds easy but it was a payment but that took a lot of work so we're gonna talk about how we made this happen all right guys so I've had a lot of people asked me about this stunt we put together and go back to Oshkosh this last year and I had just finished Draco first thing that happens after doing the extol competitions at Oshkosh is I had a bunch of my friends show up telling me oh my gosh Draco's awesome I had a really good friend come on who says we got to do something really cool with that plane I think it might be able to do something we've been trying to do in the parachuting world and the wingsuit world we just have never accomplished but we think drinko might make it happen so that was Scott Palmer Scott there's a stud Scott I've done some stunts for videos and movies actually at first off the set thought it might be impossible there's a lot of math that went into this and there was a lot of prep and a lot of training and safety briefing we actually got the FAA involved before we even tried it we set up safety Jon's own safety team safety parameters and so I'm gonna tell you a little bit about the problems of pulling off the stunts of having a whole bunch of wingsuits grab onto the wing of an aircraft so for starters let's get an airplane up here and let's have another airplane being Draco and have people jumped out of this one and then grab onto the wing of this one so we started playing with basic math we quickly realized simply that one aircraft would start lower than the other then we jump from this ship and try and pair to this ship here's the problem we first started with a keen air parachute jump ship and Draco and we tried this at one speed and this at a paired speed it doesn't work the guys jump out of this plane and as soon as he jumps out the wind hits something he comes this way and I fly by them we knew that would happen so we staged the back so right off the bat we said let's do some basic math on our first day of jumps let's get Draco and find all its flying limitations how fast can I dive what up on that Idol what if I'm at partial power where if I'm in partial flaps full flaps partial rudder a slip wing over here's what Draco could do in a dive in every phase of flight without ripping the wings off the airplane and pass it via me so we got all this data and we crunched it then we said the other thing we're gonna do is we're gonna have the wingsuit guys jump and we want to know when they open up and they stretch the arms as far far as they can and they get as big as they can how slow can they get their descent rate so they open up this is a great big squirrel shape and hands and little feet and they're opened up and how whoa can we get this descent rate and then if we point the body downhill how fast can we get its descent rate there's two other numbers how fast it forward speed and then how slow forward we could travel and where they blend so really what we learned very fast the wingsuits really do fly but in the world of aviation they more like fall quickly in a board like motion they're sinking rate exceeded the backseat gray of any plane we could pair up with it and so we couldn't get the truth meet you could do lots of flybys so what happened is we could bring Draco way lower in elevation and drop it way down here and get this plane way ahead and they jump out the wind with hit them and they fly this way backwards as the wind hit him Draco would started to a steep dive down hill and we did a whole bunch of there we go we weren't even close like if they are so dissimilar formation it's insane and we learned very quickly that we need the wingsuits opened up as big as possible stretching their arms way forward way type getting as big as they can and we want them to stay at about 85 miles per hour and we want them to sink at less than 3500 feet per minute problem is aircraft if you want them to sink at 3,500 feet per minute their air speed is 120 to 200 or wings depart the aircraft can sit you're so far if you dive to hit this descent rate your airspeed gains even if the engine is in idle or essentially off the airplane can hit 3,500 feet per minute but not at 85 miles an hour they cannot pair so we kept trying full flaps full idle different speeds all day long we couldn't do it it was called off you can actually get a wingsuit to dive and gain enough speed and approach an aircraft but it wasn't a stabilized one's going faster than the other we wanted to be exactly the same the goal was to fly the most dissimilar flying machine in the world information and it just doesn't look like it's gonna work came back I said you know what I'm gonna try something with Draco I've never done before I had this wild idea I basically just told the boys you know what I'm gonna try something so I put on my parachute I have this theory what if I put the airplane in reverse now on a turboprop this is a really bad idea money the aircraft let me tell you what happens we put the plane to reverse reverse is capable on Draco it's a turboprop the blades stay spinning in one direction but you can actually take the pitch and rotate it opposite so even though the blade stays going this direction I changed the pitch and reverse is used for stopping only never in flight it's used for when you land you throw it in reverse so you get to a stop that's what it's for so as far as the ability for the engine and airframe to handle reverse do it all the time every time we land we pitch it in reverse throw all the thrust back however there's something happens when you put it in reverse the air that used to be putting straight back on the tail of the aircraft and it's nice and clean over your horizontal you rudder all your control surfaces are nice and smooth that error coming off those blades going back is great pitch the blades the other way the air is now pushing forward and what that does is that takes the air to push forward in reverse and it makes a giant mushroom of disrupted air going the wrong direction which means it's no longer coming back across your elevator or your rudder to keep your flying control surfaces working so my theory was this and I go up I enough put my plane in a dive put it into reverse so that I can go and even steeper dive meet the 3,500 foot sink rate without exceeding my 85 mile an hour paring speed to the wing since I'm gonna go out we put the plane into dive I'm gonna try not to exceed 85 miles an hour in forward speed but I need to hit 3,500 foot per minute sink so I got up and I baby step into it pointed the plane down slowed it down dirtied it up put out the flaps got it as dirty as I could to keep the plane slow nose it over steeper steeper started or approached 80 85 miles an hour it's gonna run away I'm nowhere near 3,500 foot per minute see great take the engine pull it over the gate click it into reverse I baby stepped into our first hit it do you feel yourself going way forward into the seat because you already dive it downhill and then I start giving more power and increasing the horsepower of that reverse and that's when the control starts to shake my feet are needing to move twice as much on the rudder and then the elevator let's go what's really happened is the mushroom cloud the more I added power the bigger the mushroom going the wrong direction front plane enveloped out and then blanked my tail when that happened all sudden I lose control of the tail no problem what's nice is when that would happen I could quickly bring the power back forward and instantly put the bear back over my tail and correct any abnormal movements in the aircraft so what I did for the next two hours is I just played with the sequence of airspeed to dive transition to reverse and then how much power I put at those transitions to try and get smoothly into 85 miles an hour 3,500 foot sink rate with all my controls stabilized that's what I practiced and I went over and over and over and over till I hit it a hundred percent of the time now is let's see if it we can actually pull it off we move out to mount Timpanogos range we set up a couple of gemstones and our first jump was not to accomplish anything other than can we do it really far apart but in the speeds we need [Music] [Music] it was with the close enough that we knew we could start bringing it closer then we moved everybody closer step by step so this was a long process and I tell you what that's some of the greatest wingsuit pilots in the world paired up next to me in Draco my dream bill which I had just barely finished flying it in Reverse [Music] it's a flying over over the top of your wing no just like oh my we did some more calculations and I found one of the harder items was the King airs speed and trying to do a convergence of a jumping person out and pairing with Draco has such a fine line between possible and not possible we decided to change jump ships so though we started with a king air we moved to helicopters [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] Oh [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] then look out alright gosh I had a wingsuit I'm looking at my buddy's face full of feet away from me out my window right there upside down staring at me another guy over here another guy up here I'm watching them inch towards my wing and I'm looking one side the other side I'm just trying to hold everything steady I'm as serious as I could possibly be on the outside but on the inside I'm like oh my gosh they're grabbing my wing they're gonna get there they're almost there it's eight inches six inches don't think that I'm telling you I actually felt then grab my wing their hand is just out of view it's up on top but I felt the aircraft move as they got ahold of it out there and then when the second one came in and ducked on the other side and we are flying in formation two guys holding on to Draco while it's in a dive in Reverse to make it happen that was look coolest thing I've ever done all of you that helped GoPro for helping us out with it Marshall Miller Scott Palmer the gallons my twin brother Mark Beatty and you know what they're all racking their brains we're putting ideas together we got some more coming so I hope you like follow along we're gonna get helicopters wingsuits Draco scrappy and we're gonna put them all together and do something really really fun things with aviation [Music]
