Originally Posted by
Dave Wilshere
I'm not talking about my experience, I can land anything. I'm basing it on 20+ pilots I see in England regularly and we don't have 1000' runways available, even the airfields only tend to have 300' of decent surface either side of an intersection, as the runways were set in 1940! My local grass field is less than 300' and we have around 10 guys with varying experience flying UF models and they generally land fine. Yes some have the odd bounce early on, but they all get there with stock CARF gear and springs.
I'm sorry, but being able to fly rolling circuits does not mean you can read speed. Flying fast is easy, flying slow is where the skill is.
There are pilots here who don't get on with landing the UF, generally they have come from draggy jets that slow themselves, so land easy. The UF is not going to land itself, but it flies very slowly once you scrub the speed.
Bad work man blames his tools is what we say here. I'm not getting at you, but there is nothing wrong with the UF gear.
Iīm not with you either. I have built and test many planes ,Iīm that kind of guy, I built the plane for Ruyman and I was the one whose sugestion was to soften the spring rate.
My look at the problem is simple and tested in many planes; if the spring canīt store enough energy to bring the plane back to the air it will not do it.
Normally a suspension system has an accompanying damping system to resist bouncing. Oil is usually the preferred damping media but air damping and friction alone is also seen .
Damping dissipates energy . If the system is not to be equipped with a system capable of dissipating the energy of a bad landing,better not to store it. What is the purpose of that piece of hardware if it can not meet the expectations of its name????
Of course you can try the reverse remedy by fitting stiffer springs effectively locking the suspension system and not storing anything. This is easy to achieve in that type of trailing link oleos that has a "preferred" horizontal suspension (pothole) vs vertical suspension (too hard of a descent rate at touchdown).
Anyway I prefer to hit end of stroke sometimes than having a bunny hop when the "bad work man" comes to the job(flying) site.
My way of telling if a plane is going to bounce is simply looking at the sag of the spring ,25-30% percent sag and it will not bounce.
To all ,please letīs be nice.We are just talking about our opinions ,is not necessary to fit any one in any case as this is going to propably fit ourselves in a bad one.