I decided to revisit this thread, and the original question. This is my personal experience. Spad started simply as combat planes...cheap, have fun, smack em up, no emotional debt factor. I never had any desire or intentions to mess with designing a trainer. Until I met Sassy. When I met Sassy, she owned a Dura-Plane that was so full of epoxy it was a flying brick and she had no luck trying to learn on it. She had the Dura-Plane because she spent a lot of time and money on a Great Planes Trainer and it was destryoed in a training crash. Not earning her wings with the Dura-Plane, she put a lot of time and money into an LT-40. This was also destroyed in a training crash. She was nervous, and scared to death of wrecking any more planes. I told her I would see what we could do. We spent a Saturday enlarging one of the original Spad designs (the Dominator) Into a larger airplane with lower wing loading. We chose the heavier American pipe for survivability. We used all 4mm coro because it's everywhere, cheap, and tough. We used two spars for cartwheel survivability. The engine mount, landing gear, radio and hardware all came out of her Dura-Plane. Debonair #1 was finished that afternoon with about $10 worth of materials plus what we used off the Dura-Plane. The next day we went to the field. The winds were blowing about 20mph. We took the plane up and it performed flawlessly. After triming it out, Sassy was given the Tx and flew out the rest of the flight with no problems. We fueled it up, and Sassy took of, flew the entire flight, and landed. She soloed. One of her first comments after landing was that the nerves and fear of crashing were gone, because the time, cost and effort that went into the airplane were so low. Since she was involved in every step of the building process the day before, she also commented that it was no big deal if she splattered it, because she would just build another one. She said that for her, removing the fear factor made ALL the difference in the world. That trainer is still flying today. Although Sassy has gone on to fly other airplanes, including combat competition, the Original Debonair is still one of her favorite airplanes.