DAVE MATHENY
COMMENTARY / LIGHT FLIGHT
The Dreaded Downwind Turn
It’s not a real danger—mostly
THERE’S A TALE TOLD IN SOME CORNERS of the flying world that it is
dangerous to turn downwind. There is no factual basis for it, but
it lingers. I’ve heard it referred to, not often but occasionally, as
a fact since I first got into flying more than 30 years ago.
Back then it came up in hangar talk. Now, in the age of the
Internet, it lives on in discussion forums. “Beware of turning
downwind,” the legend goes, “because the wind will then be
behind you, robbing you of airspeed, and you may stall.”
No factual basis, but the concept has a strong emotional tug to
it. It sort of feels right, as if, when you turn downwind, you should
anticipate a devil at your six o’clock, shooting windsocks at you—
wrong-way windsocks, sucking the air out from underneath your
wings. Irrational beliefs about flight are more common outside of
aviation, usually. I remember a visitor to our airpark asking me
what I would do if I were flying along one day and the wind quit
blowing. Assuming he was joking, I made some lighthearted reply
and realized, from his look of grave concern, that he meant it.
I have to confess having fallen victim
to the downwind-turn fear myself once, a
very long time ago. In fact, it was during
my first solo flight after instruction. With
all of one hour of flying time in my logbook—ultralight instruction was very
brief at the time—I assembled my brand-new Eagle ultralight next to a dirt road in
a shallow valley that ran east and west.
There were houses and apartment buildings on both sides, their tops maybe 90
feet above the valley floor.
It took nearly two hours to assemble
the aircraft. An unknown but growing
number of spectators in those houses
must have watched me put it together. I
couldn’t see anyone behind those windows,
