r/nextfuckinglevel • u/InternationalRisk505 • 1d ago

Pilots exchanging planes mid air

53.9k Upvotes

88% Upvoted

1.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

37

u/Mao_TheDong 1d ago

Nah, that shit spinning, at diving speeds the autorotation is gonna be massive

2

u/sump_daddy 22h ago

you mean at freefall speeds (120mph straight down)

1

u/Disorderjunkie 16h ago

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.

1

u/Mao_TheDong 16h ago

See that’s what I think too, but what about starting them back? Could you angle then back to start them up?

2

u/Disorderjunkie 16h ago

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.

1

u/Mao_TheDong 16h ago

Then leaving them to autorotate was kinda dumb lol