I'm not a pilot. I'm married to a pilot, but I am personally not a pilot. Not even close. That doesn't mean that I've never flown a plane. I've flown some planes. I even flew the Goodyear blimp over thirty miles during a press event. Admittedly, I got the opportunity because I fibbed about being a licensed pilot. But that's a story for another time. What I want to talk about today is the time that I flew a Cessna 172 at the age of eleven. I was a cadet airman in the Civil Air Patrol and I was in the student seat of a military-spec Cessna for a familiarization flight. Don't laugh. There really is such a thing as a military-spec Cessna.

About ten minutes after taking off, our senior pilot leveled the 172 about three thousand feet off the ground, gave me a short lecture about not doing anything stupid, then said it was time for me to fly the thing. What I was supposed to do: keep the plane level and straight using the techniques I'd been taught. What I actually did: banked it sharply and sent it into a full power dive. Why I did that: I'd been too excited to sleep the night before so I'd re-read a book about the Messerschmitt Me163 "Komet." The book talked a lot about how the Komet could almost go supersonic in a power dive. I wanted to see how close the 172 could get to supersonic.

What happened next: the senior pilot yelled at me, smacked me away from the rectangular steel steering wheel control, and resumed control of the aircraft. What did not ever happen again: me flying a plane in the Civil Air Patrol. But here's the neat thing about the Cessna 172; even if Captain Kaufmann (sorry, Sir) hadn't taken charge, I probably wouldn't have killed us. The Cessna 172 is positively stable.

The Cessna T-41 Mescalero, the military-spec version of the 172. National Museum of the United States Air Force

"Positively stable" means that if you stop screwing around with the plane long enough for it to do what it wants to do, it will straighten up and fly right. There are degrees of positive stability; some planes will just level the wings, others will gradually pull out of the dive or the climb into which they have been put. I'm sure we have some pilots among the reader base who have a more sophisticated understanding of the concept, but my kindergarten explanation will, I hope, suffice for now.

The opposite of positively stable is relaxed stability. That's the same kind of euphemism that I've heard used regarding some people's marital fidelity; they have a relaxed attitude towards it. Which means you can find them on Tinder. In the airplane sense, relaxed stability means that the airplane is inherently unstable, like a spinning top with a slight weight imbalance.

A pilot with a positively stable airplane has to work to make it turn, dive, or climb. A pilot with a relaxed plane has to work to keep it straight. The payoff for relaxed stability is that you get higher maneuverability in exchange for the extra hassle.

Since this is Road & Track, not Aviation Weekly, I suppose we should hurry up and talk about cars. A front-wheel-drive performance car with the engine hung out over the front wheels generally has positive stability. If you're going through a fast turn in a Honda Civic Si or a VW GTI and you start to slide or wobble, relaxing your grip on the steering and applying a little power will result in the car straightening out. That's not necessarily a good thing if you're facing a concrete barrier, but it's safe and predictable behavior.

The penalty is that these cars are harder to turn. In club racing, we apply some pretty wacky strategies to turn positively stable cars into relaxed-stable cars. My Neon has rear springs that are basically solid and a wicked amount of toe-out on the back wheels. So when you enter a turn, the rear end naturally slides around like it's on casters. This is terrifying until you get used to it, but without that tuning, I'd never be able to corner on even remotely even terms with Miatas or other RWD cars.

Powerful RWD cars, particularly mid-engined cars, have relaxed stability by design. If you're mid-corner in a Ferrari Berlinetta Boxer and the rear end starts to slide, letting go of the wheel and adding power will NOT FIX THINGS DO NOT DO IT. I hope I'm being clear. Don't do that. You'll wind up like the fellow in the old issue of this fine magazine who put his Berlinetta Boxer off the road and down a tree-cluttered hillside. "Good tires, but certainly not great tires." You remember the photo.

You want a positively stable vehicle for bad weather, late nights, and unpredictable circumstances

Those of you who received a scientific or classical education will no doubt be familiar with the polar-moment-of-inertia concept. That's a big part of positive or relaxed stability. A high polar moment of inertia makes for a stable car. That's even true of the fabled air-cooled 911 Turbos. They were stable cars that reliably understeered until you did something stupid. My 993, which benefits from a newer suspension design in back, is even better in this regard. You have to be a real idiot to get it out of shape.

The moral of the story is that you want a positively stable vehicle for bad weather, long drives, late nights, small children, and other unpredictable circumstances. When lap times count, however, you want relaxed stability, and you need the talent to stay ahead of that relaxed stability, the same way that pilots of the Me163 Komet needed to be on their toes in power dives.

We could end the discussion here except for one thing: there's a new generation of high-performance cars that are inherently unstable for reasons having to do with their powertrain engineering. They have high-torque turbocharged engines controlled by drive-by-wire throttles, and therefore don't always respond to the accelerator pedal the way you'd expect. If you're doing 100-plus miles per hour in a fast turn, on the absolute limit of the tires, and the computer throws another 30 foot-pounds' worth of torque at the outside rear wheel—well, that's going to tax your abilities in a big, scary hurry.

My love for the Dodge Viper is well known to R&T readers, and part of that love comes from the fact that the Viper, in Gen V form, is absolutely and completely predictable. If you move the throttle five percent, you get five percent more power. Try the same maneuver in a McLaren, BMW, or Ferrari, and you could be playing roulette with the turbo.

They're not docile, but if you know what you're doing, they're predictable.

The need to produce cover-story horsepower numbers while also satisfying the eco-weenie crowd means that many modern cars have absolutely schizophrenic engines. It's not something you'd discover while driving to the store or even driving a fast canyon road, but if you're on a track chasing that last half-second of laptime you're going to, in the words of the late Jeff Cooper, "see the elephant" at some point.

All of this could be solved very easily if we put engines like the Viper's V10 or the old Ferrari 458 Speciale's V8 in every performance car—but the days of big-power naturally-aspirated engines are all but gone. So we're going to have these electronically-controlled turbo marvel-motors whether we like or not. And we're going to have even more sophisticated ESC systems to keep them on a leash.

Which brings me to the F-117 stealth fighter. It's inherently unstable because of its radar-shedding design. So much so that it requires a complicated computer just to keep it flying straight. No human being could fly an F-117 the way you'd fly a P-51 Mustang or even an F-15 Eagle. As you'd expect, some pilots preferred the old analog way; one British aviator said that the Jaguar strike fighter he'd flown previously was "much more the flying aircraft" compared to the F-117.

Maybe that's the phrase I'll use in the future. The 458 Speciale was "much more the driving car" than the current 488. The same relationship holds true between the C6 Z06 and the C7 Z06. I prefer driving a car that will take me as far into the danger zone as I am willing to go, with no unpleasant surprises along the way. I may not be a pilot, but the 11-year-old cadet in me still likes to stir up a bit of trouble sometimes. I'd rather stir it up without a computerized spoon, you dig?

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