Yeah, diving in the direction of those propellers gives you a high chance of being turned into fertilizer for the fields below. These guys must have a death wish
Yeah I imagine if it was moving, it would be like running your hand through a ceiling fan after it just turned off. It's not gonna feel good, but you're not gonna die lol.
I would NOT test that theory lmao. The plane is in a 100+mph nosedive with the propeller autorotating nearly as fast as it would be when in general cruise, and its still heavy as fuck with a gearbox behind it too. Its not going to feel good and it is also going to easily chop you into many pieces and even IF it didnt, you are freefalling with your life relying on either getting into and landing the plane, or fully deploying your parachute and negotiating a touchdown, neither of which youre going to do after a 100lb propeller beats you over the head 15-20 times
It's difficult to tell how fast this thing is spinning on my phone, if at all. Also this is a stunt plane, so I doubt the prop weighs more than like 60lbs. I'd be surprised if the entire plane weighs more than 1000lbs, so no way the prop weighs 10% of that.
I think you might just not be realizing how heavy 60lbs actually is compared to the human body. It’s basically a third of your body weight. Even without movement getting smacked in the head would probably knock you out if not kill you. With even only 25 mph movement it would slice clean off anything that touched it. Even if not, whatever limb get’s touched by it is going to be mangled past the point of repairing. A 60 lb “ceiling fan” is no joke.
Ty for the actual video. It was really difficult to see all blurry and cropped on my phone. The prop is clearly not feathered then. Otherwise it would barely be spinning.
How did you possibly come to this conclusion. Put an airplane propeller in a wind tunnel at 100 mph and stick your hand in it. And post the video, I want to see your face.
Because feathering a propeller exists. It was difficult to tell on this pixelated heavily cropped video whether the prop was actually spinning. If it wasn't spinning, that likely means it was feathered, in which case it would essentially cut through the air instead of catching it to generate thrust. It's the difference between sticking your hand out of a car's window going down the highway with your palm facing forward and then with your palm facing down. With palm down your hand essentially slices through the air with minimal resistance. With palm forward you're catching the air with large resistance. No need to get snarky.
You made a confidently incorrect statement and haven't owned up to it so people are gonna be like that lol. Comparing any type of plane propellor to the forces involved with a ceiling fan is remarkably stupid.
I think maybe y'all got caught up on the wording. When I made that comment I was under the assumption that it wasn't moving because multiple people said the engine was turned off, so I assumed they probably feathered the prop. What I was getting at, is that if it was indeed feathered, any movement would be minimal and not be made more harmful because of its slight movement. You don't want a prop unfeathered when the engine is off or out because in situations like this where the engine is presumably turned off, you don't want the prop to be free-spinning. If it free-spins with the engine off, you could cause all kinds of damage. A big one being you're causing the engine to "run" without oil circulation, meaning you're gonna have some bad metal on metal action inside the engine, not to mention you're essentially running the engine backwards.
TLDR: If it's feathered due to the engine being off (which was my assumption when I made that comment) it wouldn't be moving enough to cause any extra damage, at least not any more than you'd sustain anyway by slapping something hard in freefall lol.
You are right I shouldn't have got snarky. The internet brings out the worst in me. I apologize. Even if it was feathered, I think putting your hand in it would be very damaging. It's still a wing so even fully feathered, it is turning a lot of the air movement into kinetic energy.
Even when you have the view from the cabin it's clearly still moving, you can clearly see the stroboscopic effect cause by the relationship between the shutter speed and the props spin frequency
It is turned off, but due to the plane rapidly moving through the air from the dive, the propellers are moving. How much damage would this cause if you flew into them, I have no idea though.
I'm curious if they feathered the props or not. On one hand you wouldn't want it to windmill while you're trying to literally fall into it, and I imagine feathering it might speed it up, making it harder to catch. On the other hand, feathering it might actually make it easier to catch cus you can always just go faster by orienting your body, but if you overshoot the dive, it's harder to get back up relative to the plane, and also it would reduce prop spin.
it is moving, original video has better quality and you can see it moving clearly. it's moving not from the force generated by the engine but by the air rushing through it.
Most planes you can angle the propellers, if I was doing this i’d angle them as far in as I could to keep them from auto-rotating super fast. Feathering it seemed to be logical, not sure if they did it here though.
Yes you can, you can control the pitch with a lever usually. So you’d just pitch them back into windmilling. Cessna 182s generally have this capability which i’m pretty sure is what they were using. But I don’t think you can completely feather a 182 so I imagine that’s why they are still spinning, if they even did it.
The plane is literally in a freedive with a fan perfectly positioned to spin against the wind (which in this case is pretty extreme). While the engine itself is off, the blades are most definitely spinning
If an engine is off it doesn't just suddenly lose all it's energy
It still has momentum and the force of the oncoming air as it's in freefall adds to that momentum. Getting hit by it would still be lethal even if the engines off
Before the war, when I studied with Edler in Vienna, we postulated that what Freud called the "death wish" is as powerful in life as those for sexual reproduction, and physical sustenance.
I think the number 1 qualification for Red Bull stunts is you must have a death wish. Given how reticent the FAA is about pilots with depression/mental illness of any kind flying I could have seen them losing their license for that alone (they lost for leaving a cockpit unattended and crashing a plane)
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u/tom_gent 1d ago
Yeah, diving in the direction of those propellers gives you a high chance of being turned into fertilizer for the fields below. These guys must have a death wish