On Jul 2, 9:18 pm, Eric Greenwell wrote:
Chip Bearden wrote:

It's not well known that when the LS-3
and ASW 20 first appeared here in the US around 1977, the '3 was the
hot ship to have.

Even though George Moffat won the 15 M nationals at Ephrata in 1976,
using an ASW 20?

Yeah, there are always exceptions.

Actually, I think George's win was in 1978. The year I'm thinking of
was, IIRC, 1977, in Hobbs? Rudy Mozer had one of the few (maybe the
only) '20 in the USA at the time. One day before the start, the flap/
aileron mixer broke loose in the fuselage. Skillfully and miraculously
Rudy pulled the dive brakes and put the nose down, which gave him some
fantastic dihedral and with whatever control he retained kept the
whole thing fairly level. By ruddering it around he was able to land
on a long runway there. He thought he'd forgotten to hook something up
that morning so, as the story goes, he didn't even bother to climb out
of the cockpit. He just told one of his kids to open up the hatch and
hook up the controls. With the puzzled response that the control
connections looked just fine, the situation got more complicated and
his contest was over.

So in 1977, the LS-3 was going great (Dick Johnson tested the '20 and
the '3 to be essentially equal), the '20 was dogged by a few doubts
about the flexible wings, and it was uncertain which way the wind
would blow. At least one former national champion we spoke with said
that if he had to pick between the two, he'd take the LS-3 because of
the more robust structure, the outstanding build quality, and the
price advantage (it was the cheapest of the new 15M ships at that
time).

A few years later, the story had changed and most hot pilots were
moving into the '20. Not long after that, the shrinkage over the spar
caps on the LS-3 wing began to affect cruise performance (except for
the handful of airplanes, like mine, that were corrected). It's
interesting how two airplanes with identical performance when new had
such dramatically different lives.

Chip Bearden
ASW 24 "JB"
USA