flying with one wing

Well I fly recreationally, have done for many years, and I've always been interested in most aspects of aviation.

But as I say, I may have to eat some of my words, such as "completely impossible".

If you compare the original video with the RC plane, it's clear that (with it's enormous power to weight ratio compared with 'real' aeroplanes) it enters knife-edge flight almost immediately with enough speed for the trailing remaining wing to give it directional stability.

Whereas in the original one, the spin it entered before they cut to the knife-edge would be normal for an aircraft with both wings, under control, but I still don't believe for a moment that it would look like that with only one wing - the spin would be much faster and be unrecoverable (plenty of aircraft can't be recovered from spins even with both wings!).

Note also the difference between the RC model's landing, and the one in the original vid. I think they just edited out the other wing - the flight looks perfectly normal until just before the landing if you mentally paint that wing back in.

I have done an easa part66 B1 study, I need some practical experince though to get the license but I'm now doing an aeronautical engineering study so I was curious on how you know so much

Yeah it would have no chance to recover out of an spin with one wing.

The spin looks also awefully slow for such a light aircraft and it's far too controlled. Have you seen the weird turn it does around 42sec you need both wings for that I believe.

Well the landing is completly fake of the original vid, just after the turn it becomes a cgi/3d model, you can see that clearly when the plain is on the ground.

yeah, you're right, now that I'm not at work, I've had time to rewind it and now quite a lot of it seems wrong. It's very clever, very well done, but a lot of the movement is too fast and jurky and the camera shake between cuts is a neat trick to disguise the transition. Had me fooled. .
It looked possible so I wanted to believe...
incidentally, isn't it spinning the wrong way? I can't be bothered to look again !

There are numerous records of Dakota C47's flying and landing with one wing shot off, granted you still had the stub wing to the engine nechelle attached, apparently they built in enough rudder movement to allow for it.

Chris

Well yes, there are lots of accounts of survival, following wing damage of all kinds, often severe.

I can't say it's an in-flight emergency that I'd like to have to deal with myself, but at cruise speed or above, the remnants of a wing will be generating lift, and it's not surprising that there are occasional documented instances where it's enough. The majority where it wasn't enough and they crashed, of course, are less noteworthy, and not so documented.

The F15 in the vid I posted earlier still had a bit of wing left, and landed at twice the normal speed, with a tailhook to help it stop.

The RC aircraft in the second one landed on its side and skidded to a stop in a few feet. Try that in an real plane weighing nearly a ton at 50mph or more, and the result will be very different.

But I am happy to downgrade my earlier "completely impossible" to "exceedingly unlikely".

I still maintain that to imagine a catastrophic failure, with loss of the wing at the root, during aerobatic manoeuvres, with recovery to knife-edge flight and a safe landing, is simply fantasy.

Fun, but fantasy nevertheless.

It is impossible to control a plane that has lost the whole wing. It starts spinning immediately, and no amount of opposite aileron/rudder will be able to counteract the spin. You lose the whole wing, you go from fly by wire to fly by prayer.

I'm sure that's true if you're travelling fast enough for the wings to generate lift, but what would happen in the case of the original video ( I think we've agreed it's a good fake), he lost the wing at the top of a turn when he wasn't really moving and a powerful stunt plane could surely drop back to earth reasonably slowly hanging on the prop?

To lose the wing at the top of a turn means that he's already flying at a high angle of attack, with the consequently high g that snaps off the wing.

So the large force that's still on the other wing is likely to flick it instantly into a spin, which wouldn't be recoverable.

If by some miracle the wing came off without, somehow, the aircraft entering a spin, then conceivably, the application of enough power would get it into the stable state seen in the RC model video I posted.

This 'hanging on the prop' that people talk about is possible only when the thrust axis is vertical, which would not be possible with only one wing, which will inevitably tip the thrust to some angle off the vertical. As soon as this happens, the vertical component of the thrust will be nowhere near enough to hold the plane up, and lots of forward speed would be needed to provide enough additional lift from the fuselage to balance the weight.

RC models such as the one in the video have a much higher thrust to weight ratio than full size aeroplanes, so they can fly in knife edge with the prop pointing much more nearly vertically up than the full size one. The full size one, as I say, needs a lot more forward speed in knife edge flight, since it needs the lift off the fuselage.

All that forward speed would make getting back on to the ground safely extremely unlikely.

So for this to work for real requires the extremely unlikely avoidance of the spin, and also the extremely unlikely avoidance of a spectacular cartwheel on reaching the ground.

It just ain't gonna work, folks.