Originally Posted by
Arfur Dent
A "barrel roll" is a rolling manoeuvre that is quite lazy and gentle and describes a path that you could imagine being around a barrel in the sky. A 4 point roll describes a roll maintaining the same height and direction but stopping (momentarily) at each 90 degrees of the roll ie after the first stop you are "knife edge" - the second stop you are inverted etc etc. There is no such thing as a "4-point barrel roll".
I understand a "4 point roll" is an aileron roll with stops every 90 degrees - but the roll the pilot performed clearly wasn't an aileron roll because he used elevator. He clearly pitches up about 20 degrees before inputting aileron, and in fact he says that's what he does when he explains the move with the models. And to me it looked like a barrel roll - similar to the one they perform in 'Roll Backs', but with hesitations every 90 degrees. It's clearly not a full-deflection aileron-roll like they perform in the 'Revolution' manoeuvre. So doesn't that make it a "four point barrel roll"? Or is there another name for a barrel-roll incorporating hesitations every 90 degrees that they should have used?