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PROFILES
Blacky Blackwell
You don’t have to be a test pilot to land an airplane on a
pier in downtown New York City. You don’t have to be a test
pilot to recover from a spin so vicious that it buckles wing ribs.
And, you don’t have to be a test pilot to land a twin on a bumpy
day with no ailerons—but it helps.
Blacky Blackwell, of San Antonio, has forty years experience as an
experimental test pilot developing airplanes as diverse as the Cessna
T-37, the Helio Stallion, the Merlin III, the Learjet 25G and the
Saab 340.
“When you’ve done it long enough it’s a normal
8-hour-a-day job,” he says, “only you work 16 hours a
day.”
It may be a normal, but it is a job with some big jaws. The pilot
needs to be in a constant state of readiness, alert to each nuance
of pitch, roll and yaw.
“As you develop experience you say, ‘What is plan B if
plan A doesn’t work?’” he says. “And you have
to have the knowledge to go with it to say, ‘This could break
and then I’ll do this.’ If you don’t do that you
won’t survive. Sooner or later, something will bite you, if
you don’t have another plan.”
Experimental test pilots, like Blacky, fly the planes before the
kinks are worked out. They are interpreters for the designers and
the engineers, making endless flights, observing minute details, imagining
scenarios and experimenting with them.
When he was a Cessna test pilot, one Air Force student pilot found
one they hadn’t thought of.
“We thought we had already tried every possible spin mode,”
he says.
“But we missed one. The Air Force lost an airplane because
of it.”
The instructor and student returned to earth by parachute and the
T-37s returned to flight test for more spin testing. The student’s
error turned into an accelerated rate of spin.
The rotation rate quadrupled when he eased the stick forward, instead
of popping it forward, plus he kept pushing the pro-spin rudder down.
“It would spin so fast,” Blacky says, “that it
would buckle the ribs in the outboard fuel cells from the hydrostatic
pressure of the fuel.” After about four design changes it went
back to the Air Force a better trainer.
Blacky has never jumped out of an airplane, but there was one time
in San Antonio when he would have if he could have. It was in a production
airplane—the Merlin III. “The pilot had been having problems
with the stick pusher during the stalls,” he says, “so
I went up to see what was going on.”
“Just as the stall broke, one wing dropped and I kind of popped
some aileron. When I did, the wheel spun in my hand. I had broken
the aileron cable.
“The Merlin III is a pretty high performance twin. It has very
little dihedral effect, so full rudder did very little. We lost about
10,000 feet. I was able to recover using aileron trim.”
Experimenting, he discovered he could raise and lower the wings by
putting the flaps down and using the throttles for asymmetric power.
This was the second Merlin III built and the cable had been strung
over a cable keeper, instead of under it. So, rather than holding
the cable in place, the keeper sawed through it.
Trouble like that was rare. Much of what he did was routine and much
of it was fun.
In the 60s, when he flew for Helio Courier, the Short Take Off and
Landing aircraft, Helio had him demonstrate it in air shows. “I
had an aerobatic waiver in it and I used to do vertical maneuvers
and rolls.
“It had roll augmentation devices called interceptors—little
spoilers hooked directly to the ailerons. It had an abrupt roll rate.
“People would come up to me at air shows and say, ‘Blackie,
have you ever seen what the top of the wing looks like when you do
a loop?
“I said, ‘No, I’d be afraid to!’
“Being a cantilevered wing, with any Gs, the wing bent, which
it was supposed to. When it did, it looked like a waffle iron.”
He also demonstrated the Helio for a special occasion that the FAA
and the city of New York organized to promote emergency evacuation
and awareness. Other STOL manufacturers were there, but Blackie was
the first to land and take off first from a pier on the Hudson River
side.
“I can’t say I was the first ever to land on the island,”
he says.
The first was a guy who bragged to his buddies in an uptown bar that
he could land his plane there. “No way,” they said. A
couple hours later he proved he could.
But, the police stopped him from taking off again.
“So I can’t say I was the first to land,” Blacky
says, “but I was the first approved to land and the very first
to take off!”
He has been flight testing airplanes since 1957 and his favorite element
is fine tuning their flying qualities—the way they feel, the
way they perform and the way they handle.
“As I got further into my career I was always looking for the
perfect flying airplane,” he says. He hasn’t found one
yet, but has improved the ones he’s flown.
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