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Old 06-18-2006 | 11:09 PM
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MikeEast
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Default RE: Cap 232, Too early yet.

I agree that basis your very brief comment you probably are not ready for a Cap yet, at least not a true to scale Cap 232. As Campy said, a modified Cap that has a modified wing designed to be more forgiving would be fine if you have good solid basic flight skills.
How long have you been flying and what sort of skills have you developed? If you are just learning to fly and are not real and I mean real comfortable with loops, rolls, spins and such and fly aerobatics with pretty decent control then you better hold off. Also you need to be very proficient at taking off, and more importantly landing with skill and precision. Scale aerobatic planes are very unforgiving, especially if you slow them down too much. You cannot make mistakes on landings with a Cap, Edge, Extra, Yak, Sukhoi, Ultimate, Pitts etc. If you slow them down too much they will tipstall every time. This also holds true for warbirds like the P51, Spitfire, etc etc. I see so many guys that are okay at flying try to move up to these sorts of planes only to tear them up trying to land them, or stall them in flight when they try to make a slow turn to downwind like they did with a trainer only to see the plane fall out of the sky in a spiral dive.. Im not trying to scare you off, they are really easy to fly and actually fly just a WHOLE lot better than the 4stars, trainers, cubs, warbirds etc.. you just have to be absolutely certain that when you take on one of these sorts of planes you are prepared to handle the stall characteristics.

I saw a guy at a fly in a couple of months ago that had a 40% Carden Cap, Jets, and the whole 9 yards. He "looked" the part and apparently had money. But he took off this georgeous $8000 airplane and flew it around for about 10 minutes only to slow it down too much on a dead calm day. It was an absolutely routine dead calm landing and the guy slowed it down and you could see it slow down and start to hang,,,, it slowed down and sat there moving about 10mph wobbling for about 3 seconds 10' off the ground and then like clockwork, the nose and 1 wingtip dropped and WHACK. It hit on a wingtip and then the belly, smashed the landing gear, broke a $125 prop and probably did about $500 worth of damage. Point being, this guy is/was a pretty good pilot and obviously flew reasonably well. But these types of planes just present a whole new set of challenges to a pilot.