page_title: Herbert O. Fisher
section_title: Reversible pitch experiments
hierarchical_section_title: Herbert O. Fisher / Postwar / Reversible pitch experiments
caption_attribution_description: Bearcat aus der englischen Wiki, aus der engl. WP. dort PD US
context_page_description: Herbert O. Fisher was an American test pilot and an aviation executive, overseeing aviation projects at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. He worked for the Curtiss-Wright Corporation. Fisher flew as a pilot for over 50 years, racking up 19,351 accident and violation free hours.
  During World War II Fisher was sent to the China-Burma-India theater to train the Flying Tigers as a civilian. He flew many combat missions and was awarded the Air Medal by Franklin D. Roosevelt.
  Disproving the public perception of the heroic test pilot, among his peers, the portly Fisher was considered one of the premiere pilots of his time. "Herbert O. Fisher is one of those people who generally went unnoticed. That is until he climbed into the cockpit of an airplane."
context_section_description: Fisher also conducted a program designed to allow aircraft to descend rapidly. It involved reversing all four propellers simultaneously in flight. On a Douglas C-54 Skymaster transport, the extremely high sink rates of up to 15,000 feet per minute in four seconds after reversal, produced a safe method of rapid descent for airliners. The flight would start at 15,000 ft., three miles from the airfield before push over, landing and coming to a full stop in one minute and 50 seconds. Fisher wrote that forward airspeed was well within normal parameters (200 mph (320 km/h)), with no decrease in controllability.
  Fisher conducted nearly 200 of these high rate/low speed descents and demonstrated the technique for Generals"Hap" Arnold and Dwight Eisenhower in 1948. For the latest pressurized airliners and combat aircraft that operated at high altitudes, this was an effective method of safely dumping altitude in the event of an emergency, and was adopted worldwide as a safe procedure. Fisher was also instrumental in developing the use of reversing pitch to rapidly slow an aircraft, which allowed them to land safely on shorter runways, and, in general, greatly reduce the incidence of runway overruns.
  Later, flying a U.S. Navy Grumman F8F Bearcat fighter, Fisher developed a way to fly "zero-g", vertical dives. From 20,000 ft, the F8F would be nosed down into a vertical dive, while he simultaneously reversed the propeller pitch. This technique allowed a controlled vertical dive at rates of descent that varied between 30,000 and 37,000 fpm.
caption: Grumman F8F Bearcat
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