Don't forget CG. A rearward CG tends to make planes easier to spin...
loading aft of the limit can obviously cause behavior outside of the
envelope.

cjcampbell wrote:

It might be possible to force the Ercoupe to spin by really yanking on
the controls in turbulent air and doing everything you could to force
it beyond its stall limitations, but I suspect that you have to be
deliberately trying to crash it.

The NTSB database attributes some Ecroupe accidents to "stall," but the
Ercoupe definitely has different stall characteristics than other
aircraft. Ercoupe fans deny that they are stalls at all. The way pilots
kill themselves on final in Ercoupes is they get real slow and a little
high, so they try to slow some more. The Ercoupe does not stall,
exactly, but it doesn't like that sort of treatment, either. It begins
to descend very rapidly and it takes some time to recover to a normal
rate of descent.

IIRC there have even been a couple of fatalities from spins in
Ercoupes, but control failures were a factor in these. Overall, the
Ercoupe has a *worse* than average fatality rate, which is something
that I doubt Langewische expected. It does show that Langewische was
wrong when he thought that the accident rate would be lowered
significantly if you made it impossible to stall an airplane. All it
really showed was that pilots who were likely to kill themselves in
stalls had to find some other method of committing suicide and murder.