Ex-pilot here... lost oil pressure on on a little pleasure flight about 50 miles from home base. Returned to the field okay but it was white knuckle flying on the way back. The RPM kept dropping along with the oil pressure and was down to 1/3 normal cruise speed. After I radioed emergency, another plane came and followed me in, in case I had to put it down early.
It ended up being that the mechanic that did the AD failed to install a seal correctly on an oil cooler. I was just losing oil and it was being sucked into the engine and clogging the air filter. It's lucky these engines hold a large amount of oil.
(I owned a Piper Tri-Pacer PA-22-135 in case you're wondering)
Out of curiousity, I expected the plane completely lose forward movement, I did not see him dip the plane down to gain forward momentum.
How is this pulled off, it's not exactly a glider?
It's hard to discern the attitude of a plane in a video like that, you would have to be looking at the gauges to see what kind of roll and yaw he was experiencing. Also, if you notice he obtained the altitude of the field. This is because it is a little hard to judge altitude until you are within about 30ft from the ground.
I can say he was probably experiencing some pretty good g-force in that turn because you can tell he came in pretty hot.
Thx for the context.
It is a glider. The total aerodynamic force vector still points straight up, directly opposite to gravity. This is always the case for unaccelerated flight. A light plane might have a (drag, lift) lbs-f vector of (-200, 2000) where the flight path is the x axis. In a glide you rotate this coordinate system so the total aerodynamic vector points straight up, placing the x-axis aka flight path at the correct inclination. Greater drag values result in steeper flight paths. If you had an engine the thrust would offset drag and the vector would be (0, 2000) resulting in level flight. With excess thrust the vector might be (200, 2000) and the aircraft would climb. In a terminal velocity vertical dive it would be (-2000, 0) aka a parachute.
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