Ercoupe

Phil J wrote in news:5d15f685-058a-44f2-a9b2-
:

On Mar 11, 10:22*am, Bertie the Bunyip wrote:
Phil J wrote in news:875f835d-861f-4472-80b2-
:







On Mar 9, 3:06*pm, Dan wrote:
On Mar 9, 3:58 pm, Bertie the Bunyip wrote:

Heard of it, never saw one.

Seen a few. There was one for sale on Barnstormers recently.
Bertie

Awful because?

No rudders. Even the ones built by Alon, which had pedals,
didn't
have
decent yaw control.

The big problem with them is, they;re 'idiot proof'. When you
make
something idiot proof, all you do is breed a better class of
idiot.
Idiots are like antibiotic resistant staff infections like that.

Bertie

Hmmm..

Good point. The "spin proof" claim would indicate less than full
control authority, which comes in handy from time to time.

I wonder if there's a way to correlate "improved safety features"
with
"increased accident rate."

Kinda like riding a bike -- the sense of protection a helmet
provides
may encourage risky behavior.

Hmmmm...

Dan

From what I have read, the Ercoupe had a few problems. *If you lost
the engine, it didn't glide worth a damn. *And if you let it get
too
slow on approach it would develope a huge sink rate. *If you didn't
speed up, you couldn't flare enough to arrest the sink rate and you
would slam into the ground.

Actually, the flight manual actually said that if you were to high
and
needed to scrub off altitude, you should pull the stick back into
your
gut and close the throttle. I did it and it does work and is pretty
controllable,but it is very undcomfortable.



As the years went by and the main gear oleos got old, or when the
nose
gear was replaced with a dual-fork strut, they tended to sit too
nose-
high on the ground, and that made them more difficult to land,
especially in crosswinds, because the angle-of-attack stayed too
high
at touchdown.

I think the mains use rubber donuts, but I'm not sure.

Bertie- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

You're right, it was rubber doughnuts. I guess they just got stale as
the years went by.

Good guess on my part then, cuz that's all it was. it was a popular
method of shock absorbption back when. Probably remained on th eairplane
through the Mooney variants at all. Why change what works?