I had the KR set up in cruise and trimmed out - power back to idle. I assumed the glide speed would be maybe in the 120 mph range - held the nose up to bleed the speed off a bit - about 120 smph indicated I slowly released the stick and let it center to the air loads
The nose dropped to a rather steep angle and as the airspeed went through 145 indicated I took the stick and came out of the dive. .......................................... Thanks for the trouble Larry - it was interesting (for me). In the cruise she needs a little bit of up trim to hold the nose on the horizon and keep everything balanced. To me this suggests that the forces arrangement in the cruise has something tugging down on the nose (a nose-down moment). As you said - this is not a bad thing - better than having the tail wondering about in uncertainty. It does however interest me to know what was tugging the front down (in S&L flight) requiring that bit of "up" trim. I was convinced that it down-thrust on the engine - hence the test to see what happens when we remove that component - well now we know I was wrong - and that the motor is keeping the nose up (providing a nose-up moment), not pulling it down - when we remove the thrust, the nose falls away quite rapidly - we need to see if this happens before the speed decays. To my thinking, the next likely suspect tugging the snozzle down is a fwd CG. Unlike tail heavy, a fwd CG is healthy any day of the week, but if this is the case it may be useful to know. Is the elevator still effective right into the stall - a fwd CG could provoke elevator stall before the wing gets to its stalling angle. Difficult to tell the difference coz something lets go, the nose drops and we recover into S&L flight. Was it the wing that quit flying or is it the tail that stopped flying and let the wing go. I would be suspicious of birds that consistently stalled dead straight - no wing drop - maybe the wing never actually stalled. I have had my fair share of informstion so I will stop asking for tests. If you do however decide to try the power-off glide with some weight moved back - please let us know what you learn. Take care Steve
