On Wednesday, January 18, 2017 at 12:38:37 PM UTC-8, SoaringXCellence wrote:
...It seems the -14 had a properly sized tail surface. So no "waddle" that came with some earlier v-tail designs.

Well, it depends. The standard HP-14 plans set shows the HP-14 as having the same size tail as most of the Schreder birds from the HP-11 through the HP-18. Steve Smith once did a stability analysis of the HP-14 that shows it to have a relatively narrow margin of static stability. That's not necessarily bad, but it does mean greater pilot workload than were there a greater margin.

Several HP-14 builders made larger tails for their ships; some by using longer skins and spars, some by adding extended tips to the ruddervators.

I've flown HP-11 and HP-18, but never HP-14. But anyhow, my impression is that they're not all that hard to come to terms with. The hard part is learning to deal with the 90-degree landing flaps. They offer about the best glidepath control there ever was, but the dearth of similarly-equipped two-seaters means that you pretty much have to learn to use them on your own.

BTW, don't believe the haters who say that once you crank on the flaps you can't back off. That's just bull****. I've gone from full positive to get down onto the deck, full negative to float all the way to the turnoff (halfway down a 9000-foot runway), and then back to full positive to get down and stopped, all during the same approach. It's once you figure out the feed-forward trick.

--Bob K.