ORIGINAL: mesae
ORIGINAL: Tim Taylor
The plane I was writing about is a 46 size composit pattern plane. The plane never flew like it was tail heavy at all, I just had major unexpected tip stalling to the left at any speed. I wrote the makers and they said, "It's suppose to do that." Well, I could see a little tip stalling but not unrecoverable tip stalls, like getting control back 5 feet off the ground? I've have other planes that may tip stall but they're nothing like this one was. The problem came as I was removing weight from the nose after the maiden. I originally had about 1/2 ounce lead in the nose and I removed it. It was a couple weeks before flying the plane again and I had not placed the correlation between the tip stalls and the removal of lead. Now it seems to fly well with almost no tendencies to tip stall. It's about 1/2 ounce nose heavy now by the makers specs.
Thanks All.
How did you attempt to recover from these tip stalls? It is very unusual for a simple tip stall to be so prolonged unless it develops into a spin. It is either an extremely poorly designed/setup airplane, or you you were not relaxing the elevator when the stall occurred. Not relaxing the elevator, or worse yet--increasing the elevator would prevent recovery by causing secondary, tertiary, quaternary, etc. stalls.
I always set up my airplanes so they tip stall easily since I really enjoy good snap roll characteristics. Of course setups like this demand respect and will punish me severely for mishandling the elevator and/or rudder.
If it always snaps to the left, regardless of power setting, then most likely your left wing has wash-in (warped), or your rudder is significantly out of trim to the left. If it only does this when substantial thrust is being produced, then it is likely caused by propeller-induced left yaw, and you are not correcting for it with rudder, or your rudder is again perhaps out of trim. The aft CG causes the airplane to be more sensitive to any imperfection in trim. Moving the CG forward may have masked this, which is fine if it flies the way you like. Anyhow it sounds like you are happy with it now, which is what's important. I hope this helps.