Originally Posted by
Gipsy Queen
Never became really comfortable with the absence of brakes . . . .
Quite apart from the fact that not all landplanes have brakes, who needs brakes anyway? Engine against wind, tide and current, dead easy dynamic vector sums to do in your head in real time, you've got
lots of controls
- engine power (you can go below idle by using only one mag, or just blipping it on and off)
- remembering that left turns and right turns are very different on the water, so that's something you can use to your advantage
- all flying controls
- water rudders up or down
- wave the doors around to use them as sails
and probably some others I've forgotten ... point being that this is all dead easy because you don't have to worry about the slope, so that's one degree of freedom fewer!
Having said which, a sailing boat is easier to control on the water, and I
have managed to bang a sailing boat into other things due to lack of brakes (which, fortunately, is usually vastly cheaper than banging an aeroplane into things).
Oh, and of course some floatplanes
do have brakes, in that you can set the propeller pitch such that you can go backwards, but that's cheating really.
(FTAOD: this is a
joke. I do have SEP(sea)(expired) but nobody has let me take one out on my own.)