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My Airplane Projects
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Date: 9-23-2009
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Number of Hours: 0.00
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Manual Reference:
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Brief Description: Visit to the factory.
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While on a two week west coast vacation we visited the Van's factory in Aurora, Oregon. Joe Blank gave us the royal treatment with a very thorough plant tour and demo flights in the "red one". The Trumatic was punching out parts, and it is a thing of beauty to watch. Now I know why all those holes line up.
Joe graciously took Carolyn on a demo flight. He gave her the stick for a while and as a non pilot she was really impressed with the ease of flying this machine, and the great visability. She also liked the comfortable seating and the roomy cockpit.
During my flight I was able to evaluate the flight control responsiveness, stability, visability, and engine operations. This is an airplane that is a lot of fun to fly! Roll response is amazingly smooth and quick. There is almost no perceptable friction in the control linkages. The design of the flaperon system has just about completely eliminated adverse yaw. It was hard for me to resist pushing too much rudder in the turns.
Speaking of flaperons, there is a pronounced pitch trim change when flaps are deployed. The nose wants to pitch down and has to be counteracted with the electric trim. A future mod that might be nice would be a stick mounted trim switch.
Power control was easy to master, once the eye gets trained to find the engine "gauges" quickly.
About the only knock on the airplane was the poor quality of intercom audio, and I think that was due to a bad headset on the right side.
Taxiing with the rudder and occasional differential braking was very easily mastered. Joe handled the takeoff and landing, but he made them look easy even in a variable crosswind.
Ordered the Finish Kit while we were there, now we have to pick out the interior color scheme, and get back to work on serial number 176.
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Carolyn flies the RV-12.
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No more "Experimental".
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This is where the precision goes into the kits.
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