David,
I am perplexed. It is true that most of the used "deal of the century" aircraft
that came through my shop for evaluation or repair took on an average of 350
man hours to bring them up to Annex E and flight standards.
I have never had an aircraft from my shop display any charachteristic you
describe.
Even 139AB which had the right wing incidence at 3.1 degrees and the left
at 2.6 degrees never rolled over and into a spin. Simply relaxation of back
pressure broke the stall. Yes, the wing drop was entertaining, but only through
complete disregard for normal flight stall techniques (i.e. adding aileron
and leaving ones feet flat on the floor) and nearly full aft stick would the
plane break into a severe un-commanded roll. (Fixing 139AB is a long story but
450 hours later and $20,000 it is a fine flying airplane.) If you know of
another
aircraft with such characteristics, I suggest you advise the owner to fix
the darned thing.
For everyone else, I don't intend to upset anyone. I've done a paper on my
thoughts
on stalls on the Europa expanding my techniques articles. I've omitted
the glider wing stall spin as I found it benign and not worth talking about.
In any case, spin entry had to be done with full aft stick and full rudder to
gain entry. Proper spin recovery controls quickly broke the stall and rotation.
The mass of the glider winged aircraft meant more rudder was used to quicken
the stop of the rotation than on the short wing. I only did one turn in the
glider as I didn't have a chute and the required safety gear to do spin testing
here in the States for a full three turns.
Attached is my synopsis of stalls in the Europa XS/Classic. I've also included
a second hand buying paper
Bottom line, if you find your Europa will stall straight ahead fine using my
techniques
for yaw control and it behaves differently in an accelerated stall, there
is a control not operating properly which should have been identified on
inspection.
I have found that most scary Europa stall characteristics are build rig errors
that have gone ignored and missed by inspectors, and most are pilot proficiency
and training issues.
Best Regards,
Bud Yerly
Read this topic online here:
http://forums.matronics.com/viewtopic.php?p=505792#505792
Attachments:
http://forums.matronics.com//files/buying_a_second_hand_experimental_161.docx
http://forums.matronics.com//files/europa_stall_spin_evaluation_129.pdf
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