Originally Posted by
mikearuba
A rapid descent at any bank angle... Are you flying it in circles or kicking the rudder in to go straight down in a slip ?...
Speaking for Cessna 182s, you fly in circles doing a full slip with nose slightly above the horizon. So a left one would be, left wing tip on the ground using ailerons, full right rudder to the stop to make a slip. Pull the yoke to adjust g's but adjust ailerons a bit too, no hard rule on that but technically g's go to infinity at 90 degrees according to the math and we don't want that, while an outright dive will overspeed the airframe pretty fast, so you are treading a fairly fine line near 90 degrees of bank. It's a walk and chew gum at the same time kind of a thing and I used to train new pilots to do it with about half of them washing out of this very maneuver. I never thought it was that hard to do personally, and I am not hero pilot either, but many guys would get un-nerved about an extended unusual attitude and they would often screw it up. Since the maneuver was at the limits of the airframe and screwups could not be tolerated we generally had to fire them if they did not get it pretty quick. That said, I know many jump pilots used this maneuver for decades without issue, although from what I hear it is getting less popular to do it at drop zones because the early 182s they use are wearing out and the last few thousand hours can only be extracted by gentle means.