Re: Safety

[Mi Vida Loca]

At 02:34 PM 8/29/1999 -0600, you wrote:
>I have nearly 500 hours in taildraggers of various sizes and discriptions.
>I love my coupe and enjoy that flight a half hour before sundown when things
>cool down and the bumps are gone BUT; I would rather land anything with
>rudder pedals in a cross wind than anything without pedals. You can argue
>technique but the other evening just after touchdown I got hit by a strong
>side gust which lifted one wing back off the ground and lacking a one
>hundred foot wide runway, I might have wound up in the Mesquite! There is
>that transition at touchdown when you no longer have aerodynamic control and
>the plane is so light on it's tires and at such a high speed (60 mph) that
>you have little control from the tires as yet. Now I'm not going to give up
>the coupe, but I won't agree that it posseses greater capability than a
>three axis airplane, it doesn't.
>
>Dick in NM.

Don't let improper rigging (tail too low), driving it onto the ground instead of touching down when at the lowest possible airspeed and a lack of knowledge of landing a coupe in an X-wind interfere with your preconceived apprehensions. If you were to correct those 3 items you would have no hairy chested pilot story to tell.
The simple fact of the matter is that once down on the ground if your coupe is sitting level it will not raise a wing once it is tracking straight down the runway. It will however raise a wing briefly (if the tail is not level) if when you touch down you are carrying a little too much speed. The reason for this is that landing in a crab the up wind wing will gain speed as it swings around thus increasing lift while the down wind wing slows in it's retreat thereby loosing lift. More lift on one wing and less on the other will always result in a lifting of the wing with the most lift. Basic aerodynamics! The coupe with it's tail up properly will run down the runway at 100 mph for as long as you have runway and will not break ground until you increase the angle of attack.
I am more than willing to land a Coupe in any X-wind that any other A/C can do and I'll do it without being white knuckled. It is very easy to buy into all the crap floating around about coupes,,,, I even hear experienced Coupers spew it occasionally, but the truth is properly rigged and landed at the slowest possible airspeed a 35 foot wide runway is more than wide enough even if you lack a lot of experience in a Coupe.



Dave
41 Charlie
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