On Feb 19, 5:14*pm, Walt Connelly Walt.Connelly.
wrote:
Yesterday I was making a stab at doing a 5 hour duration flight in a
1-34. *I was wearing a 303 back pack from Strong as the back cushion and
used the bottom seat cushion. *I had a lumbar pad in the chute and felt
comfy for about 45 minutes after take off. *At one hour I knew I was
gonna be hurting if I made 5 hours. I made 3.5 hours and could have
stayed up another 1.5 easily, the lift was awesome although the bottoms
kept getting in the way. *I was a hurting puppy most of last night and
fortunately have a number of physician friends who came thru for me on a
Saturday. *I will live.

The seat pan seems to be the problem to me. The three different segments
with the transition from one to the other do not seem to be compatible
with the human back. *I'm thinking I could put all the astronaut foam
and support in there but would still have a problem. *Any ideas? *Has
anyone found a truly comfy way to configure this type of seat:?

Walt

--
Walt Connelly

The problem I had in the 1-34 was that I couldn't raise the front of
the seat to distribute my weight around my bottom to the back of my
thighs evenly. So most of my weight was all right on my tail bone
(coccyx area). After a flight of an hour or two I was really
uncomfortable having to shift weight back and forth from "cheek" to
"cheek". Afterwards I would be sore for a few days. I found that a
dense wedge-shaped cushion for the seat pan helped tremendously. The
thin part towards the back and the thicker part towards the front.
That gave the seat pan a much more ergonomic shape following the curve
of my bottom. I believe I also used a thin cushion for my lower back,
but the wedge seat pan cushion was by far the most important. Once I
had that setup correctly, longer duration flights were really pretty
comfortable.

Being uncomfortable in the cockpit is a distraction you definitely
don't need. Schweizer obviously didn't put much emphasis on ergonomic
design when they built the 1-34. Just wait til you fly something with
pilot comfort as an integral part of the design. You'll love it! Even
something as old as my LS1f has an excellent seat design. The LS
cockpit might be small, but it's amazing how comfortable it is over
long flights.