Nathan wrote:
IMHO, the last second or two it looked like the plane started to pull up. Even if it was only slightly. How else could there have been pitch up unless the pilot was attempting the change?
For exactly the same reason the airplane pitched up off the race course -- the trim tab was no longer there to encourage the airplane to fly in a straight path and it naturally wanted to climb.
I have a lot of experience teaching dive bombing from aircraft, and one of the toughest things to teach is making the pilot trim nose down while the airplane accelerates downhill. As it accelerates, the airplane wants to naturally pitch up, and if you don't correct it what results is called a 'banana pass', because from the side the flight path appears curved like a banana. The only way to make the bombing dive a straight line is to either trim nose down or gradually increase forward stick pressure as the airspeed increases in the descent. Aerobatics pilots have to fight this same tendency on the down-line of a Cuban 8.
IF the trim tab was the issue with the Ghost, then it all ready naturally had a climbing tendency of it's own with absolutely no stick inputs. The increasing speed as the airplane descended in those last few seconds would have only increased the airplane's tendency to want to pull up from the relative flight path. Thus it may have appeared a pilot was trying to pull the nose up, but the photos show the elevators in essentially a trailing position.
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ellice_island_kid wrote:
I am only in my 20s but someday I will fly it at airshows. I am getting rich really fast writing software and so I can afford to do really stupid things like put all my money into warbirds.
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