Greetings,

 

Boy, am I embarrassed!  In my attempt to think through the flight dynamics as described in the Legacy canopy accident, I got myself turned around and backwards and my explanation came out wrong.  Of course the tail provides negative lift and of course losing that negative lift will cause the nose to drop.   

 

Please accept my apologies for the mistake and thanks to those who corrected me offline as well as on the LML.  It is important not to let errors go uncorrected and I'm glad people caught and corrected my error.

 

However, I hope that doesn't detract from the other points in my posting, which is that we have real world examples of Legacies flying with open canopies without control problems and ones with control problems.  I'm still inviting Lancair International to join the discussion with actual flight test data or aerodynamic modeling data to help resolve the question.

 

Sorry,

Dennis (self grounded until I reread my aerodynamics books!)