On Mar 23, 5:07 pm, Jay Maynard
wrote:
On 2008-03-23, Andrew Sarangan wrote:



It is a very light construction, and easy to damage the skin or
external parts. When climbing into the cockpit, you must step on the
approx 6" wide strip at the wing root. If you step outside that strip,
you will definitely put a hole through the skin.

This is true of a lot of other aircraft as well, but I see your point.

I think this one requires extra care compared to many other light
airplanes I have flown where I had to step on the wing to get in. We
have been careful about not stepping outboard the black stripe, but
contrary what one might expect, you cannot step inboard of the black
stripe either. As a result, we have a permanently deformed area where
the wing meets the fuselage.




It's a great little airplane if you understand these limitations.

Again, true of any aircraft, but well worth remembering.

Even though it is IFR equipped, it should be flown in IFR with extreme
caution.

I would expect an autopilot would help a lot here to manage the workload,
although the factory test pilot and sales manager tells me he's got about
500 hours actual in Zodiacs - he lives an hour's flight away from the
factory, and commutes in whatever they have handy - and he hand-flies it.

We have the Trutrak autopilot. Despite lots of tweaking we can't get
it to work except in very smooth air. It has a tendency to overcorrect
with each oscillation progressively larger. I hand fly it in rough
air. I have flown in IMC too. The heading indicator and compass are
both useless. The compass is permanently off my something like 30
degrees, and there was no calibration card.

One night I had a scary incident with the autopilot. I was sitting in
the left seat this time, and since I most fly right seat, I got the
trim and PTT keys mixed up. I pressed the trim key to talk to ATC, and
the next second we were in free fall. Our heads hit the canopy, and we
lost a thousand feet in a couple of seconds. I was certain we had had
a major structural loss.Turns out the autopilot was fighting the trim
until the trim overpowered it and disengaged the autopilot. The result
was a massive dive that scared the bejeezus out of us.