Originally Posted by
Herod
Hans: agree with the first staement, not the second. I never flew the '50, but have some 6,000 hours on the '27. An aeroplane that would never let you down.
Amazing that there were no serious injuries. Says a lot for that fuselage.
Guess I never really explained what I meant. I should have said: "Build like a brick. Flies like a garbage truck with a flat tire on one engine". V1-cut was full rudder and a close to 180deg turn input on the wheel to barely keep it straight. Most of the time I would tell my FO to give me full L/R rudder in the SIM after an engine failure, because of the effort it took. Also, AP OFF + GD on final would switch the yaw damper off, because you could not land with it on, and with the small rudder and humongous tail with dorsal fin, lots of swaying on final (we would always reconnect the YD again, and hopefully disconnect before touchdown). You would never forget to take your hand of the power levers at V1, because it was too heavy to rotate with one hand at Vr. Put in flaps 25 at 160, and forget to put in three hands of trim, and you would be pushing against the control with 2 hands fighting the balloon, asking the PM to trim AND (even on the AP I saw it balloon way over 1 dot fly down on the GS when selecting F25). Stopped flying the F50 in '05, and have absolutely fond memories.