Capt. Stan Pearce's Deke 2024-06-30

Notes from Capt. Stan Pearce "When I was working for the university, there was only two of us aerobatics instructors, so we pretty much had this baby to ourselves... I put in about 800 or so hours in her, wish I had the dough to buy one for myself... N5503Z was a 8KCAB Super Decathalon with a O-360 180 Lycomining, with the full Christen inverted oil system. The only limitation was 5 seconds right knife edge flight. The 1.5 gallon header tank gave you anywhere from 5-15 mins inverted flight, depending on the power settings... Fully symmetrical airfoil, and IIRC correctly rated for 6.5 positive and 4.4 negative G's (with the normal 150% safety factor on top of that) She did pretty much everything, with lomchevacks and tails slides being prohibited (falling sideways in a slide could blow out the side window panels) I thought the best maneuver in the Decathlon was the "avalanche", an outside snap roll at the top of a loop (great for ending lessons when you wanted to get off work early) She did outside loops nicely, but Bellanca had tiny nails in the wing ribs that took the place of some of the stitching, and they used to back out quite often from extended heavy negative G's, so we kept that maneuver only for days when you wanted to go home early...hard to make money if the student is a pile of puss wanting to go home after only 30 minutes (plus, who wants to spend all that ground time teaching evacuation and parachute use, racking your balls, strapping in, to go back and land after just a few minutes of fun) The newer Decathlons have metal ribs in the wings, ours had the original composite structure...wood!"

__________________________________________________ This repaint requires LilSki's LIC's Super Decathlon, available at AvSim. Read the Read Me. A folder is included with the photos of the actual plane. Caz Dalton

by Cazzie (2007-07-13 17:47:02)



Submitted by Cazzie