Hanger Flying/ I learned from this experience

On 4/9/2015 9:17 AM, Steve Leonard wrote:
On Thursday, April 9, 2015 at 9:46:26 AM UTC-5, Mike the Strike wrote:
I had a similar experience with a 20 year-old ASW-20. The previous owner
had installed lead weights in the tail and wings without any logbook
notation and the weight and balance was far off (aft of permitted). On
one of my first flights, I eased back into a thermal and suddenly found
myself looking upwards at blue sky!

I always do a weight and balance on new ships now!

Mike

And even if you don't have a scale capable of the weight on the main, at
least you can check the weight on the tail. If you look at W&B numbers,
you can see that the weight on the main has a relatively small impact on
the CG location. Being off on that weight by 20 or 30 lbs has a smaller
effect on the CG than being off by 2 or 3 lbs on the tail weight. If the
tail weight is close to what is recorded at the most recent W&B, odds are
you can get a good handle on where your flight CG will be with you on
board. If not, well, you better get a bigger scale to be able to check the
whole plane!

Steve Leonard


Heh! It took me - with George Applebay's help - 7 or 8 years to learn the 7
pounds of lead shown in my ship's build log/most-recent-W&B as being installed
in the aft fin was because the original owner weighed about 100 lb more than
my 140 pounds, and George wanted the CG "OK for the heavy guy." I'd never
bothered to do the arithmetic for me, being OK with "Kentucky windage" and
rationalization. Got away with it, too, though the embarrassment felt like it
might kill me.

I'd been flying "considerably aft" of George's defined limit for all that
time, and the fact that - once things were properly redone for my weight - I
could detect no change in flying qualities was scant comfort.

My rationale at the time was the recently-been-flown ship had only 30 hours on
it, so how far off could the CG be? (Ha ha ha! What an idiot I was. Pretty
damn far!)

Bob - Kids, it may be significant lotsa people have chimed in w. CG horror
stories - W.