The scariest thing I have ever had to do is go under the hood in a small plane and try to recover it as it spun out of control. The hood didn’t allow you to see the ground for reference . . you had to recover from the gyrations and G forces just by looking at the flight controls. That’s why you had a hood on.
At one point, while preparing for the FAA exam, I took a peek out the side of the hood (yes, I was occasionally naughty in my youth). It looked like the plane was upside down and the earth was spinning toward us. I regretted having looked out!
In the 1970’s Burt Rutan found he could eliminate stalls, and, thus, the need to recover from the loss of control in small airplanes. He designed the Vari-EZE, a plane with two wings, one at the front and one at the back called a ‘canard’. So, when a plane slowed down the front wing would stop flying, the nose would be forced down, and the plane would continue to fly safely.
Yesterday I looked up and saw a Vari-EZE. It started me thinking about John Denver. His songs inspired me, and his movies were always fun. So, I was sad to hear that, in the middle of a beautiful day, after a round of golf at Spyglass Hills, John Denver’s plane had nosed into the ocean off the Monterey coast in California.
He was flying a Vari-EZE.