Flying figure 8's

Cessna 152
If you click on "Cessna 152" you will see almost an exact copy of the plane (a Cessna 152 2 passenger) that I soloed in in 1987.

Two of the things (in 1987) when I was trying to learn to fly well enough to solo in a Cessna 152 were going up into a stall and keeping my cool and flying figure 8's. Stalls you just have to do enough times to where you can pull out of a stall one way or the other. If you are flying a Cessna 172 you are in luck because if you can't pull out of the stall all you have to do is to let go of the yoke (steering wheel) and the Cessna 172 is known to be one of the only planes to right itself if you can't after a stall. By the way if you can't right the plane after stalling it you crash and that's all she wrote. When you go up into a stall you usually fall at the very least 500 to 1000 feet down or backwards. However, if you don't get nose first pretty soon your wings can't get lift and then you tend to go into a flat spin which is usually the plane level with no forward motion. However, like a dart that is thrown because the engine is heavier than the tail as you fall the nose tends to want to go first and as soon as the nose goes first if you are upright rather than upside down you will start to get lift and then move towards flying forward and keeping lift and maintaining your altitude. So, being upright and flying forward at above stall speed will give you lift. However, if you are losing altitude too fast from just falling too long you could also rip the wings off if you try to pull out of a fall too fast. But unless you have been falling straight down with no lift at all more than a couple of thousand feet you probably not going to rip the wings off as long as you recover slowly enough.

Flying Figure 8's

The exercise of flying figure 8's is to make you realize that it doesn't matter what you do in the air, if you are in a headwind, tailwind or cross wind, you won't be on course unless you learn to crab into the wind. And Crabbing into the wind is basically flying almost sideways. So, your position in relation to what is happening on the ground is always important. For example, let's say you are cruising at 132 mph in your plane. However, if you are flying into a 140 mph headwind at that altitude you will be flying backwards in relation to the ground at 8 mph even though you are flying forwards through the air at 132 mph. Thinking in this way is very different than driving a car where you actually have wheels that act like anchors keeping you wherever you are unless winds over the ground reach above 100 mph usually. But when you are in the air you have to do whatever it takes not to be blown by the winds right, left, backwards etc. But your friend (except when landing) is a tailwind. So, for example if you are flying 132 mph through the air(theoretically) and you have a tailwind of 140 mph you would be traveling in relation to the ground at least (272 mph) so if you slow down to land thinking that you are only going say 60 or 70 mph for landing you will crash if you are not being very aware of your tailwind.

However, all this is only theoretical to show you potentialities because usually when you have winds at a speed of 140 mph at any altitude you would have landed the plane already so the gusts wouldn't rip the wings off.

So, flying figure 8's just mean that you are trying (usually in a crosswind of 20 mph or more) to stay in relation to the ground in a perfect figure 8. This is extremely different and hard to do to keep your plane in that figure 8 in relation to fixed landmarks on the ground, especially if the crosswinds are gusty. But this helps to see that you are sort of like a ship on the sea and vulnerable to changing winds which change all sorts of ways during almost any day and can be different at any altitude. So, it helps to know which direction the wind is going at different altitudes so that you can use the tailwinds that are pushing you towards your goal of where you are going rather than to try to fly into headwinds where you can barely make any headway forward in relation to the ground.