Thanks for the trip report, Vieke!
I was flying the day of your return and the weather was quite challenging, with strong gusty winds and showers.
Flying a long cross country flight VFR in that conditions is possible, but it’s evident that you need to be proficient with instrument flying otherwise it can get hairy very quickly.
The Cessna 172 POH recommends the “hands off yoke” method.
Yes indeed. I don’t think you’d actually get too vertical even with the gear, but you would get to around 45 degrees without exceeding flap limiting speed.
dublinpilot wrote:
slow the aircraft right down, put out full flap
And if you lower the gear as well, then you can go down almost vertically in the arrow, no?
Ah ok. In that case I wouldn’t bother with it. If the gap turns out not to be big enough you end up in a very dangerous situation with an unusual attitude in IMC.
I’d just (In the PA28R that I fly) slow the aircraft right down, put out full flap, stand on one rudder and use full aileron in the opposite direction (side slip). You’ll go down at a very steep angle, have plenty of capacity to make it steep by pointing the nose further down (hence the low initial forward speed), and if it all goes horribly wrong and you enter IMC, all you have to do to regain an normal attitude is return the controls to neutral.
The steep bank spiral descent is a VFR manoeuver strictly for VMC use, and the success of the manoeuver is conditioned by the cloud gap being large enough.
That spiral is only a VMC maneuversnd should only be used to descend through a big enough hole, I think.
Forgive the ignorance of this VFR only pilot, but I thought the whole idea was not to have big bank angles in IMC, and that the reason that holds were not orbits was becasue continious turns tend to induce the leans ?
I did that one too many times, in the Warrior: Full flaps, 45 degress bank, power idle … ;-) That produces a nice descent rate. My little daughter loves that, but then she loves the craziest rollercoasters too …
I was also taught the “drop-down spiral descent” method (flaps 2, 45’ bank) and while if well mastered it can be very effective (you go down like an elevator), you can easily lose bearings if you don’t train it often. It is also dangerous if the cloud hole is funnel shaped as when facing the tighter bottom most people will instinctively tighten the turn to remain VMC with all the implications of it. Keeping a constant heading and descent rate to go through a layer (with nowadays instrumentation) is in my own amateur opinion easier and safer. Whether the owner of the CTR is actually going to allow you to do it is another thing. Geneva would probably tell me to bugger off if I asked.
