If you’re never tried going backwards in a plane, well, it’s really fun, though it’s usually hard to see that negative progress let alone capture it in video. In this one, however, it is clear that progress is indeed being made! backwards.
Kimberly Dawn (whose advancingaviation.com site has great content to help both student pilots and instructors) posted the video on her Facebook page. It shows that the two pilots knew that in order to get the proof of backwards progress they’d need to point the camera not at the panel but down at the ground. The GPS (an oldie-but-goody Garmin 250XL), as you’ll see if you pause the video right at the start, gives a groundspeed reading, but it’s not a negative number because, duh, all it knows is that the plane is moving in relation to where it just was. It doesn’t know where the nose is pointed! So as much as we’d all love to see -12 knots here, what we do get to see is the sure sign of the landscape moving slowly in a most unusual direction. (If it’s hard for you to see it, just watch the leading edge of the tire.)
Thanks for the fun post, Kimberly!
