wrote:
On May 21, 7:44 am, Stealth Pilot
wrote:

btw I saw a really beautifully built RV6 landed a kiss on greaser on
its test flight then go plonk on to its nose as the nose leg broke
off. vans denied a problem. tisc tisc.


Yeah, and a buddy of mine saw an RV land on its nosewheel when the
pilot made a bad approach and forced it on. Porpoised down the runway
and broke the wheelpant. That sort of piloting is really common and
regularly breaks nosegears on Cessna 150s and 172s. That RV pilot flew
away again with the busted nosehweel in the baggage compartment, but
what damage has been done to the leg now, and when is it going to snap
off and cause a serious accident? And who will get the blame? Van's of
course, not the clumsy pilot who failed to get the thing NDI'd after
the incident. How often are RVs flipping over busted nosegears that
were abused by their owners? Can Van's be expected to produce idiot-
proof airplanes? Aren't we supposed to learn to fly so that fragile
structures like airplanes don''t get broken and don't need redesigning
to the point they're too heavy to fly?

My understanding of the nose-gear issue is that Van's fix was a slight
change to the angle to give a skoosh more clearance. Hardly a
"redesign," and certainly little or no weight penalty

The primary difference between the owner of a certified airplane and
that of an Experimental Amateur-Built is that the guy who owns a
certified airplane has a right to expect a certain level of quality,
both in design and construction. The Amateur-Built owner has no quality
assurance beyond his or her trust in the aircraft designer.

However, in my opinion, this does not give the aircraft designer a
"pass." If there are features of the design which tend to trip pilots
up, the designer should consider altering the design to make it safer.
Certainly, there has to be a balance between performance and safety, but
often the changes don't hurt that much.

Do I blame Vans' for the original nosegear design? No. It was adequate
to the mission. However, service in the field indicated that *typical*
RV-6A pilots were having trouble. They averaged over 1,500 hours total
time. One had over 500 hours in RV-6s. In no cases did the nosegear
"just break"; there were pilot factors, there were environmental factors
(a 15,000-hour ATP hitting a rabbit, for instance...).

Vans looked at the accidents, and decided to alter the nosegear design
to give a bit more clearance. Wouldn't (probably) have helped with the
rabbit, but there were several bounced landings or soft fields where it
might of helped.

*That's* the right response...not just blaming the pilots. The fact is,
pilots are going to have trouble. More and better training helps, but
all of us can probably relate events in the past where we screwed
up...but didn't suffer any consequences because the plane pulled us
through. I accidentally stalled/spun carrying my first passenger after
getting my license; I got too slow on an approach and dropped the plane
in with an impact greater than four Gs.

If I'd crashed in either case, there's no doubt the NTSB would have
ruled it "Pilot Error"...and rightly so. But the Citabria was tolerant
of a ham-fisted ex-student scared out of his wits; Pete Bowers put a lot
of beef into laminated spruce gear legs and the fuselage structure
supporting them.

Every accident is "pilot error," but sometimes the only error the pilot
made was getting out of bed that morning. Tom Wolfe wrote about pilots'
tendencies to automatically absolve the aircraft in most accidents; that
a "good enough pilot would never have let it happen/should have been
able to recover/should have be able to recognize the situation early
enough to bail out."

It's an attitude still rife. Sadly, it tends to blind pilots from the
potential for beneficial changes.

Ron Wanttaja