You know, I haven't assumed you're an idiot in any of this exchange. I would appreciate you not doing so as well. I'm perfectly well aware of the efforts of engineers to limit stall behavior on many different kinds of GA aircraft. I'm not at all familiar with such efforts on commercial aircraft. But I DO know the difference between the behavior of an aircraft with limited elevator effectiveness and the behavior of this simulated Waco in a stall. What SHOULD happen, is that an aircraft with limited elevator effectiveness should mush, hovering on the edge of a stall, coming in and out, losing altitude fairly rapidly at near minimum steady airspeed and maximum angle of attack (varying according to weight and cg, of course). And during that mushing, if one of the wings drops, then that wing should stall more and faster. It drops because it has lost lift from stalling before the other wing. I realize that the Waco is a biplane, of course, but I don't believe there is any dihedral in the upper wing. I'm not aware that biplanes have spin resistance because of the relation of different dihedral angles in the wings. Is that your argument? I've never flown any kind of Waco, much less stalled one. Have you?
The Alabeo Waco, on the other hand, does not mush. There is frequently a drop of one wing just before departure, which, apparently, according to what you've said, isn't realistic, and then it noses over sharply and starts flying again, recovering much too much airspeed too soon, and usually in odd attitudes, and has to be pulled back into too high an angle of attack again by keeping full back pressure on the stick. I've spent about an hour stalling it yesterday. None of them felt realistic.
Well said - so many bleeping armchair experts that you wont ever win - but thanks for always trying! :salute:
I am not an armchair expert. I'm a pilot, with many hours of actual stall experience in a number of GA aircraft. I'm not complaining about the Tomahawk before buying it. I was simply expressing my dissatisfaction with certain aspects of the flight behavior of other Alabeo models I have and wondering whether the Tomahawk was better in that regard. These forums have become funny places, where any expression of critique is taken as an attack. Maybe I'm a bit different, but I don't find every single one of the many, many addon aircraft I've bought and flown to be equally convincing as models of actual flight behavior. I'm not sure why a statement to that effect concerning a particular model or models is the cause for such angst. Again, I meant no disrespect to Bernt. But if his attitude is that his flight dynamics on all the aircraft he's worked on are perfectly realistic, then I don't think it's me that has wrong ideas about actual stall and spin behavior in real aircraft.
As for the Tomahawk not entering a spin by itself, I have a number of hours in a Tomahawk (far more in the C172), and have stalled them a number of times. As is simply good practice, I made it a point to learn about the stall and spin characteristics of the plane before flying it. This is the first I've heard that the Tomahawk is difficult to spin. You might find this interesting:
http://www.aopa.org/News-and-Video/All-News/1997/February/1/Tomahawk-Safety-Review
EDIT: Neil seems to have offered a similar observation while I was typing this.
