DAVE MATHENY
A Higher Order
of Stupid
Learning can be a painful process
READERS WHO HAVE FOLLOWED MY STORIES and drawings
going all the way back to EAA’s Experimenter magazine
era will remember this incident. How could they forget?
Forgive me for telling it again, but when a pilot commits
a blunder of this magnitude, and survives, he ought to be
able to retell the story at least once a year. Besides, there’s
a lesson in it that remains ever fresh.
It began with two things. First was the toilet-paper
tossing I had been doing for a couple of years in the 1990s,
described in last month’s article, titled “Skypaper.” (I had
been throwing rolls of toilet paper out of my Quicksilver
MX Sprint ultralight and then circling back and cutting
them with my wings.)
The second was something I had observed during
a season of sky diving. And no, it did not occur to me to
wrap myself in toilet paper and jump to see if the drag
from the toilet paper slowed me down enough so I could
land without needing a parachute. It came up when I was
talking with a flying buddy at the hangar about how sky
divers estimate where to exit the aircraft. They fly over
the drop zone and toss a weighted crepe-paper streamer
out the door. Between the weight and the drag of the
crepe paper, the streamer is configured to descend at
about the same rate as a parachutist under an inflated canopy. If the wind carries the streamer so that it lands, for
example, a quarter of a mile southwest of the drop zone,
that fact tells the sky divers that the place to exit is a quarter of a mile northeast. Simple and effective.
