I hate to bring the subject up again, but if the discussion helps one of us
it is probably worth it.  I am puzzled as how willing lots of people are to
do stalls and how unwilling to do spins.  Seems to me that a stall is only
step (or wing) away from a spin so every time you do a stall in an aircraft
not demonstrated to be spin recoverable you are getting too close to the
unknown.  I plan to install an AOA warning and stall strips in my ES, but I
wonder if there is any information out there about spins.  I heard two
stories about the Columbia.  One was that they felt the certification effort
was greater to demonstrate spin recoverability than spin resistance so they
went the spin resistant route.  The other story was that they ran into
enough trouble with spin recovery that they thought it was better to go spin
resistant.  The first sounds like a reasonable choice, where the second
would be bothersome to those of us with ES's.  I also heard one opinion that
the ES needs more directional stability - the IV was designed first and when
the ES was given a 50% larger wing with the same vertical tail area it was
found lacking.  I have a sketch of a ventral fin that doesn't look too bad -
would it make sense to add?

Gary Casey
ES