CHAPTER 21 / Full Throttle & Full Delusion: The Liftoff Lurch

Crunch time, rookie. Yes, you. It doesn’t matter how many hours you’ve logged in a Cessna, a simulator, or strapped into a taxpayer-funded F-18—if this is a Super Cub, and your foot’s near a heel brake, you’re a wide-eyed amateur at best, and a future insurance case at worst. 

Here we are. Engine purring like a war criminal awaiting sentencing. You’re lined up—more or less—at the threshold of your local county strip. Or maybe it’s not a strip at all. Maybe it’s the slightly flatter section of pasture behind your uncle’s pig farm, where livestock already knows better. Cows flinching. Chickens fainting. One goat’s making a break for it—headed for North Korea. Or Nebraska. Whichever’s safer.

Let’s pretend—just this once—that no meteorological demons have joined us.
No wind. No slope. No wet patches, gravel, sand, or the tears of previous pilots. Just a flat, dry, soul-crushingly normal strip.

This is as easy as it’s ever going to get.
And that should terrify you.

Line up with the centreline. Now stare down the runway like you actually belong here. If you’re not 7 feet tall or blessed with a Cub mod called “delusions of visibility,” you’ll see nothing but cowling and sky. That’s normal.
Personally, I cheat. I point the nose a few degrees right, just enough to catch a glimpse of the centerline with my peripheral despair. Gives me a fighting chance of not mowing down runway lights or children. This is where you take a deep breath, tighten your belts, and remind yourself that—Every successful takeoff is just a failed excuse to stay on the ground.

Brace yourself.
The runway doesn’t forgive.
The Cub doesn’t care.
And the gods of torque? They’re already clinking their beer cans together, placing bets on when exactly you’ll veer off into a ditch.

Here’s what happens next.

Pick a point halfway down the runway. Mark it in your soul.
That’s your Decision Point—capital D, capital P, soon to be followed by capital WTF.

Now listen. I’m not a fan of rigid rules. Aviation already has enough laminated dogma to wallpaper the inside of a Boing hangar. But one rule actually deserves to exist:

The 50/70 Rule — courtesy of Sparky Imeson, may he rest in tragically practical peace.

The idea is brutal in its simplicity:
If, by the halfway mark of your runway, you haven’t reached at least 70% of your rotation speed, abort. Abort with dignity. Abort before your landing gear becomes modern art.

Sounds easy, right?
But here’s the catch: you need to know what that rotation speed is beforehand.
Not while you're:

– swerving like a moose
– bouncing like a pogo stick
– or realising your checklist is crumpled, coffee-stained, and tucked under your thigh next to yesterday’s beef jerky.

This isn’t the moment to “double-check.”
This is the moment where double-checking gets you triple-dead.

So let’s say you do hit 70% by the 50% mark. Great. You’re probably going to get off the ground—but don’t celebrate yet.

That’s not your go speed.
That’s just your “I won’t eat the fence” speed.
It says nothing about the power lines, the hay barn, or the tree that’s been quietly judging you since engine start.

Where Rudder Meets Regret
Codename: The Throttle, The Tail, and The Gyroscopic Gut Punch—Just because you lifted off doesn’t mean you’re flying.
It means you're falling… with the option of dying slightly later.

Now—breathe.
And apply power smoothly.
Think honeymoon, not Holocaust.
This is not the moment to slam the throttle forward like Mike Tyson collecting on unpaid bills. You’re not in a flight sim. You’re not impressing your girlfriend. You’re in a Super Cub. And unless it's powered by the breath of a dying lawn mower, full power will throw you left so fast you’ll be filing your accident report in cursive.

Apply it like you’re trying to seduce the engine, not provoke it.
Why?
Because the engine’s still waking up. Cold. Grumpy. Maybe hungover.
And because gentle throttle application does a few magical things:

1. It’s polite. (Your mechanic may cry less.)
2. It’s survivable.
3. It makes all those left-turning forces we ranted about earlier behave like mildly disgruntled bureaucrats instead of deranged axe murderers.

Remember: you cheated the centerline a bit. Nose pointed slightly right? Good. That move wasn’t just vanity—it’s tactical. Because now, as the engine spools up, torque and P-factor try to shove you left… and you’re already giving them a lane to burn off steam.

Your job now?
Dance on the rudder.
Anticipate the evil. Don’t wait for it to hit.
At some point—somewhere between “mild panic” and “elevated heart rate”—you’ll feel the elevator wake up. That’s your cue.

Push the stick forward gently.
Not like you’re squashing a bug.
Like you’re lowering a crown onto the Queen of Aerodynamic Misjudgment.

If you’ve done everything right—and let’s face it, you haven’t, but let’s pretend—then you’ll lift the tail cleanly off the ground.

This is when the prop becomes a physics professor with bad intentions.
That gyroscopic disc up front? The one spinning like a caffeinated demon?
When you pitch the nose, it reacts 90 degrees off-plane like some kind of passive-aggressive god.
It’s called gyroscopic precession. And it will ruin your marriage with the centerline.

So ease into it.
A bit of right rudder. Maybe more. Maybe less.
With experience, you’ll be tapping rudder before the forces even arrive—and that, my friend, is the unspoken art of taildragger survival:

Don’t react. Anticipate.
Don’t fight the forces. Cut them off at the knees.

Then—suddenly—you can see.
The runway’s visible.
The nose isn’t in the sky anymore.
You’re on two wheels, and it’s almost peaceful.

The Cub will take off when it’s good and ready.
It doesn’t need your permission. It doesn’t care about your ego.
It’ll rise when the forces align—just right enough to give you hope.
And that’s the real danger.

So for now—
Hold it steady.
Relax.
Smile, if you must.

Because this is the last fleeting moment of serenity…
before the airplane tries to kill you again—at 30 feet.

We’ll talk about that tomorrow.
If you make it.