Have put off doing this forever… Mostly because I’ve had this cub a fair amount of time and it’s always worked just fine…. or at least that’s what we tell ourselves when we don’t have the time or energy to invest in trying something else… DOH
ignorance is bliss I guess…
Put off the pirep mostly because far more qualified people than I have already posted up.
Airplane background;
Run of the mill bushbeater. Been in the barn for 17-18 years, rebuilt in ’02ish. Still never was what you would call ‘one of the good ones’ on the slow end. Then had the opportunity to park under a hailstorm a year or two later and got to recover it again. With the help of some good ole boys from MT, I got it in a ‘known’ jig this time, and was pleasantly surprised with how much that improved the bottom end. Heavy cub with long wings, long prop, long legs, big wheels, metal interior, yada, yada, yada… Not a light weight!
I’m a mediocre cub guy at best, but fly big overweight tailwheel stuff daily, so current and proficient at least.
I didn’t do a whole lot of number measuring stuff, because I knew that either it would do as expected, (I have flown other examples with the TL) and I would be a happy camper, or it would surprise me (in a less than favorable way) in which case I’d know it was time to go back and brush up on my flying skills.
Soo… first impression? Power steering. Turns, climbs, moves around with way less effort. Which is huge if you’re in a long wing, overweight pig, and spend you’re day snatching it around to look at stuff.
My initial landings were what I would call longer, although they would measure shorter. I say that, because unlike many stol guys who typically measure touchdown to stop, I count my real world…. where I really needed to be, and where I actually made it stick. That may come across as condescending, but that’s not the intention, what I’m trying to say, is I have no need to stick it on 18’ in a controlled, paved environment. What I do need, is the knowledge of what I can stick it in to every single time in a constantly changing environment… and I was floating it.
And of course this was a simple case of proficiency in the new configuration. I had flown this airplane for almost two decades set up differently and was pretty intimate with where it paid off, and was now flying a little blind. A few laps at it and I was back to normal distances, and less than an hour later I had shaved more off my norm than I actually expected. I doubt I’ll go in to any tighter spaces than I normally would, I just appreciate the knowledge that I’ve now padded my safety margin. To try and quantify that for inquiring minds, we have several favorite cub haunts that are 250’ - 300’ long, but with good approaches. We have countless perching knobs that make fun stops when the wind is right, that’ll park two airplanes if the second guy in is handy, and of course clear approaches again. I’m almost always 2 up, sometimes with the dog, and always with enough goodies in the back to be self sufficient. Soo… not really what I would call pushing the extremes, but not letting a good cub go barn sour either. That’s fun enough for me.
Take offs? it’s a heavy pig, as cubs go, so not Valdez showstopper material, but if you yank it off early (and I did just to see if we helped there any) it will pull itself off and grunt away a fair amount sooner. I have a 300’ strip on one end of my property, and a 180’ strip on the other. There is NO over run as you will either be in a canal or running in to a levi if you screw the pooch. The levi is 20’ tall, so departing towards the levi means you need to be at 21’ agl by the end of the strip. They are generally crosswind strips, but they make good yardsticks for testing comfort levels. They’re very comfortable set up this way. In no wind it’ll land or take off either way just fine. This all seems very unscientific, but for me at least, it’s much more meaningful, than knowing what a particular airplane could do this in ‘X’ amount of feet, but not knowing, for sure at least, what I could make that airplane do.
Final thoughts? There are a ton of things we say are ‘must do’s’ on these things. But for me at least, a bone stock cub is pretty darned close to perfect, so my list is pretty small. This one definitely fits the ‘must do’ bill for me.
Take care, Rob