High Speed Stall in F6F

[Shuckins]

So...there I was, in my trusty, rusty F6F with 75% internal fuel and drop tank heading to nme base to help vul...er CAP it.

Tooling along at 10k...climbing steadily...when the hair stood up on the back of my neck.  Glancing behind me, I see a Yak closing in at 200.  YIKES.

Pushed forward into negative g bunt, rolled inverted and went mad with the controls just trying to stay alive.  Toggled weapons and dropped tank, rolling insanely back and forth the whole time.

No hits.  Time to try to reverse the situation.  Leveled wings momentarily, banked about 30degrees to the left and tried to pull upward, kill speed and force overshoot.

Instant high-speed stall.  Hellcat whipped inverted, the nose went down, and started to wrap itself into a violent spin.

Elevators ineffective...opposite aileron ineffective.  Controls felt as slippery as snot.  Reducing throttle didn't seem to help.  No control input had the desired effect.

Glanced at airspeed indicator.  Even tho the nose was pointed almost straight down, airspeed was slightly less than 200mph.

Decided to try to deploy flaps.  One notch, two notches, reduced throttle to nothing.  The spin finally began to slow.  Control effectiveness regained.  Pulled out of resulting dive.

Had the Yak followed me down I would have been toast at that point.  But he was occupied with a couple of my buds, so I was able to regain my composure, and continue the flight.

Had to change my under wear tho.

My question is...isn't this type of spin behavior highly uncharacteristic for the Hellcat...at least historically.  I've read numerous accounts about its' stall characteristics which state quite flatly that opposite controls would bring it out of any stall almost immediately.

Any comments?

[mars01]

What you expierianced was a snap roll.  You pulled hard up exceeding the angle of attack and snap stalled the plane.

Next time use normal spin recovery procedure and leave the inputs in long enough for them to take affecdt.  Most often people don't hold the recovery inputs long enough to break the spin.

Try it off line.  Pull hard back on the stick and kick left rudder.  When you want to recover kick right rudder and push the stick forward and hold them till you are flying again.

[Red Tail 444]

Yup, Mars beat me to it...F6's have nasty (read as: very nasty) departure characteristics,  although you usually have plenty of warning beforehang. Furthermore, the weight of the PW engine, forces the nose down, tightening the spin further.

Standard recovery procedure works well, however...better luck next time

Oh, be sure to chop throttle when attempting a spin / stall recovery...opposite rudder, forward stick..pul out of dive...

[hogenbor]

After having read quite a bit about snap rolls I tried to do it myself off-line. Took up a Fw-190A5 and did the trick. 300mph, pull hard back, full left rudder. Sure enough, the plane whipped around faster than I'd ever seen it do before.

What was more, I could do it at almost SL without crashing first go! You seem to go left as your rolling motion goes that way, but you snap around so fast, you actually end up in a right bank!

Boy what fun. It must be very hard to time this in a close dogfight without getting hosed, but you lose quite a bit of speed with a very fast change of direction. Hard to follow for any pursuer.

[Red Tail 444]

The 190's depending on your tuen will either reverse direction (Left wing stall), or the  right  wing will cause you to drop off.

I think this only hapens inthe 190 A series....I recall seeing this data in a test between P51B and 190A8...