New Aerobatic Videos

I’ve posted several new videos shot last week while I was flying my Extra 300L near Las Vegas. You can find the videos (in .wmv format) in one of my SkyDrive folders. The video titles should be self-explanatory.

One video shows the close- and extended trail portion of a three-ship formation flight. I was number 3, working with an RV-6A and RV-8.

More information about the maneuvers is available on my Web site.

The area where I was flying is southwest of Boulder City, NV (61B), just south of the "substations" marked on the chart near the dry lake bed.

My friends at APS Emergency Training just posted a great discussion of AoA and recoveries from unusual attitudes. You can read the article online or download it as a .pdf. I highly recommend the articles published by BJ and his staff.  You can find videos on the site, too.

I’ve also been working on a Web site for a new group of instructors who provide stall/spin/upset training—The Council for Unusual Attitude Training and Education (CUATE).

PowerPoint c. 1918

Anyone who has given (or been on the receiving end of) a PowerPoint presentation will appreciate the following anecdote, which could come straight from a Monty Python skit, quoted in Aces Falling: War Above the Trenches, 1918 by Peter Hart.

Hart’s description of the early days of photo intrepretation includes an excerpt from the diary of Lieutenant Thomas Hughes:

I started my course of ‘Interpretation of Aeroplane Photographs’ this morning. There were eight infantry officers–I rather think they were battalion intelligence officers–assembled round the table in the conference room at the Corps…where I arrived with the component parts of a magic lantern. After a bit of business getting the light to work, I got under way with my celebrated lantern exhibition and was getting along quite nicely when the door behind the screen opened and the Corps Commander and the B.G.G.S. shuffled in, tripped over the electric light wire, put out the light and fused the arc lamp. The Corps Commander then fell over a chair and I felt it was time to pull up a blind, which I did. He then told me to carry on as if he wasn’t there!"

PC-Based Simulations and Aviation Training

Transference of PC-Based Simulation to Aviation Training—Issues in Learning (.pdf) is a new review of published studies and books from 1997–2007 on the topic by Nic D’Alessandro of Insite Solutions in Australia.

This article isn’t a rigorous review of the topic, nor does it present original, peer-reviewed research, but it does summarize many of the issues, and it includes a useful bibliography.

Disclosure: I had no role in this study, and I learned about it only after it was published on the Web. But the author does include several references to my book on the topic.