"Kind words..." Always enjoy your posts!
"a piece of yarn tied to a stick jutting up in front of me" Interesting...
Ours had a piece of yarn taped to the base of the windshield on the centreline, and it was called a yaw indicator. Yaw is the left-right motion of a plane, and is controlled by the rudder pedals. The trick was to keep the yarn straight up the midline of the windshield. This meant that the plane was flying straight through the air. If the yarn was off to one side, that showed that the airflow was somewhat sideways across the plane, i.e. the plane was "crabbing" through the air sorta sideways.
There is a gage on the dash for this, but, as always, simpler is better!
Yours sounds more complicated... 2 dimensions.
The second dimension is pitch... the nose up / down axis through the air.
There is another gage for this... I was taught a simpler method.
We used a certain "cruise" airspeed... Pitch the nose down, speed increases... Pitch it up, speed decreases. The trick was to keep the airspeed constant on the windspeed indicator gage.
I cheated... As the wind noise level and frequency changed with airspeed, I learned to keep the noise level the same... Kinda like flying by ear.
"I was tempted to grab it after we landed and hold it to my nose.
It would've been the only time it came close."
That is funny... It was the object of the exercise though.
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