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Sunday, March 1, 2009

The Panic

What it is
The Panic or Blender maneuver is a vertical diving roll that virtually stops its descent as it instantaneously enters into a flat spin. Presented at TOC 1998 and named by Blaine, I designed this maneuver always looking for the highest performance at what it is called surprise factor and I remember it did work very well. You climb high, guessing 300 feet idle and punch down to a perfect vertical line, add some left aileron to do a kind of slow rolls during that dive. Then when you reach an altitude that is good for you, the airplane will suddenly go to a flat inverted position.

Plane Set-up
Simple, nothing special here, you need to go to your set up that you use to do the 3D aerobatic, so high rate a a lot of deflection. I recommend you to have at least this numbers. Rudder 45 degree, elevator 40 degree, aileron 35 degree. If you can go for higher number it will be better because the quick spinning will be quicker and tighter. CG does not need to modify for this maneuver, I found a bit better when the CG is on the nose heavy for 3D aerobatic.

How to do it
Climb as I explained before, make sure before you push vertical to have all at high rate, this is important to avoid crashes!, so dive rolling slow left and when it is the time to spin, use this technique, full down elevator, full right rudder and full left aileron, this is the best sequence too. This sequence needs to be done continuously, this means as soon you reach full down you go right rudder and as soon you get with the rudder to full go with the aileron. All the movement of your thumbs needs to be quick. This is a very hard maneuver for the airplane and you actually can bend the wing tube! Or if the wing it is not strong enough even worse you can crash the airplane! so to reduce the G's when you decide to do the spin go with the sticks slower to the full position, this will make the airplane to start to spin with less angle of attack loading less the airplane. If you feel you putting to many G's to your airplane try this sequence, full aileron then full rudder and elevator at same time, but the rudder and elevator should not go so quick to full stick position, go a bit slower. Once you see your airplane it is spinning flat open the throttle to full position to increase the spinning and to maintain altitude, keep the power at that position till you feel the airplane wants like to fly out of the spin. From that inverted flat spin you can do any thing you want!, like go to a torque roll, Cobra, etc.

1 comment:

radiocontrolledboats said...

I'd like to see someone do this before I tried it.

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