Kitfox - So Safe It Will Barely Kill You

the cub is the safest airplane in the world it can just barely kill you now that's an age-old max stanley quote max was a test pilot for northrup referring to the piper j3 cup and what he's referring to is the inherent safety of a well-designed light low-speed aircraft and recently it got me thinking that the kit box checks all those boxes but might actually take it even a step further [Music] [Applause] [Music] you see the other day i was out shaking the cobwebs off after spending a couple weeks outside of the cockpit doing my regular routine of going up doing some slow flight and some stalls okay this would be a power off stall [Music] the tail's stalled but the wing won't get to stall while doing stalls i started thinking this isn't really a good representation of what's going to get me because obviously in the real world i'm not going to be flying flat and level pulling slowly back into a stall looking for the sign of a stall and then recovering the dangerous thing is going to be unintentional stalls that either lead to a spin or happen at a time that you're too low to be able to correct for it the first two that came to mind would be a stall spin as well as a departure stall that would happen say if your engine failed on takeoff now i don't know about you guys but i actually had not really spent much time training for what would happen if my engine failed on a hard climb out now everything i'm going to talk about here is going to be specific to my aircraft alone and even my kit fox can vary a little bit from other kit foxes so we'll take that with the grain of salt but if my airplane were to lose an engine when i'm climbing out at vx at full throttle on vx for those that don't know is best angle of climb that's going to be the steepest deck angle that i could possibly climb out to basically like clear an object or something like that my plane climbs at such a steep angle and at such a low speed that if the engine quits i'm going to decelerate so fast because of gravity that i'm going to be at stall before i know it so if my engine were to fail on a takeoff i would have to react immediately or i could be in a lot of trouble so what i did was i went up high put the airplane at 50 or 55 miles an hour full throttle i'm climbing at about 1800 2000 feet per minute and when i'm at that deck angle pull the throttle see what it feels like so this is when i realized that the kit fox might have a couple aerodynamic safety features that i don't know if are intentional or unintentional but they're things that are pretty cool when it comes to scenarios like this now my kit fox which again we're talking about my aircraft specifically likes to be taken off with full nose down trim and i don't know if this is because of the thrust line or the angle of incidence of the tail to that thrust line but when i'm under high power i need to be trimmed far forward so i'm not having to push the stick forward to keep the aircraft flying level so what i'm getting at here is because my plane is at full nose down trim at takeoff it places me in a position that if i go from a power on or full power environment to a power off the plane actually noses over on its own i even tried pulling the power and seeing what the plane would do without putting any control inputs in and it pushed over so hard i almost hit my head on the skylight okay that was a bit of an exaggeration but it was a roller coaster ride so that thing just naturally corrected and pushed the nose over for me to me it just almost feels like the kickbox has your back [Music] now practicing straight line stalls to me doesn't do much you want to do it like you're turning base to final right now i am pretty much power off trying to tighten up that pattern turn a little bit to see if i can get it to stall my tail keeps wanting to stall but i can't get the wing to actually stall there's a reason that my plane doesn't want to stall when i do that and it comes down to an aspect ratio between the size of the tail and the size of the main wing basically the kit box in general has a relatively small tail compared to other aircraft but because of the short coupled nature of it it really doesn't need that big of a tail and there are some downsides to having the the smaller tail is that you know the elevator becomes less and less effective at slow speeds and it gets a little harder to land a kit box really slow you know as opposed to like a cup but getting back to the safety feature in that is that it's really hard to get the wing on this plane to stall and even though the plane can get pretty slow and you can install the plane it's going to talk to you so much and you're going to run out of elevator way before the plane's going to want to just naturally stall i don't have a scenario where i could trim my aircraft into a stall so every stall is going to have to be pretty forced or accelerated but again the input you would be giving to the plane would feel so wrong that it would be very very hard to accidentally install the kickbox but again a stall is not normally what kills someone what kills is the incipient spin being that you stalled you were somewhat uncoordinated and your plane entered a flat spin the interesting thing though is the kit fox also doesn't really like to spin [Music] and now i know some of you guys are not pilots so i'm gonna go back to some broad strokes here and explain what a spin is and why it's so deadly so basically a spin or a flat spin is when one wing of an aircraft is fully stalled and the other isn't the way this happens is when you get into a stalled scenario but you aren't perfectly coordinated so one wing is flying slightly slower than the other that or it's just blanketed by the air coming off the fuselage that would cause that slower or that inside wing to stall first normally the stalled wing will drop the pilot's natural reaction is to use ailerons to correct the dropped wing but when that wing is already stalled the aileron when it's attached in a standard configuration which i'll get to in a second what that does is it changes the chord line of the wing and effectively changes the angle of attack of the wing so when you take an already stalled wing and you add angle of attack all you're doing is exacerbating it basically you gotta figure i have a stalled wing right here i just added more angle to it and also at the same time lowered the angle to the outside wing i just made my high wing start flying even faster and stalled my inside wing even deeper and a lot of times when this happens say on base to final you're upside down before you know it now that point where you have a stalled wing that you try to lift and your input actually goes the opposite direction is called the region of reverse command it's a super dangerous phenomenon but it's just an inherent effect of the aerodynamics at play of a standard wing and aileron now the kit fox is a little bit different aerodynamically and design wise than a standard plane that has say regular flaps and ailerons and i know i've explained this before but i'm going to go back to the flapper on talk with the kit fox and for those that don't know the kit box has flap rods as opposed to standard flaps and ailerons basically it's taking one effective flight control service and turning it into two flying control surfaces if that makes sense there's mechanical mixing inside the plane that allows the same flying surfaces to act as both ailerons as well as flaps meaning that when i move my control stick left to right it will move the flapper ons just like it would ailerons to help roll the aircraft but when i pull the flap handle it will deflect both flapper ons down while still leaving me full aileron authority through the control stick but what really makes the kit fox unique isn't just the ons but the way that they are mounted on the aircraft so as opposed to standard flaps and ailerons that are going to be attached to the trailing edge of the wing flying as one actual flying surface the flaparons are separated junkers style flying as their own control or flight surface now what this means is that because the flaperon is detached from the actual wings surface and lowered down below it the flapper on is flying in air that is being pushed off the underside of the wing basically redirected by the underside of the wing so the angle of attack of the flapper on is not going to be the same angle of attack of the wing because the wing is effectively redirecting the air onto the flapper on but basically because of that detached orientation of the flat bronze the kit fox is actually able to lift a stalled wing because even when your wing is stalled your flapper on isn't which means for the most part there really isn't a region of reversed command so as far as a kickfox goes it's very hard to spin a kit fox and i would go up and demonstrate one but i have actually never been trained in a spin i've never actually spun the aircraft so i didn't think it was wise to do for my first time in a video like this but the the kick fox inherently does not want to spin you can force it into a spin if you stall very heavily with almost an accelerated stall and a punch of of rudder that's almost getting you into the entry for a snap roll that'll put the plane in a spin and you really have to fight to even keep the plane in the spin it's just such an aerodynamically balanced and stable aircraft that it wants to recover from things pretty naturally so to kind of sum that up i feel like this plane inherently and possibly unintentionally has very good stall preventative spin resistant and engine failure reactive natures is not even the right term but it has these inherent design features that i have no idea if they were planned or if they're just the byproduct of a good aircraft design but their safety features that in the event of some of these worst case scenarios can help prevent either enter them or help get you out of them with relative ease so there you have it the kit fox safest airplane in the world that can just barely kill you but before i jump back in the plane and get up in the air and go enjoy a little bit more of this weather before it gets too hot and windy out i do want to take a quick second to say a huge shout out and thank you to my friends over at squarespace for sponsoring yet another one of my videos and for those that don't know squarespace is the ultimate platform to build a website and run your business you start with one of their award-winning templates and you craft it into your own beautiful professional looking website that works on both desktop as well as mobile and because you're starting with one of their templates it's super simple literally anyone can do it you click to change drag to drop and they have features for literally every industry so it doesn't matter if you're trying to do an online store personal blog professional photo gallery book your clients on there have members areas you can do it with squarespace so if you haven't yet head over to squarespace.com for a free trial and when you're ready to purchase make sure to use code trent palmer at checkout that'll get you 10 off thank you again squarespace for sponsoring this one and you guys know the drill like this video if you do subscribe if you haven't come be my wingman we'll see on the next

Channel: Trent Palmer

Views: 464,077

Keywords: trent palmer, bush plane, bush pilot, aviation, airplane, pilot, flight, kitfox, airplane crash, stall, airplane stall, STOL, stall spin, crash, flat spin, recovery, flight training, flight sim

Id: IO7mtq4zW6E

Length: 11min 10sec (670 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 28 2022