Ercoupe

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.

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.

Phil