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Hi folks,

 

This is probably a thorny subject for a first post, but I've always been attracted to the Rutan designs, and now that I'm grown up and have a little time and money to spare, I'm considering building an aircraft. Safety is a major factor in determining what I choose.

 

http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Rutan_VariEze

 

suggests that about 1/16 of the aircraft that were built, have killed someone.

This I find frankly terrifying, but I understand (though I can't find the statistics again) that the Long-EZ is considerably safer.

 

On paper, the Long-Eze and Vari-Eze seem to have broadly similar performance figures, so I find myself wondering what accounts for the difference. Another aircraft I've looked at is the Junqua Ibis for which plans are still available. It cruises considerably slower than the Vari-Eze, but the stall speed isn't much lower, which is perhaps what counts in terms of safety?

 

I find myself wondering (heaven forbid!) whether despite the vaunted 'unstallability' of canards, they are actually more dangerous than standard designs? Or is it similar to Beechcraft syndrome - that they're essentially safe but flown by inexperienced pilots?

 

I should perhaps say a bit about my background. I have dabbled in gliding in the past, but never powered flight. I am considering this as a long-term project and I am serious about it.

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It seems to me that early-on there were quite a few pilots that flew low and showed off and hit power lines, etc. Today there are some second and third owners that do not have much of an idea as to what they have.....only that it flys and hope everything is okay under the cowl.

If you build your plane (and have quite a bit of time in even a Cessna 152) and follow the pilot manual in doing canard only runway flights and do not get anxious and rationalize that everything should be ok or ' I feel lucky'.......you have an exellent chance in becoming a long-time EZ flyer.

I would suggest that the cowl come off after each flight during the period of flying your hours off...and inspect closely for loose items, etc.

I found my Varieze to be very stable and docile in flight and much easier to control that the Cessna 150 that I flew to get my license.....especially handling summer updrafts in So.Calif.

Also, the canard will become your best 'flying instrument' on or in the plane for pitch and roll. My Varieze can on a calmer day be trimmed for hands-off flight for quite a period of time.

The turn from base to final can be made at a bank that a convertional plane would have a hard time doing safely.....just do not follow another plane too closely and get involved in their vortice, etc.

W.Johnson .........Varieze N725EZ

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This page is a mish-mash of partially correct information and partial nonsense.

 

suggests that about 1/16 of the aircraft that were built, have killed someone.

There are about 825 Vari-Eze's registered in the USA, give or take, as of today. There are 47 fatal accidents in the NTSB database, as of today, for a ratio of about 1/18. But that's meaningless - do you have any idea how many C-172's have had fatal accidents, as a percentage of the total ever built? I certainly don't, and it's a meaningless number.

 

What you care about is the accident rate (and fatal accident rate) per 100K hours of flying time. That's the standard by which all GA aircraft are measured. Having done a safety review of the COZY MKIV for last year's OSH presentation - see:

 

http://www.cozybuilders.org/Oshkosh_Presentations/

 

I compared the COZY to other 4-seat homebuilts. You can see the results on page 9 of 2008's COZY forum presentation. Those numbers are worldwide results for the COZY. The US ONLY results for the COZY MKIV are:

 

fatal rate = 4.5/100K hrs

overall rate = 14.6/100K hrs

 

I just ran the numbers, using the same methodology, for the Vari-Eze, pulling data from the NTSB accident and FAA registration sites.

 

For the VE:

 

fatal rate = 46.7/100K hrs

overall rate = 20.7/100K hrs

 

Higher than the COZY. However, note that for the Velocity 4-seater, the numbers are:

 

fatal rate = 5.9/100K hrs

overall rate = 25/100K hrs

 

and for the Lancair IVP:

 

fatal rate = 13.1/100K hrs

overall rate = 29.2/100K hrs

 

The rates for GA as a whole (which includes larger aircraft and twins) is about:

 

fatal rate = 1.26/100K hrs

overall rate = 6.32/100K hrs

 

Which is clearly a lot better than these homebuilts. On the other hand, as I said, the homebuilts include accidents occurring in the phase I test period, and the GA rate includes aircraft flown in much safer regimes than single pilot single engine. Not quite apples to apples.

 

This I find frankly terrifying, but I understand (though I can't find the statistics again) that the Long-EZ is considerably safer.

The VE is a "hotter" airplane than the LE (or COZY). I'd expect the LE to have a slightly lower rate than the VE - probably about the COZY's. The calcs for the LE are left as an exercise for the student.

 

On paper, the Long-Eze and Vari-Eze seem to have broadly similar performance figures, so I find myself wondering what accounts for the difference.

You're assuming that there is a difference, and you don't know that that's a fact.

 

Given the #'s I quoted above, the VE is not substantially different than the COZY and Velocity, and WAY better than a Lancair IVP (as well as the Lancair ES and the RV-10, which I didn't list).

 

__IF__ there is a difference between the LE and VE, it might have to do with the higher landing speeds of the VE and the ability of the early versions to depart controlled flight easier than LE's.

 

I find myself wondering (heaven forbid!) whether despite the vaunted 'unstallability' of canards, they are actually more dangerous than standard designs?

Without doing a full survey of other 2-seaters with approximately the same performance, we have no way of knowing whether or not the accident rate is substantially different. I would expect (but this is just a guess) that the rates are about the same, or slightly higher for the VE, but that the TYPE and cause of accidents would be somewhat different.

 

The survey and calcs for the 2-seater aircraft type is also left as an exercise for the student. If someone is interested in the methodology for calculating rates, contact me via email off-forum.

 

Or is it similar to Beechcraft syndrome - that they're essentially safe but flown by inexperienced pilots?

There's certainly some of this going on. They land differently that the C-172's that most folks train in, and the speed can lead folks to tempt fate with respect to weather that they might not otherwise do in a slower plane.

 

But by and large, no matter what the EAA may claim (with no data that I've ever seen to back them up), homebuilts are not as safe as the GA fleet as a whole, as shown above. That's just a fact, born out by any study of the databases listed above, with any reasonable estimate for hours flown/year.

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I think there's something to be said for sample size also. How many thousands of hours does the Cessna fleet fly in a week, vs. even the most popular home build. The Concorde had a phenomenal safety record ... until one day 5% of them were destroyed in fatal crashes. Would NASA have gotten funding for the shuttle if they knew there would on average be a fatality every 10 flights or so?

 

Marc's comment on speed rings true to me also. I seem to recall once seeing a chart of single engine GA aircraft types: accident rates vs. approach or touchdown speeds and there being a definite correlation. Don't recall the details (you can "prove" anything you want with the right chart), but it left an impression on me.

 

Consider also: brand new Cessna and LongEZ fly the same 400 mile trip and crash on landing. The Cessna's accident rate is 1 out of 4+ hours or so, the EZ's is 1 out of 3. Per flight hour, the Cessna is more safe, but the end result is the same.

 

And to be fair: Cessna / overall GA numbers also include flight instruction accident rates, while experimental home-builts do not.

I don't care, I'm still free.

You can't take the sky from me.

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Marc - I sure hope that's a mistake on the VE fatal rate.

I'm sorry - missed the typo. Obviously, the fatal rate can't be higher than the overall rate. The fatal rate for the VE is:

 

6.7/100K hrs.

 

Missed the extra "4" first time around.

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...The Concorde had a phenomenal safety record ... until one day 5% of them were destroyed in fatal crashes.

While I understand your concern about statistical significance, the estimate for VE flight hours is about 700K. For COZY's, about 90K, for Velocities, about 200K, and for Lancair IVP's about 130K. For RV-10's and Lancair ES's, only about 16K each, so I'd say that for the first 4 aircraft types, the answers are statistically significant, while for the last two, maybe not so much. Long-EZ's will clearly be in the same category as the VE - there will be many hundreds of thousands of flight hours, so one or two accidents one way or the other will not change the rates substantially. For the RV-10, one accident has a HUGE effect on the rate.

 

And to be fair: Cessna / overall GA numbers also include flight instruction accident rates, while experimental home-builts do not.

Not as much certainly, but there's nothing that prevents people from getting instruction in homebuilt aircraft. I did my instrument training in my plane.

 

Read the Nall report on GA accidents - it's enlightening.

 

The biggest single problem in estimating accident rates is estimating how many hours each airplane flies each year. All the numbers could easily be off by a factor of two in either direction. But that doesn't change the general conclusion about homebuilts vs GA as a whole - they're clearly more dangerous - it's just not clear by exactly how much or for what reason.

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First of all, I'd like to say thank-you for all the pointers.

 

You're assuming that there is a difference, and you don't know that that's a fact.

Well, the numbers I had were 46 and 17, and I understood that there are about the same number of long-EZs and vari-EZs flying. I hadn't done the maths, but it seemed fairly clear there was a case to answer... or at least to discuss. Because I'm not just asking about the Rutan designs. My question is more general... Are there some designs that are substantially safer than others, and how can I be guided in making a decision?

 

OK... The NTSB holds data on 14 fatalities in 11 accidents for the Long-EZ and 3 for the long-EZ between 1978 and 2009, and 21 fatalities for the Vari-EZ and 43 for the Varieze. In other words about 17 for the Long-EZ and 64 for the Vari-EZ. I haven't checked every record, but the databases don't seem to be duplicates (i.e. 2 entries for the same plane, under different names).

 

63/17 is 3.7.

 

There are 798 long-ez registrations in the US and 797 variezes (this database seems more tolerant to different naming conventions).

 

Let's assume for the sake of argument that VariEZs, being a slightly older design and cheaper to fly, average twice the flying hours of the LongEZs. When I put this into Fisher's exact test and gradually increase the number of hours, the p-value asymptotes to around 0.02. In other words... statistically significant. Even when I swing the odds substantially in favour of the Vari-EZ.

 

What I did was to use a matrix of

 

17 63

500 1000

 

and then try ever increasing numbers of hours - all the way up to 700000 and 1400000. After a certain number of flying hours the p-value settles down and only changing the ratio between the Long-EZ hours and the Vari-EZ hours seems to make a difference. Or of course changing the numbers of fatalities.

 

So you're right, I hadn't done my sums and I was operating on imperfect information (I didn't know to look in the NTSB databases). But I had looked for information, and not finding it I chose to ask here. Having done the sums... it still seems that we have something to discuss.

 

But that's meaningless - do you have any idea how many C-172's have had fatal accidents, as a percentage of the total ever built? I certainly don't, and it's a meaningless number.

My metric isn't a meaningless number. It's just a different metric from the usual one, which can just as validly be dismissed as meaningless. And more to the point, it was the only meaningful statistic I could calculate with the data I had available to me.

 

Some of the 'dangerous' planes - such as the Lancair - are very quick. So you might well argue that a Piper Cub is safer because there are fewer fatalities per hour. If you're flying for fun, you should get a Cub. But if you regard flying as a means of transport - perhaps you like to visit your parents 500 miles away on a regular basis - you might still be safer choosing the Lancair. Here I really haven't done any sums or looked to see whether the cub is a deathtrap and my contrived example is completely back to front. So don't shoot me down on these scores. I'm just trying to make a qualitative point that the relevant metric depends on what question you're asking.

 

Assuming I'm typical of the sort of person who might want to build and fly a plane (remember at this stage I have no real concept of how many hours I'm likely to fly between my first training flight and handing in my licence and how that compares to the 'average'...), it seems my chances of killing myself might be 1/20 or worse. That should be, and to me it is, quite chastening. And that's all I'm asking of this metric. Are my chances of killing myself substantial enough to worry about?

 

If only 1/1,000,000 people died, I would say 'so what'? 1/1,000,000 isn't much more than 1/3,000,000. But if you're talking odds of 1/20 v. 1/60 then this is very much within the range where it makes sense to discuss the relative risks of different designs. Which is where the accident incidence/100,000 hours starts to be useful.

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A risk assesment chart at

http://www.dancesafe.org/documents/druginfo/risk.php

gives death probabilities for various activities.

Bottom line, if you want to be completely safe stay at home and restrict yourself to the activities at the bottom of the chart, although you might run the risk of spontaneous combustion :D :D :D

"We choose to do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard."

JFK

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First of all, I'd like to say thank-you for all the pointers.

 

 

 

If only 1/1,000,000 people died, I would say 'so what'? 1/1,000,000 isn't much more than 1/3,000,000. But if you're talking odds of 1/20 v. 1/60 then this is very much within the range where it makes sense to discuss the relative risks of different designs. Which is where the accident incidence/100,000 hours starts to be useful.

thats a lot of stats. but not much about the real cause of the accidents. the pilot, not one of those accidents could happen without the pilot. My theory, it's not the type of plane but the type of pilot that owns and flies that type of plane. there are two types of owners that crash most of the homebuilts. there is the cheap guy, he will build and save a buck at all costs. he selects his aircraft because it will be cheap to build and fly. even his flight training is done on the cheap. and then there is the more money then brains type, he does not care what it costs to build but buys the most expensive equipment money can buy, because if it costs more it must perform better. he has it installed for him by the best mechanics but he has no idea how it was done or how it works. he has paid for the very best flight training and has done it all in the shortest time possible so he can fly his very expensive bird and show it off to as many people as possible.

Evolultion Eze RG -a two place side by side-200 Knots on 200 HP. A&P / pilot for over 30 years

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Well, the numbers I had were 46 and 17, and I understood that there are about the same number of long-EZs and vari-EZs flying.

Those numbers are incorrect, at least for the Long-EZ. As I said yesterday, there are 47 fatal Vari-EZ accidents (not fatalities-fatal accidents) in the NTSB records. A quick check shows 29 fatal accidents in the NTSB records for Long-EZ's - I don't know where you got your numbers, but searching these databases takes a little finessing - they're not the easiest to use.

 

Using the same assumptions for flight hours per year, and the fact that the Long has been around 4 fewer years than the Vari, and given the approximately equal number of aircraft currently registered, I get an accident rate for the Long-EZ of:

 

fatal rate = 4.8/100K hrs

overall rate = 16.7/100K hrs

 

Now, this is slightly better than the 6.7 and 20.7 numbers for the Vari-Eze as I surmised it might be in a previous post, but it's clearly not a huge difference - maybe 30% better on fatal accidents.

 

Are there some designs that are substantially safer than others, and how can I be guided in making a decision?

Let's assume for the sake of argument that VariEZs, being a slightly older design and cheaper to fly, average twice the flying hours of the LongEZs.

No way. I've assumed that the number of aircraft of each type has increased linearly over the years since they've been introduced (obviously wrong, but as close as I can get to an equal assumption for each aircraft type) and that an airplane that's flying flies 50 hrs/year. In this matter, VE's have about 700K hours, and LE's have about 600K hours.

 

Like I said, if I'm within a factor of 2 for any particular aircraft type, I think that's about as good as it's ever going to get.

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Bottom line, if you want to be completely safe stay at home and restrict yourself to the activities at the bottom of the chart, although you might run the risk of spontaneous combustion

I'm afraid I see red whenever anybody comes out with that one.

 

Personally I like to limit my exposure to somewhere between the third and fourth rows - 1/100 - 1/1000. Which is probably within the 5th percentile when it comes to sports. Probably higher. So don't call me a chicken for considering risk.

 

I've known a few people who've killed themselves through one sport or another. Some were competent enough to know they were pushing the limits. Some were incompetent enough to exceed them without realising. I also know a man who killed five other people through sheer arrogance.

 

I have some respect for the first group. Some sympathy for the second. But what really riles me is when people refuse to acknowledge the risks they are taking. In the gliding community many people put up all kind of mental barriers so that they don't have to deal with it... They all know cognitively that what they do is dangerous, but never truly stop to think about it. To me this is fundementally dishonest... but it's a form of dishonesty that is very easy to slip into, and of which I'm sure we are all guilty of, from time to time. 'Driving to the hill is the most dangerous part of the day' or 'you could get killed crossing the road'... These are nothing less than lies we tell ourselves.

 

My attitude is to do whatever seems fun - which normally implies an element of danger - as safely as possible. And to be honest with myself. I see nothing shameful about that.

 

I don't mean this in a personal attack. But it is something I feel strongly about.

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Those numbers are incorrect, at least for the Long-EZ. As I said yesterday, there are 47 fatal Vari-EZ accidents (not fatalities-fatal accidents) in the NTSB records. A quick check shows 29 fatal accidents in the NTSB records for Long-EZ's - I don't know where you got your numbers, but searching these databases takes a little finessing - they're not the easiest to use.

I was using the NTSB database. I've searched for 'long-ez', 'longez', 'longeze' but I still only got 13 accidents until I thought to search for 'long ez'. Now I get the same figures as you for the Long-EZ - thanks.

 

I get slightly higher figures (50) for the Vari-EZ.

 

... difference - maybe 30% better on fatal accidents.

If you put your figures of 29/47 + 600k/700k through the number crunchers, it isn't statistically significant - p=0.17. Although more likely than not the truth is still thereabouts.

 

No way. I've assumed that the number of aircraft of each type has increased linearly over the years since they've been introduced (obviously wrong, but as close as I can get to an equal assumption for each aircraft type) and that an airplane that's flying flies 50 hrs/year. In this matter, VE's have about 700K hours, and LE's have about 600K hours.

 

Like I said, if I'm within a factor of 2 for any particular aircraft type, I think that's about as good as it's ever going to get.

I think you misunderstood my intent. I didn't mean to argue that Vari-Ezes have twice the number of hours, but that the statement that Vari-EZs have a worse safety record than Long-EZs was robust to our assumptions being as wrong as they could feasibly be.

 

Obviously as my facts were wrong, the rest is moot.

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k1234 wrote

So don't call me a chicken for considering risk.

 

It is unfortunate that you misinterpreted my attempt at humor :sad:

 

Statistics don't lie, but they don't tell the whole story. The P.I.C. of an experimental aircraft has a lot of freedom and a lot of responsibility. He(she)is totally responsible for safe operations. I don't think that anyone will argue that there aren't those out there that abuse those freedoms. Look through some of the NTSB reports and you will see that pilot error and mechanical failures are responsible for a large percentage of the accidents. Ask yourself if these accidents could have been prevented with better maintenance/design and prudent flight operations. It might be that the only thing as bad as a loose nut on the stick is a loose nut on the wrench.

"We choose to do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard."

JFK

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Just as a general point, correlation does not *necessarily* mean causation. You can see trends in statistics, but rarely the whole story.

 

My favorite: a chart "proving" that a lack of pirates cause global warming. :D

 

http://www.venganza.org/about/open-letter/

I don't care, I'm still free.

You can't take the sky from me.

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Just as a general point, correlation does not *necessarily* mean causation. You can see trends in statistics, but rarely the whole story.

 

My favorite: a chart "proving" that a lack of pirates cause global warming. :D

 

http://www.venganza.org/about/open-letter/

That one doesn't work anymore. The number of pirates worldwide has increased greatly over the last 5 years or so, but the global temperatures have been cooling for the last 8 years.

 

Maybe we're on the backside of the curve.

Mike LaFLeur - Cozy MkIV #1155
N68ML
76225.gif

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I just had a good read through the NTSB database, including all the fatal/non-fatal long-ez crashes and all the fatal Kitfox crashes.

 

I realise that the Kitfox is - in many ways - a very silly aircraft to compare with the Long-EZ. The reason I chose it is that there are a lot of them around - 1500 in the FAA database - and because most versions have a stalling speed under 40mph compared to the Long-EZ's 65mph. What I was wondering was basically whether the slow stall speed would lead to better chances of surviving a forced landing (engine out, propellor out, fuel supply issues etc...).

 

Of 97 long-ez crashes, 41 were due to forced landings, and eight of these were fatal, from a total of 27 total accidents causing fatalities.

 

Of 154 Kitfox crashes, 47 were due to forced landings and two of these were fatal, from a total of 20 accidents causing fatalities.

 

I haven't been through the figures for the Vari-Eze properly, but losing your engine in this aircraft also often seems to precede tragedy.

 

Anyway, you do seem to have a better chance of surviving an engine-out scenario in a Kitfox than a Long-EZ. This is statistically significant, if you use a 1-tailed test (which seems reasonable to me). I'd also wager that the statistics are biased in the Long-EZ's favour because it seems feasible to have a forced landing in a Kitfox that you can fix then fly away from without notifying anybody, whereas I doubt this often happens in a Long-EZ.

 

In terms of Kitfox fatalities, there were a lot of CFITs - perhaps it's more likely to be flown in the mountains - and there were a lot of low-level stalls and spins. A general impression was that kitfox pilots were a lot more creative in terms of how they crashed. No Long-EZs ground looped, had problems with their floats or hit deer on the landing strip.

 

In terms of the Long-EZ crashes - a few were certainly due to low flying and similar stunts but my impression was that only a minority of people died through being clearly daft. One thing that surprised me was the large number of long-EZs either recorded as 'stalling' on final approach or 'being caught in downdrafts' and flung to the ground. I had to wonder whether some of the latter problems were actually unrecognised stalls. They were fairly frequently fatal, though I didn't keep a tally. I might go through the figures again.

 

I'm curious about exactly what 'stalling' an 'unstallable' aircraft means. I assume it just means 'going a bit nose-down' and hitting the ground with too high a rate of descent.

 

There were also an alarming number of unexplained accidents where the plane veered off to one side for no apparent reason, then crashed the ground whilst on its side or inverted.

 

I don't know all the caveats of searching these databases - so feel free to point out flaws in my reasoning or search technique. In some ways I'm not even that concerned about whether or not my quantitative findings are correct. It's fairly clear that many of these accidents are due to the same old issues over and over. I'm sure it's been a good exercise for me to look through them and like Mark I'd recommend it to anyone who hasn't.

 

I like the pirate graph, btw.

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That one doesn't work anymore. The number of pirates worldwide has increased greatly over the last 5 years or so, but the global temperatures have been cooling for the last 8 years.

 

Maybe we're on the backside of the curve.

I am responding to your comment because I have been trying to get rid of the bug on the screen for tooooooo long !

My suggestion for lowering the accident death rate for canard aircraft is to add all the slow-speed devices (including smaller engine and lighter aircraft ) you can, so that you can land slower and increase chance of living. If you want to race, be the first to get to the destination.......do not do this. If you want to increase your chance of getting there and walking away...... built it to land a few mph slower.

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My suggestion for lowering the accident death rate for canard aircraft is to add all the slow-speed devices (including smaller engine and lighter aircraft ) you can, so that you can land slower and increase chance of living.

 

The only thing that's going to save your bacon is that safety device housed by your headset.

I'd rather be sitting at 9500' in a slick aircraft with a good moving map than working with the tools available in a slow aircraft. Sure you can land a Cub at low speed ......... but my aircraft has a better shot at making the field.

 

I also use anywhere map which allows me to identify fields I can make at any point in time while I'm flying.

 

Training, preparedness an options.

T Mann - Loooong-EZ/20B Infinity R/G Chpts 18

Velocity/RG N951TM

Mann's Airplane Factory

We add rocket's to everything!

4, 5, 6, 7, 8. 9, 10, 14, 19, 20 Done

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The only thing that's going to save your bacon is that safety device housed by your headset.

I'd rather be sitting at 9500' in a slick aircraft with a good moving map than working with the tools available in a slow aircraft. Sure you can land a Cub at low speed ......... but my aircraft has a better shot at making the field.

 

I also use anywhere map which allows me to identify fields I can make at any point in time while I'm flying.

 

Training, preparedness an options.

Congratulations ...........and Good Luck !!
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Most likely there will be a strong correlation between landing speed and fatalities. It is the old kinetic energy equation KE=1/2mv^2 where in a controlled landing/crash, the v square term can kick your butt with faster landing speed aircraft. The ultralites that fly around with extremely low landing speeds suffer little consequences with an engine out landing.

 

Beyond the KE of landing, our EZ aircraft have a tendency to tip over offroad.

 

There are several (many?) instances of Ezs having a brake or tire problem that dragges them off to one side of the runway---usually either destroying the landing gear and/or tipping over.

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Congratulations ...........and Good Luck !!

Thanks.

 

I wonder which aircraft Steve Fossett had the best luck with?

If you truly believe this line of logic, why would you decide on a composite canard? ...... or this just some sort of debate exercise?

Just wondering.

T Mann - Loooong-EZ/20B Infinity R/G Chpts 18

Velocity/RG N951TM

Mann's Airplane Factory

We add rocket's to everything!

4, 5, 6, 7, 8. 9, 10, 14, 19, 20 Done

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Thanks.

 

I wonder which aircraft Steve Fossett had the best luck with?

If you truly believe this line of logic, why would you decide on a composite canard? ...... or this just some sort of debate exercise?

Just wondering.

Hi,

I am just trying to interpret the statistics and not one individual case eg. Fossett's.. I am sure that you understand this. I picked the composite canard aircraft back in 1976 (when I picked up my plans at Mojave) because it was a safer airplane per Burt was fairly fast and was on the cover of Popular Science Magazine in 1975. Also, it could be built without a bunch of tools.

Other considerations at the time were the BD-5 and KR-2 which I did buy plans for previously.

Why did you ?

WT Johnson

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Hi,

I am just trying to interpret the statistics and not one individual case eg. Fossett's.. I am sure that you understand this. I picked the composite canard aircraft back in 1976 (when I picked up my plans at Mojave) because it was a safer airplane per Burt was fairly fast and was on the cover of Popular Science Magazine in 1975. Also, it could be built without a bunch of tools.

Other considerations at the time were the BD-5 and KR-2 which I did buy plans for previously.

Why did you ?

WT Johnson

I picked up my plans in about '82. The things that sold me on the design was it's stall characteristics but mostly it low drag characteristics. When you can climb quickly to altitude, chances are you will. That makes it easier to cash in on the ablity to reach an airfield 20-25 miles away from an altitude of 10K. When I compare those characteristics to the Archer I typically fly (which doesn't have half the range from that altitude) it makes for a substantial option.

T Mann - Loooong-EZ/20B Infinity R/G Chpts 18

Velocity/RG N951TM

Mann's Airplane Factory

We add rocket's to everything!

4, 5, 6, 7, 8. 9, 10, 14, 19, 20 Done

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