AOPA Pilot Magazine - June 2019 - 56

A GARMIN GPS/COM (right) is the

sole means of navigation and
communication. Plastic shapes
attached to the ailerons (far right)
help center them in flight. A steerable tailwheel (bottom right) gets
lubricated inadvertently on every
aerobatic flight by engine oil from
the breather tube. The gooseneck
control stick moves without noticable friction (center right).

56 | AOPA PILOT June 2019

loop with a 4-G pull. When the airplane
floats over the top of the maneuver, it has
gained 2,000 feet-about twice the height
of the same maneuver in my former Pitts
S-1S. A vertical climb for a hammerhead
nets 2,200 feet of altitude gain-and that's
with the engine and prop dialed back to
75-percent power.
At 180 KIAS, I start a four-point roll,
and things go haywire. When I push
beyond half-scale aileron deflection,
the centering tendency abruptly disappears and the roll rate suddenly spikes.
It's nonlinear to say the least, and I find
myself over- and undershooting my targets by absurd margins. I'm not even in
the ballpark.
I try a few aileron rolls using full
deflection, and the world goes around in
excess of 400 degrees per second. The
SC's design and seating position place
the pilot at the center of the roll axis, and
since my eyeballs are at the geographic
center of the roll, the blindingly fast roll
rate isn't as disorienting as it might sound.
The next maneuver is an avalanche,
a loop with a snap roll on top, and the
SC enters the snap energetically-then
recovers the instant pro-spin controls
are relaxed.
I go back to rolling maneuvers and
get closer to hitting the targets on a fourpoint roll, but the ailerons' sudden shift
from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde is jarring. It
would take lots of repetition to get accustomed to their split personality.
A vertical roll lets me explore varying
amounts of aileron deflection at diminishing airspeeds, and predictably breakout
forces get progressively lighter at slower
speed. After an impossibly long, 9-second upline, I kick full left rudder and am
surprised that the airplane is still climbing. It could have stayed in the upline
a couple seconds longer. This elevator
is a full 1,000 feet longer than the one
in the nearby Empire State Building in
Manhattan.
Back in the landing pattern, I make
left traffic for Runway 24 where a 6-knot
headwind awaits. I fly 100 KIAS on base,
and with no flaps to deploy or landing
gear to lower, airspeed control is a binary
combination of pitch and power.
I cross the fence at 90 KIAS, raise the
nose in ground effect, and carry a smidge
of power as the airplane decelerates. But
leaving the throttle cracked provides a bit

too much power, and I float beyond the
1,000-foot fixed-distance marker. I close
the throttle completely and the airplane
touches down slightly tailwheel-first in a
full-stall, three-point landing and tracks
straight ahead.
"The less you do on landing, the better," Petrocelli had counseled-and that
was good advice.
GOLD STANDARD

Pilots are taught from the beginning
of flight training to maximize their
airplane's performance-but the SC
requires just the opposite. Pilots are the
weak link. We've got to restrain ourselves to keep from exceeding our own
physiological limits.
I barely scratched the surface of what
this extraordinary airplane can do during
my short introduction to it-and I was fine
with that. A pilot could spend an entire
career stretching and building and learning, and never touch the far corners of the
SC's design envelope.
"You think you understand the SC
after you fly it for a while," Vayda said.
"Then it shows you that there are many
more realms you can enter, and you didn't
even know that they were there."
Still, the SC's popularity is a surprise
to its manufacturer. The company has
delivered 81 so far, more than triple the
number of single-seat S models it made
for aerobatic competitors and airshow
performers in the 1990s and early 2000s.
When the company forecast SC sales prior
to starting production, it expected to sell
about 26-the same as the S models.
But in the rarefied world of ultrahigh-performance, unlimited aerobats,
the SC has become an international gold
standard. Aerobatic competitors have
long debated the merits of forming a
"one design" class that allows them to be
judged strictly on the merits of their own
flying-not the capability of their various
airplanes. The SC offers something like
that at the tippy top of the price, performance, and prestige scales.
"With so many elite competitors flying SCs, the difference between winning
and losing are the mistakes pilots make-
not the capability of the airplane," Vayda
said. "If you want to win, you almost have
to have one."
AOPA
EMAIL dave.hirschman@aopa.org
AOPA Pilot Magazine - June 2019

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