I recently got signed off and have done a few hours in the Z-242L and love it!
It's been great fun to fly. After spending most of my time in Cessnas the visibility of the Zlin was awesome.
I found that for some reason it was a real 'draggy' aircraft which resulted in some pretty average gliding distances - if you ever had the engine quit on you at a semi-low level there's no time to stuff around - coarse pitch and clean it up asap. On the plus side if you find yourself fast on final dump the flaps (yank the handbrake!), prop fine and you'll slow down in a hurry
The wheel brakes aren't the best - i spoke to the LAMEs about this one and they'd actually looked into it in the past but couldn't determine why. The actual setup looked better than most of the other aircraft in the fleet but just didn't perform for some reason.
It's got some interesting design features: frise ailerons, aerodynamic balance tabs, mass balance tabs, that offset nosewheel, all those separate switches for master, battery, generator, engine instruments, flight instruments....
And the flight qualities were very responsive - a joy to fly. I thoroughly reccommend it - you'll enjoy it.
Rob.
And a question for anyone out there - where/how does the stall warning function on the Z-242L?? It's not a typical leading edge stall warning and apparently it's tied to the air/ground logic. Anyone know?