Last week I took my son (15) and two of his friends a on a short burger run flight to Vislhofen at the Danube river (actually it was a Tortellini and ice cream run … but you get the idea). On the way back I showed them Zero G flights – and of course the boys couldn’t get enough of their iPhones beeing weightless … I did it four or five times, the last parabola was pretty long and we experienced weigtlessness for about 5-7 seconds …
I only had some rugs and a cardboard box in the baggage compartments and the towbar was secured … but other than that I could not see much risk in the maneuver. The tanks were almost full and since I reduce power to idle on the way down I do not think there could be much risk with the oil system.
I cant see an issue. Inevitably when aeroing generally pulling too hard at the bottom could well take the aircraft outside its limits (I have a lot of Cirrus time but I cant recall any published limits in the POH) as well as induce a stall, and you are right without an inverted Christen oil starvation is a concern, but unlikely to be an issue given you are running at near flight idle. It is always a lot of fun. The risk is tiny but I have always been careful to avoid metal pens or other such objects in the cockpit and I guess there is a slightly increased risk of these getting into the “sytems” if you are doing semi aero style flying. However, I cant think of any gaps and holes in the Cirrus which might gobble up stray pens!
Yes, that’s how I see it aswell. I have an aerobatic rating which I have acquired in a two week course on Zlins. So I have no problems with pull-outs, stalls and the like. I checked and my shallow pull-outs were around 2.5 g’s, so no problem. But of course I did all that in 6000 feet AGL … I like margins.
Next time I’ll try it alone. I’d like to find out how long the zero g time can be. I know it’s function of speed, so an SEP might be too slow. I wonder if there is a way to calculate the possible duration?
Some interesting information here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2598414/
Has anyone not done this at some point?
A bit disgusting but a classic i guess… :)
I’ve done it in a rented spamcan. Half the panel levitated and landed on my passenger’s lap.
This one is the best.
Haha! Yes, I know that one … it’s really funny :-) Good that the dog didn’t leave the plane through the rear window!
