RobByers
Member
I had the priviledge of being the first official demo ride in New Blue on Monday afternoon. I was the first demo by pure dumb luck. Mitch Lock was supposed to go to an east coast EAA chapter meeting on Saturday but bad weather kept him grounded. I ended up being first. Better to be lucky than good I guess. I am a Navy Test Pilot by trade with most of my expereince in rotory wing aircraft. I started building my RV-12 based on a lot of reaseach my growing enthusiasm for the concept of the E-LSA class as I view it s my insurance policy against 1) when I get forced into managment and have to stop flying (which is happening as we speak and 2) sometime after I retire and get paranoid I might lose my medical. Now that I have flown the aircraft I am even more enthusiastic and want to start building twice as fast. Unfortunately for me building twice as fast means building one-fourth as good.
I really can't say enough good things about the aircraft. The intergrated avionics are better than most military aircraft and simulators I have flown and tested. We are really getting a lot of bang for our buck with this kit. Voice alerts for stall, aircraft limits, terrain alerts, the darn thing even gives you accurate verbal glideslope calls. The "stall - stall" voice even sounds like the "stall - stall" voice in the V-22.
On taxi out, we were fourth in line at the holdshort. Everybody else was opening their doors and sweating their ar#e off but with the air vents on the sides just behind the prop, even at idle, we had plenty of air to cool us off.
I very much like the light control forces and very consistent force gradients, almost helicopter like. If I were to design a sitck-force per g at cruise speed to my own liking it would be a lot like the 12. Had no issues going right to 60 deg AOB and loading her up. No tendency to dig in and no tendency to overbank on you. It's not common for a reversable control system to have such good and consistent mechanical characteristics and control harmony across the range of operating speeds like this one has. Being pushrod controlled, there was absolutely no freeplay in lateral lateral control. There was a small amount of freeplay in longitudinal control but the freeplay and the breakout force at all speeds appear to prevent overcontrol and pilot induced oscillations as lateral and longitudinal control power is quite high. I actually think reducing the very small amount of freeplay would endup making the aircraft to prone to pitch PIO. There was a very notable increase in breakout and force gradient in lateral control with flaps down. I would not call it inharmonious with pitch and the increased force gradient reduced any PIO tendency getting to final. Very stable and difficlut to excite long term mode and a very highly damped short term mode. It had some of the best pitch pointing accuracy I have ever seen. You can fly this thing within 1 deg of attitude and 2 kts of airspeed without looking at that big beautiful glass display. When referencing the glass display you can almost use the thing with the accurate pitch pointing as a vertical speed command. My one complaint about the dsiplay is that the VSI pointer and AOB pointers really don't stand out enough. The best comment I can make about the handling qualities comes from something that happened to us on climbout from a low approach. Midfield as we started up at 75 kt climb speed a huge flock of birds bloomed just to our left and crossed the runway. They broke into three large groups in front of us. Break left, break right, pitch down, pitch up in rapid succession and then climbout at over 900 FPM with two heavy guys on a high density altidue day. I never would have been able to avoid those birds in a Cesana 152. You would not have been able to get such a quick and perdictible roll and pitch response at climb speed and power.
There is plenty of room in the cockpit and Mitch and I only bumped elbows once when we both reached down simultaneously to retract the flap handle.
She's faster than you might think. No problem truing out at the LSA 120 KTAS fully loaded on a pretty high DA day.
No aircraft is perfect and there were a few nits. The aircraft had a slightly irritating structural resonance somewhere at climb power. The huge stabilator/huge trim tab combinaiton may surprise you in a trim runaway. I simulated a trim runaway by laying on the forward detent on the trim switch and was surprised at the reaction. The aircraft is hard to slow down and get down from a high hot approach even with two notches of flap. If you get high and hot just go around early and save youself the trouble. After the thrid pass, I think I had all the gains mapped and gave Mitch a setup he could land without too much float. Oh yeah, she might float a bit. After touchdown, aerobraking was very effective in slowing the aircraft.
Mitch had the canopy latch modification installed. No isses with the canopy. I actually think Mitch may have develped the latch.
If I remeber more I'll add it later.
I really can't say enough good things about the aircraft. The intergrated avionics are better than most military aircraft and simulators I have flown and tested. We are really getting a lot of bang for our buck with this kit. Voice alerts for stall, aircraft limits, terrain alerts, the darn thing even gives you accurate verbal glideslope calls. The "stall - stall" voice even sounds like the "stall - stall" voice in the V-22.
On taxi out, we were fourth in line at the holdshort. Everybody else was opening their doors and sweating their ar#e off but with the air vents on the sides just behind the prop, even at idle, we had plenty of air to cool us off.
I very much like the light control forces and very consistent force gradients, almost helicopter like. If I were to design a sitck-force per g at cruise speed to my own liking it would be a lot like the 12. Had no issues going right to 60 deg AOB and loading her up. No tendency to dig in and no tendency to overbank on you. It's not common for a reversable control system to have such good and consistent mechanical characteristics and control harmony across the range of operating speeds like this one has. Being pushrod controlled, there was absolutely no freeplay in lateral lateral control. There was a small amount of freeplay in longitudinal control but the freeplay and the breakout force at all speeds appear to prevent overcontrol and pilot induced oscillations as lateral and longitudinal control power is quite high. I actually think reducing the very small amount of freeplay would endup making the aircraft to prone to pitch PIO. There was a very notable increase in breakout and force gradient in lateral control with flaps down. I would not call it inharmonious with pitch and the increased force gradient reduced any PIO tendency getting to final. Very stable and difficlut to excite long term mode and a very highly damped short term mode. It had some of the best pitch pointing accuracy I have ever seen. You can fly this thing within 1 deg of attitude and 2 kts of airspeed without looking at that big beautiful glass display. When referencing the glass display you can almost use the thing with the accurate pitch pointing as a vertical speed command. My one complaint about the dsiplay is that the VSI pointer and AOB pointers really don't stand out enough. The best comment I can make about the handling qualities comes from something that happened to us on climbout from a low approach. Midfield as we started up at 75 kt climb speed a huge flock of birds bloomed just to our left and crossed the runway. They broke into three large groups in front of us. Break left, break right, pitch down, pitch up in rapid succession and then climbout at over 900 FPM with two heavy guys on a high density altidue day. I never would have been able to avoid those birds in a Cesana 152. You would not have been able to get such a quick and perdictible roll and pitch response at climb speed and power.
There is plenty of room in the cockpit and Mitch and I only bumped elbows once when we both reached down simultaneously to retract the flap handle.
She's faster than you might think. No problem truing out at the LSA 120 KTAS fully loaded on a pretty high DA day.
No aircraft is perfect and there were a few nits. The aircraft had a slightly irritating structural resonance somewhere at climb power. The huge stabilator/huge trim tab combinaiton may surprise you in a trim runaway. I simulated a trim runaway by laying on the forward detent on the trim switch and was surprised at the reaction. The aircraft is hard to slow down and get down from a high hot approach even with two notches of flap. If you get high and hot just go around early and save youself the trouble. After the thrid pass, I think I had all the gains mapped and gave Mitch a setup he could land without too much float. Oh yeah, she might float a bit. After touchdown, aerobraking was very effective in slowing the aircraft.
Mitch had the canopy latch modification installed. No isses with the canopy. I actually think Mitch may have develped the latch.
If I remeber more I'll add it later.