Yesterday at the annual Seafair air-show in Seattle I was happy to catch
the Columbia Airshow Tour featuring Sean D. Tucker. Sean flies a Columbia
400 and does a number of aerobatic manuvers including rolls, loops, and other
inverted and otherwise impressive displays.
The show itself was very impressive- I shot some video but I’ll need to edit it a bit to see if I can get it into good enough shape
to post online. The weather was beautiful and unfortunately still photos don’t really capture what it was like since they look like
normal photos turned upside down.
In any case, motivated by a few discussions on the Club Columbia Forums about
the limitations of the Columbia, I headed in to Galvin today after the airshows and chatted with Sean for a bit.
First of all let me say that Sean was great. I’m sure he was tired out from
doing the air-show but he patiently answered all my questions, let us take a few
pictures and all.
When I mentioned that I was active with the Columbia pilots community he was
really curious to know what message we were getting from his routine. I
mentioned that we were all pretty impressed by what it said about how solid the
Columbia is, but he wanted to make sure that the word got out that his most
important message is about safety. I think he is pretty concerned that there are
a bunch of pilots out there in a very high performance airplane who don’t have
that much recurring training, fly occasionally, and/or have limited training in
the first place. I took away that his key message is that there are all of these
scary situations (unusually attitudes) that, if you know how, shouldn’t really
be that big a deal at all. But most of us have never experienced a full spin or
inverted flight and if we were to suddenly find ourselves in that situation, due
to a mountain wave, wake turbulence, or who knows what, we wouldn’t have the
right knowledge and reactions to recover. That’s why he is working on his
training program for unusual attitudes that will use the Columbia as the
training platform (and an Extra I believe, although for most of us there would
be no better training than learning in your own aircraft model).
I asked him a bit about the maneuvers in the show. Since the Columbia wasn’t
designed for inverted flight, the avionics and engine aren’t set up for those
situations. All the maneuvers he does stay in the positive-g range (his goal is
to stay between .4g and 4gs). This means that the fuel flow and oil systems in
the engine never get cut off. The airplane he is flying is equipped with the
Garmin PFD and he says that it sometimes glitches at extreme attitudes, but it
comes right back up. The Avidyne system unfortunately is not as good in this
respect- if it glitches, it shuts down. Now that they have the competition from
Garmin on this front I wonder if Avidyne might pursue an upgrade to enable
better recovery in the attitude ADHRS system.
One of the recent discussion topics is the CG envelope on the Columbia.
Typically with pilots up front “by the book” you are either at your forward CG
limit or else you need a bit of weight in the back. He flies a stock Columbia
400 and doesn’t put any ballast in the back. His statement on this topic was “a
forward CG never killed anyone”, although he did point out it can make it a bit
harder to have a graceful landing. We discussed landings a bit since a
full-flaps landing does take a bit of skill to pull off gracefully, but I
pointed out that given enough runway I like to land with just the take-off
flaps, since it makes it a breeze every time.
Another thing he mentioned was that he was looking forward to checking out a
few things at the end of the air-show season, especially the condition of the
turbines. The turbines are spinning fast and thus are in effect gyroscopes. The
high-G maneuvers probably put some interesting stress on them and he is looking
forward to inspecting to see their condition.
While he does his routine he is basically full-throttle the whole time. He
starts out by hitting right at Vne, and probably heads back to that speed range
quite a few times. When he does a loop he is aiming to be a bit less than 100kts
at the top of the loop because otherwise he will pick up too much speed on the
way back down. During the show the only instruments he uses are the airspeed and
altitude (with occasional engine checks). Mostly its classic visual flying,
given the passes low to the ground.
He also spoke for a bit about how confident he is in the Columbia. He has
done over 200 spins in it himself, and despite the fairly extreme air-work the
solid construction of the wing and good flight characteristics leave him with
confidence- his quote on this point was that if he were buying an airplane for
his own personal use with his family, the Columbia would be it. Of course that
loops back to his main point- the airframe isn’t going to fail you, but if you
get yourself into trouble, there is no parachute to bail you out, you need the
right training to be able to fly the airplane to the ground, hopefully in a
relatively flat spot somewhere (ideally a flat spot called a “runway”, but in an
emergency any will do).
Overall the air-show and talking to Sean Tucker were very inspiring. I’ve put
up a copy of the Columbia Airshow Tour Schedule on CalendarData.com- go check it
out if it comes near your city (or if you are a Columbia pilot, anywhere within
about 1000nm of your city should do the trick).
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