Educational threads ROCK!
But, that bothered me. From what tiny little bit I know, an RC can have a much, much higher thrust-to-weight ratio than a fulll sized aircraft (if I'm wrong about this, someone please correct me). That alone changes many of the dynamics involved. So I kept looking, eventually stumbled across that Hoax-Slayer site, and whaddaya know! It dealt with that exact video.
The very first time I watched it I thought the landing didn't look right. The motion was just... wrong. I was also wondering where the lift was coming from to keep the plane in the air as it was coming in to land. Stunt planes can hang from their props for a brief time, but nothing like the video purports to show.
The video is pretty clearly fake, but there are extreme performance prop planes that could theoretically perform such a recovery, and the aerobatic plane that it's pretending to be is plausible.
For example, back in the mists of time, I once saw Scott Crosby pilot his (replica)
Gee Bee E in the Watsonville Antique Fly-In (c. 1991). This aircraft is a Golden Age racer, with the later variants reaching about 1 hp for every five pounds of weight! Also had nearly as much surface area on the body as on the wings. Such an aircraft could easily fly sideways after loss of a wing if you caught it in time, though landing it that way would be spectacularly difficult. According to Mr. Crosby's comments at the time, it was actually easier to fly knife-edge than flat and level, albeit slower...
Here's a link to
video from 1995 (link goes to Google Video; Gee Bee E is at 43:30, other insane aircraft follies throughout). Truly a marvellous vehicle, better exemplifying form-over-function than any I can think of.
While looking for links, I learned that he
crashed it in 1997 when the engine failed. Very sad. Fortunately he was OK, but I don't know if he got it in the air again, or perhaps built another.
Eagles are fly-by-wire? I didn't know that. But wouldn't that be a detriment? After all, wouldn't sending an instruction to a control surface that's no longer there just push the programming beyond its capacity? I don't know how a programmer could build an exception handler for a problem that large. Then again, I'm no programmer...
F-15's are not fly-by-wire, with only a single exception. They do have a control "assist" system (CAS) in F-15A-D, and an updated digital assist in the F-15E, but this is not true fly-by-wire because the controls are still coupled to the surfaces directly. A strained analogy would be to an adaptive power steering system in a modern luxury car -- it's a boost, not a replacement.
That lone exception I mentioned is the F-15 IFCS research vehicle at NASA Dryden, which had true fly-by-wire retrofitted as part of its modifications. See
here, Page 6, for a description of the aircraft.
There are actually a few theories that try to explain exactly how lift is generated. I merely gave the simplest explanation for the pressure differential.
Just to clarify before anyone asks, there is no scientific mystery about lift, just that most of the simplified explanations one usually encounters in educational materials are not quite correct. Some of the details, in particular how the boundary layer forms from rest and whether or not it remains attached, are rather complicated, but the derivation of lift (the force) from a snapshot of steady flow is pretty simple; whether you approach it from the Bernoulli pressure perspective (as in the writeup here) or in a Newtonian sense (equal and opposite, etc.) you will get the right answer.
