A pilot friend of mine figures that there must have been at least a 30 knot headwind when this video was taken. Sounds reasonable to me.
(Via A Welsh View.)
A pilot friend of mine figures that there must have been at least a 30 knot headwind when this video was taken. Sounds reasonable to me.
(Via A Welsh View.)
> A pilot friend of mine figures that there must have been at least a 30 knot headwind when this video was taken. Sounds reasonable to me.
It’s hard to imagine without the headwind. And yet two things make me think the wind is nearly calm. First, the audience is wearing hats and coats that don’t seem to be flying around. Second, in both scenes we see an airplane in the foreground taxiing to the right with its elevator full aft (up). If there were a stiff tailwind for those planes, that elevator position would have been pretty dangerous, risking flipping the plane over.
Perhaps instead the flying planes just have light wing loading and high lift airfoils. An ordinary cessna will fly (reluctantly) at 40kts, so it’s not a factor of many to get down to the 10-15kts these planes appear to be departing at.
Still, amazing. Who needs a helicopter?