Roll Out of Your Turn
By Will • Sep 21st, 2009 • Category: FlashRaise your nose to maintain
altitude during your turn,
it increases your angle
of attack.
This increases drag.
This decreases airspeed.
Steeper turns you must add,
power to overcome,
the drag.
Or you’re faced with the choice:
lose altitude or airspeed after you
roll out, of your turn,
reset power
for cruise
so you can fly
hands off.
© 2009 Will Hindmarch
(So I found this Cessna pilot’s guide, called Manual of Flight, in with my father’s books. The thing is full of found-poetry fodder. One of the best reactions I’ve ever gotten to a poem came from an early version of this one, which I’ve just rewritten after losing the original years ago. All this week, I’m composing found poems from this Manual of Flight.)
Will is a mooncalf and a scalawag. He writes for money and is the co-founder of Gameplaywright Press and Jet Pack.
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Not quite “flash fiction,” I know, so I changed the category name to “flash” so that I could post anything very short in this category that I liked. The thing is, my instinct was to post poetry over on Tumblr, which nobody I really know really reads, because I think of Jet Pack as a fiction gallery.
But that’s crazy. This is a writing gallery. A poem is written. So there it is.