Slow Flight In The Real World

Further apropos of our slow flight yammering of last week, I put the skill to use on Thursday. After 119 days or so of not flying as I recover from an injury, I took the Cub up to knock off the rust. I flew down to a nice little county grass strip south of Venice called Buchan. It exists solely for the Cub's use.

On the return flight, the Venice pattern was busy and fitting the slow-as-hell Cub into this sometimes causes a lot of panty twisting. Here's the setup: I was approaching from the south and planning to enter the left downwind for Runway 5 from over the top of the airport. Behind me a couple of miles out is a 182 doing 100 knots and planning the same entry. (I'm doing 55.) In front me on the downwind is a 172 doing touch and goes. I can see the Skyhawk is going to fly the typical insanely wide pattern, but not as bad as most. If I follow him and turn my base just as he passes my left wing, the guy in the 182 will turn final feet wet over Cancun.

The solution: Slide on the carb heat and pull the Cub back right into the pre-stall burble and keep it there, essentially parking it on the downwind. I'm close in to the runway on the downwind and I can already see the following 182 far outside me on the downwind and overhauling me by 40 knots. I let him know what I'm doing on the CTAF, but he had already figured it out. I turned a continuous shallow-bank base by keeping the 172 at the same point in the left quarter of the windshield.

Formation-trained pilots know this as a line of constant bearing. By the time I rolled out on base, the 172 is right off the Cub's nose and I'm set up for a 1/8thmile final. I'm so slow that when I finally turn final, the Skyhawk is still pulling away from me. After I landed and turned off, the 182 just touched down. As Dan George once said, sometimes the magic works. It was a textbook example of efficient use of pattern airspace.

And by the way, counter to current FAA guidance, the Cub's stall warning was activating sporadically. Cub pilots will know that as the lower clamshell door floating up off the fully open position, although it does that more reliably in ground effect than not. This technique is not limited to a docile staller like the Cub, by the way. I've done it in Mooneys, Bonanzas and Cherokees, albeit not quite so aggressively. But a burble is a burble. Anyone can learn this, too, if they want. That's why us old geezers are so opposed to dumbing down slow-flight training. Without it, the Venice pattern would stretch out beyond the horizon. On the other hand, it is pretty over the Gulf this time of year.