Originally Posted by
mary meagher
Kay Pam, regarding seat cushions. If you are sitting on a squashy soft cushion it can be dangerous. It may compress under you in unusual attitudes of the aircraft and even make it not possible to reach the controls!
They do sell expensive non compressible cushions, however we have found if you wrap a stack of NEWSPAPERS in plastic tape, to a comfortable fit for yourself or if a lot of people use the aircraft, several cushions of different thickness....and sew a nice cover over the package, you have created a zero cost NON COMPRESSIBLE CUSHION. Even if you stand on it it will not change shape.
Hm, maybe I used the wrong word since I am not a native speaker..
The kind of cushion that I use will never make it impossible to reach the controls even under 4g. There is a seat under it (you're aware of that), and it just adds something like 5 to 10 cm in height.
Step turn : the easiest machine to land, and that I have flown, was a glider. In two models of gliders, I never did anything else than a kiss landing (over a small total of about 30 landings I think, I did not have time to pursue this activity any further). I'm not sure as to the reason but I believe the features allowing that are the perfect forward and lateral visibility (as well as low cockpit position but you can't do anything about that)
The easiest aircraft to land is the one that will allow the best evaluation of height. Often, I noticed, a position higher up the cockpit will be better.
The easiest aircraft I landed was the Socata Rallye whereas the most difficult one was the Socata TB series (same manufacturer!)
Big Pistons Forever : most aeroclubs in France will require pilots to use a Vapp that is quite larger than 1.3 Vs. Some will go up to 1.5 or even 1.6Vs of maximum takeoff mass ! That's up to 1.7 Vs if you're well under takeoff mass.
However that should not be a problem
at all. It should just make your landing longer. You can just lose your speed progressively above the runway and land when at appropriate speed. Obviously it requires proper assessment of height and pitch attitude. But it is standard training in my country to do approaches up to VFE (part of forced landing training)