Rick Durden wrote:


A Cardinal has fully effective controls down through the stall. That
means you can handle incredible crosswinds. It also means, that if
you move the controls, it will respond, so apply pressure to the,
rather than moving them.

I had a C177A for a while. Hated that damn stab. It doesn't handle
more crosswind than a 172 or 182 but still that is a lot.

The cabin is huge, the biggest of all four place except maybe the Aero
Commander 112/114. It is also extremely comfortable for long flights.
I've made flights of over 5 hour durations in them and was not nearly
as tired as I've been in other airplanes.

It was a big cabin in all respects expect the most important. It had no
headroom. I'm 6'1" and the top of my head hit the overhead. Not just
scraped it occasionally but so much that I had to conciously scooch down
to minimize it as best I could.



On landing the nose comes up to block your forward view. Learn the
pitch attitude or you will land on the nose wheel. You absolutely
must get the nose up prior to touchdown or you can get yourself in a
jam and start bouncing between the mains and nosewheel.

All Cessna singles are the same, but the cardinal is a little worse.
The FG nosewheels are a joke. The difference with the early Cardinals
is that their wing is such that it will not fly away from a bounced
landing. You will be stuck there in essentially a stall, wings level,
descending at about 4-500 fpm.



The RG went through three landing gear design iterations. The
original gear requires aggressive maintenance. Make sure you
understand how it works and how to pump it down and what the failure
modes are when you check out. It is a forerunner of the 172RG you are
used to, but by the time the 172RG came out they had the bugs worked
out.

One weak link to the gear is that stupid magnet setup on the nosegear.
A little 1/2" by 1" magnet sensor on one end and a magnet on the other.
The two parts are over $600 when a kitchen magnet would be a 1000%
better design.



Use the first "notch" of flaps for takeoff, trim it as indicated, and
it will reward you with some of the most lovely takeoffs imaginable,
it just flies off. In a crosswind, use the ailerons and it tracks
perfectly. On landing always use full flaps, especially in
crosswinds, get the nose up, use your croswind technique and you can
put it on one main gear and hold it there an amazingly long time
before the dowwind gear comes down and then the nose comes down.


In crosswinds I preferred no flaps or 10 degrees.


Make sure you get a good checkout because it does not fly like other
Cessna singles, it's more responsive and you may find yourself
thinking ill of the others when you find what the Cardinal can do.

Yes, even though the performance is the same as a 172 it is different.



It is one of the finest single engine airplanes ever built. It got a
bad rep from pilots making excuses for their own ineptitude. It will
cruise about 140 knots all day long, with delightful handling,
excellent visibility and passenger comfort.

I did love the ailerons, very fast. But it will be a hell of a lot
cheaper to own a 182 than a 177RG and the speeds are the same.