Just
be sure and leave the canard off if you don’t have the wings
on…..
In
one of the early CPs (Canard Pusher newsletter for you non-canard types) there
was a builder who had his engine mounted as well as his canard and when he
needed to talk to some other builders on the other side of the airport, he
would fire up the engine and drive it over to the other side of the airport.
One
day during the return trip he decided to setup on the numbers and give it a
shot.
It
was tracking great and he was approaching rotate speed so he gave it a little
back pressure to see if the canard would come up. It did but it rose up so
high that the prop began striking the runway, The canard would not respond to
any control inputs because of the AOA it had achieved.
Now
the prop is hitting the pavement so hard it’s causing the plane to pull to one
side. Eventually it became totally uncontrollable and left the runway coming
to rest inverted. Fortunately the tower was observing and got him some help
right away.
Of
course the FAA had to be involved as well. It turns out that they did not cite
the pilot.
Drum
roll please ……..
Because
there were no wings on the plane ……… they determined there was ‘no intention
to fly.’
From: Rotary motors in
aircraft [mailto:flyrotary@lancaironline.net] On Behalf Of Joe
Ewen
Sent: Friday, January 15, 2010 9:42 PM
To: Rotary
motors in aircraft
Subject: [FlyRotary] Taxi
Testing
For those Canard
drivers out there:
Does anyone know of
or can think of any reason why I should not perform some taxi testing without
wings or canard in place. I would like to trailer my 173 to the airport
to run some taxi testing to record data on my cooling system, but do not want
to install the wings and canard since I will be bringing it back home after
the test. I do realize that rudder authority would be a poor, so this
would only be done on a calm day.