Stunts

[Richard W. Webb]

Hello fellow pilots,
	Speaking of some neat stunts, we have come up with a few here:

    1)	Ballet Pirouette (in a 747):
	    Take the 747 to 500 feet and fly over the runway area.  While
	looking at the plane from the Tower view, pull up hard.  Not too
	hard as this will simply cause a stall.  Not too little, or you
	will just climb.  At a certain point, the plane is still moving
	parallel to the ground, but oriented straight up and down.  Sometimes
	this will cause the plane to rotate VERY rapidly about its length
	axis (a pirouette).  I can get it about 30% of the time, and this
	is with alot of practice.  Usually you just flop around in the air,
	and it is challengining to see if you can recover and fly off into
	the sunset (if you have a 4D70GT).
    
    2)	Suicide:
	    We only have one machine here, so we had to come up with a Solitare
	dogfight.  It is REALLY hard to shoot a missile into the air and then
	catch up to it and have it hit you, but it can be done.  The reason
	for this strange behavior is that the missile doesn't thrust for much
	more than 30 seconds.  After this time, it begins to slow down.  If
	you shoot it up at a 20 degree angle, then level off, it will be at
	just about the right range when it falls back to your altitude.
	    An easier way is to fly over the airfield, pull up vertically,
	lock onto the 90 degree vertical angle, fire a missile.  It will
	eventually fall down, directly in line with the point you are flying
	above, so make sure you are still over the airfield when you are going
	vertically.  Now land back on the ground.  Either taxi to the exact
	point you were flying over when you launched, or use your radar to
	make the "missile" pixel exactly cover your "airplane" pixel.  Stop
	here and wait.  The missile takes between 3 and 6 minutes to fall back
	down, depending on how fast you were going when you launched it.
	Happy Shooting.

    3)	Glider:
	    When you start over from a crash with the "u" key, you start out
	at some random point.  Cut engines to 0% thrust and see if you can
	land it just based on the energy of your altitude.  Your altitude is
	random, so sometimes it can be very challenging (especially in a 747
	at 2000 ft).  Make sure to go for the runway!
    
    4)	Suicide Glider:
	    Combine the above two.  Cut engines, glide over runway, pull up
	vertical, launch missile, land safely on runway, taxi to point of
	impending doom (it is OK to use engines to slow down once you land
	by going -100% thrust and full spoilers, then use your engines to
	taxi around).
    
    4)	Core Dump (hit 1024 hundred feet):
	    Try to hit the ceiling of >100 Kfeet, this causes a core dump
	on a 4D70GT runing 3.0 (still).  You have to be going very fast at
	just below 50 Kfeet then pull up to vertical without loosing much
	energy.  The engines quit at 50 Kfeet, but you still have enough
	kinetic energy to make it (just barely!).  Take the rest of the day
	off if you can go from a static point on the runway (ground) to
	a core dump in less than 4 minutes (it has only been done once here).

		Any other good ones out there???

		Be careful out there!

-- 
Richard W. Webb                           ecvax!decwrl!borealis!\
ESL Inc.  MS/302                                 sdcsvax!seismo!- ames!esl!rww
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Sunnyvale, CA  94088     SMAIL: rww at esl.ESL.COM         ihnp4!lll-lcc!