Flight Test Chicken

Grilled Chicken Salad Sandwich with Whole Grain Mustard Mayo and Grilled Rye & Pump Bread from Boy Meets Grill page 79. This is a great, fast, week-night grill recipe. I grilled thin slices of chicken breast on the grill with butter spray, salt and ground pepper - thats all. Meanwhile I mixed the dressing that would turn this into a grilled chicken salad. It was mayo, whole grain mustard, chopped celery, red onion, lemon juice, parsley and thyme. When the chicken came off the grill, I let it rest and cool, then sliced it across the grain into chunks. The chicken chunks went into the dressing and got all stirred up. The Rye and Pumpernickel bread was sprayed with butter and put right on the grill until the slices were toasted but not crispy. I added the bacon - because everything is better with bacon. On the side was a Kosher dill pickle and a beefsteak tomato with mozzarella, parm and oregano. It only took 30 minutes from start to finish. 

Weather Report. Great flying weather. And a great day for some flight testing experiments. 

That is the wing of a Diamond DA20 airplane that I was flying this morning. As a class experiment, a student taped down strips of yarn all over the wing as you can see in the photo. In this shot the airflow is pushing the yarn straight back and in straight lines. We did several maneuvers that made those yarn tufts dance. At various times the yarn stood up, or went round-and-round, and even bent forward depending on what I was doing with the rest of the airplane. What was doing including slow flight, inverted flight, stalls and multiple turn spins. I have no still shots of all that, because I was too busy getting back right side up to take any photos, but we shot HD video from a mounted camera down the wing to see all the action. And what is that red funnel doing trailing the wing? On the way to the airport, I stopped by a hardware store and picked up two funnels. We attached the funnel to each wingtip with fishing line. We were hoping that the funnels would get caught up in the "wingtip vortex" and spin around in that airflow. It worked. You can't tell that it is twirling in this still shot, but the video captured it. I will be using these videos and more for training advanced pilots about "unusual attitudes" and, most importantly how to escape from a bad situation. I wish those pilots in Buffalo last year had taken my course. 

Deliberately throwing an airplane out of control, just to bring it back is pretty exciting - time for something a little more relaxing - Time to fire up the grill! Paul