Originally Posted by
john_tullamarine
don't you just love gliders skimming along at the cloud base ? How we didn't kill our collective selves as young idiots often causes me no end of wonderment ..
In the days before gyroscopes, I've heard that our grandparents were taught, "If you find yourself in the clouds, enter a spin. You'll lose altitude (not to mention your lunch) predictably without covering a lot of real estate or bending the airplane; if you break clear with enough altitude you can recover, and if you don't you were probably going to die anyhow."
I can't decide if the appropriate comment is, "that's bold, not old" or "Canvas airships and iron pilots."