#2 - AA1 - Grumman/American Aviation Yankee

If you read flying magazines with any regularity you will see some great advice on how to learn to fly.  Following this advice will lead to getting your license in an expeditious and orderly fashion.  There is not an expeditious or orderly bone in my body.  Moreover, I have a serious problem with staying on task...so, about a dozen flights in to learning to fly I decided to see what it was like to have a different instructor.  Since my brother and I were learning at what amounted to a one man shop that meant I would get both a new instructor and a new airplane to learn in.  Sounded good to me.  If you want your license quickly...do not do this.  Aircraft type #2 was as different from the Piper Warrior as darts and frisbee.  The American Aviation Yankee is a two seater trainer with a fighter plane style sliding canopy and just two seats. There may be more people designing airplanes, but for all intents and purposes it feels like everything was first engineered by Burt Rutan, Roy LoPresti or Jim Bede.  The Yankee is a trainer that was built from one of Bede's earliest kits plane designs, the BD-1.  Bede was big on easy to build and fast and less concerned with easy to fly.  That makes the Yankee an unusual trainer, and I think his little jet has now killed everyone who could fly it.

This is someone else's image of the very plane I flew.  The cover was not in place while I was piloting.

Flying the Yankee is flat out fun.  It is even a hoot to get into - walk up the wing, slide back the canopy, lift the seat cushion with your toe, stand on the seat, step down into the foot well and sit down.  Then you can slide the canopy over your head and start making gun noises.  The one I flew was even painted in camouflage.  Though Tom, the instructor used the term castering nose wheel it did not sound relevant to my life.  Moreover I had no idea what he was yakking about.  I just wanted to get up in the air.  Strap on plane, fire up teeny tiny engine, call the tower and tell them to dial 9-1 and watch for me to head to the run up area, release the brakes and steer with my feet to the runway.  Well, all went as planned except that last bit.  To move side to side there is, on most planes, a big sticky up thing called a rudder. If you are sitting in a plane that is safely turned off you can swing the rudder left and right by stomping on pedals at your feet.  The plane will not move left or right, after all it is turned off and there is no wind over the rudder.  Well, even when the noisemaker out front is going, the plane will not leap side to side as you dance on the pedals unless you have some speed up.  That is where this castering nose wheel becomes important.  You see, in the other plane I had flown there was a connection between the pedals and the nose wheel.  Castering means there is no connection...the nose wheel is free to swing around wherever it wants to go.  In the case of a student pilot applying some power from a standing start that wheel wants to go straight ahead pretty much regardless of how enthusiastically the student applies foot to pedal.  Well, once Tom figured out that I was an idiot he explained that you steer with differential braking.   It is like a tank, slow down one tread and you will turn in that direction.  Cool.  A bit of a worry for the fellow preflighting about 50 feet in front of me when I started out, but you could tell by his expression that he was impressed with the lines of the Yankee. 

The panel of the AA1A was bog standard simple VFR.  Push pull engine controls and the usual, initially baffling, but ultimately transparent set of gauges. The view is anything but standard.  The canopy is entirely transparent so there is spectacular visibility in every direction but straight beneath you.  Not a bad airplane for pilots afraid of heights I suppose.  This really enhances the sense of flying and a bubble canopy is just a wonderful feature in my book. My recollection of the flight characteristics is dimmed by 5 years time, but I still distinctly remember that the plane did not accelerate well with two 200 pound plus people in it. But, once in the air it was a total joy.  Most airplanes use bits of wire or string to connect the flight controls to the surfaces that actually change the plane's direction.  The Yankee uses pushrods, solid chunks of metal that directly connect your hand motions to the wings.  This makes a difference that even a pilot with ten hours can feel in an instant.  The plane really loves to maneuver, it rolls quickly from side to side, pitch changes are crisp with an near instant change in airspeed, and kicking the rudder leads to an emphatic tail wag.  All really great fun.  We did some stalls, and these were completely benign affairs in which the nose dropped through and the plane started flying again.  I still don't understand why people do not like stalls.  

According to my log book I have 18 landings in the Yankee.  I probably learned more doing those 18 than in all the previous landings or the next 100.  This airplane is really responsive. That is awesome when you are zooming around well off the ground.  However, once you get close enough tot he ground that it acts as a reference for where you are that responsiveness becomes twitchiness.  Really, the plane did not seem to go where I wanted but I could certainly see every little bit of palsy, every hesitant push or pull, and certainly every careless attempt to do something else with my hands than fly the airplane.  After the first two landings I was convinced that there must be some prohibition against flying the plane in hay fever season because an inopportune sneeze would mean a certain trip to the panel beater. But  eight or nine more landings and I was beginning to appreciate the plane's ability to link my desire to immediate action.  In addition to requiring rather more hand eye coordination than other planes, the Yankee stalls at a higher speed than most trainers and with a very flat deck angle.  The trick to landing them well is to hit the airspeed pretty closely then flare very gently.  If you get the nose up, the way you might in a Piper or Cessna you will shortly thereafter find that the remarkably study landing gear does not cushion a fall from 3-5 feet very well at all.  In my experience it did not really float or balloon so much as rear up and quit flying.  This led to some stern landings but did not lead to the multiple bounce variety that was my usual state in the P28A models with the 'Hershey bar' wing. 

If I were looking for a bargain basement two place plane this would be right at the top of my list.  It is fast, miserly with fuel and great fun to fly.  The flight characteristics would be easily mastered and while I might not like to hand fly a lot of hard IFR in a Yankee I would much rather have it on a 100 mile VFR trip than either the Cessna or Piper two seater.  And if I were flying solo I would choose it over the P and S brand 4 seaters.  It is a darn fun plane to fly.