On Mon, 31 Jan 2011 20:16:26 +0000, Jonathon May wrote:

You don't say how much experience you have, but both the ASW 20 and LS6
are flapped, and not suitable for low hours pilots.I have flown
neither,but I think if you spin either your first action is to select
negative flap.Otherwise your risk exceeding max flap speed,and if you
don't rip them off,as soon as you land you are in for an expensive trip
to the repair man.

Agreed. The 20s POH says that the first recovery action is to push the
flap fully negative and that the glider will often auto-recover with no
further action by the pilot. Height loss and speed gain are impressive: I
entered an incipient spin at 45 kts, stopped rotation in a 1/4 turn and
then pulled out, returning to level flight 300 ft lower and with 80 kts
on the clock.

You're quite busy on take-off too: the POH says to start the run with one
notch of negative flap for better aileron control. The ailerons start to
bite about 30 kts and you need to move to neutral flap at that point
because it won't lift off in negative flap, but you NEED to be in neutral
before you hit 40 or it will pop up when you move the flap lever. If you
miss neutral and hit thermal the first few launches, leave it there or
you'll likely to find yourself way below the tow plane.

The other thing that nobody has mentioned yet applies to both gliders.
Learning to fly a flapped glider is similar to learning to drive in an
automatic car and then transitioning to a manual shift. By that I mean
that operating the flaps is easy, but being in the right flap setting at
all times and getting it engrained that the flap lever is your primary
speed control takes time: it took me 30-35 hours to get to the point
where flap use became something I didn't need to think about before doing
it. I had nearly 300 hours by the time I flew a '20, with at least half
of than on the club's Pegase and Discus.


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martin@ | Martin Gregorie
gregorie. | Essex, UK
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