The biggest problem in flying the Long-EZ is the long, flat glide and very high energy retention. This makes getting down on the runway interesting if you come in at all hot. A common problem in aircraft accidents is that the pilot forgets to keep flyng the AC while trying to fix the problem. First rule; "Fly the aircraft, first, last and always." Only with the AC under control do you have any hope of solving any other problems you might have. In the Long-EZ lots of little things come together to make a very nice and efficient AC. The canard, swept wing, pusher prop allow the use of winglets as fin, rudder and winglet reducing the amount of fuselage needed to support all of these surfaces. The needs of a glider make a canard much less attractive, and harder to make work well. Remember, that the 'so called' "conventional" configuration is really a kludge to bust the patents help by the Wright brothers. :-) The Voyager is probably the most efficient AC ever built but it would be an very bad sailplane. Voyager is a one speed AC, and that speed is dependent on load. It was built to do ONE thing only, fly around the world nonstop with only the fuel onboard. Handling, comfort and everything else only needed to be "mission adequate" nothing more. In fact it was up to the task as the flight was completed safely. Sailplanes need to be multi-task, they must fly slow and fast and be easy to handle with no bad tip stalling tendencies or other strange quirks. Canards, like winglets are best when optimized for a narrow range of flying conditions. michael N6CHV AMA 77292 (Long-EZ builder) "Y.K.Chan" wrote: > > All that suggest is Canards cannot glide? can it? RCSE-List facilities provided by Model Airplane News. Send "subscribe" and "unsubscribe" requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
