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George,
Attached is the ES spin video Ron was
talking about. When I first saw it several years ago,
I saved it.
The story behind the clip is that a
builder hired an ex-Air Force fighter pilot to do his Phase 1 testing for
him. I swapped e-mails with the pilot after this came out and
got the full story. This guy took testing seriously, mapping out planned
maneuvers for each flight, wearing a helmet and parachute and videotaping every
flight. One of the things he did was to perform a series of stall tests at
progressively further aft CG's, I assume by adding ballast to the back of the
plane, as he always flew alone.. Doing spins was not part of his test
plan. During the stall in the video, his CG was fairly well aft and as you
can see, the plane unexpectedly and abruptly departed to the
left. He told me that when he applied recovery controls,
the spin actually tightened at first but after nearly three turns and
considerable loss of altitude, it did recover. Had this happened at
pattern altitude, recovery would have been impossible. At that point he
stopped doing any further stall testing and he told me that his recommendation
was that spins be a prohibited maneuver in the ES.
I got to do a lot of spins in prop and
jet trainers in the Navy and would never even consider trying on in my ES.
I did approaches to stalls to calibrate my AOA (something I feel should be an
essential part of any experimental's instrument panel), but have not done any
since, as I can't even get close to stall speed now without the aural warning
the AOA generates and would have to ignore it to do so.
I'm with Jeff and LOBO on this subject
- I don't recommend intentional stalls in Lancairs. Because each is built
a little differently, it's probable that each would handle a little differently
at high AOA. And as has been pointed out, the most likely place for a
stall is in the traffic pattern and if you depart controlled flight there, all
the training or practice in the world isn't going to help you.
Skip Slater
N540ES
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