FormerHangie
En-Route
After finally getting my daughter packaged up and off to college, I finally got a chance to take a trike flight. I met up with Trevor of Atlanta Sport Flying. He's based at Jackson County Airport (KJCA) near Jefferson, Georgia. This morning was a perfect day for open cockpit flying, very light winds and just a few cirrus clouds at altitude.
Trevor has two trikes, and uses a beautiful nearly new P&M Quik GTR for introductory flights.
Room for two, but a bit cozy:
No magenta lines for us, and no AOA! How will we survive?
That screen in the middle is for engine instrumentation.
100 hp of Rotax power and a 900 lb gross guarantee good climb performance.
For the first flight, the instructor takes the front seat, and the student sits behind. Whomever's in the front seat gets the horizontal control bar, and the back seater gets the two D shaped bars. There are two throttles, one foot and one hand. The foot throttle is used when maneuvering, and the hand throttle is used if you're going cross country. Me being in the back, I can't reach either.
We load in, taxi out, wait for 50 degrees C of oil temperature, and taxi out onto the active. Trevor lines us up, brings up the throttle some, and then really opens it up. This little bird accelerates quickly, Trevor pushes the bar forward and up we go, quickly. With all that power and so little weight, the rate of climb is impressive. As you can imagine, visibility is spectacular, but there's enough aircraft beneath you to not give you the feeling you're on the edge of a cliff.
Once we get away from the airport, I get my hands on the rear seat control bars, and start trying some shallow turns. Having flown hang gliders, this all feels very natural to me. The GTR is focused on cross country flying, and the bar pressure is relatively heavy, but it's also very stable, kind of a Skylane of the trike world . It does have a trim system, and can be trimmed to fly hands off between 65 and 90 mph. Typical cruise speed is 75-80 mph, and the airspeed indicator is in mph. It's "stall" speed is 39 mph. The reason I put the word "stall" in quotes is it really doesn't have much of stall, it just sort of mushes downwards. Trevor gives me some maneuvers to try, an again, all of this comes back very quickly from my hang gliding experience. You want to go left, look to the left, pull in a bit, pull the left wing down, then push out a bit. At that point, if you wanted to maintain that bank angle, you could take your hands off the bar and it would continue to turn at the bank angle that you set.
One thing that would be very different to power pilots is that the wing and the carriage are somewhat independent of each other. If you're in a gentle bank, the carriage remains almost upright. If you're wondering why I didn't post any pictures from the air, it's because with an open cockpit and a pusher propeller, everything has to be secured before engine start. If you're wondering what flying a trike looks like from the air, Trevor put together a demo video here:
I did get to make some approaches, and a low pass at about 50 feet over the runway. Trevor teaches a power at idle approach, and was easier than I expected. The trike lands more like an airplane than a hang glider, but there's no way to keep the nosewheel off the ground. Being that a trike only has two axis aerodynamic controls, you wouldn't want to spend much time on only the main wheels since the nosewheel is needed to provide directional control.
I liked it a lot, and would like to go back for more. Having earned a private ticket a long time ago, all it would take to get me sport pilot privileges on a weight shift aircraft would be a signoff from my instructor and then a flight review with another instructor. Hopefully, this didn't sound too much like a commercial, but if any of you have a trike instructor in your area, I highly recommend taking an intro flight, it's that much fun.
VERDICT: Very Big Grin
Trevor has two trikes, and uses a beautiful nearly new P&M Quik GTR for introductory flights.
Room for two, but a bit cozy:
No magenta lines for us, and no AOA! How will we survive?
That screen in the middle is for engine instrumentation.
100 hp of Rotax power and a 900 lb gross guarantee good climb performance.
For the first flight, the instructor takes the front seat, and the student sits behind. Whomever's in the front seat gets the horizontal control bar, and the back seater gets the two D shaped bars. There are two throttles, one foot and one hand. The foot throttle is used when maneuvering, and the hand throttle is used if you're going cross country. Me being in the back, I can't reach either.
We load in, taxi out, wait for 50 degrees C of oil temperature, and taxi out onto the active. Trevor lines us up, brings up the throttle some, and then really opens it up. This little bird accelerates quickly, Trevor pushes the bar forward and up we go, quickly. With all that power and so little weight, the rate of climb is impressive. As you can imagine, visibility is spectacular, but there's enough aircraft beneath you to not give you the feeling you're on the edge of a cliff.
Once we get away from the airport, I get my hands on the rear seat control bars, and start trying some shallow turns. Having flown hang gliders, this all feels very natural to me. The GTR is focused on cross country flying, and the bar pressure is relatively heavy, but it's also very stable, kind of a Skylane of the trike world . It does have a trim system, and can be trimmed to fly hands off between 65 and 90 mph. Typical cruise speed is 75-80 mph, and the airspeed indicator is in mph. It's "stall" speed is 39 mph. The reason I put the word "stall" in quotes is it really doesn't have much of stall, it just sort of mushes downwards. Trevor gives me some maneuvers to try, an again, all of this comes back very quickly from my hang gliding experience. You want to go left, look to the left, pull in a bit, pull the left wing down, then push out a bit. At that point, if you wanted to maintain that bank angle, you could take your hands off the bar and it would continue to turn at the bank angle that you set.
One thing that would be very different to power pilots is that the wing and the carriage are somewhat independent of each other. If you're in a gentle bank, the carriage remains almost upright. If you're wondering why I didn't post any pictures from the air, it's because with an open cockpit and a pusher propeller, everything has to be secured before engine start. If you're wondering what flying a trike looks like from the air, Trevor put together a demo video here:
I did get to make some approaches, and a low pass at about 50 feet over the runway. Trevor teaches a power at idle approach, and was easier than I expected. The trike lands more like an airplane than a hang glider, but there's no way to keep the nosewheel off the ground. Being that a trike only has two axis aerodynamic controls, you wouldn't want to spend much time on only the main wheels since the nosewheel is needed to provide directional control.
I liked it a lot, and would like to go back for more. Having earned a private ticket a long time ago, all it would take to get me sport pilot privileges on a weight shift aircraft would be a signoff from my instructor and then a flight review with another instructor. Hopefully, this didn't sound too much like a commercial, but if any of you have a trike instructor in your area, I highly recommend taking an intro flight, it's that much fun.
VERDICT: Very Big Grin
