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Old 11th October 2004 | 19:36
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BEagle
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Joined: May 1999
: ATP+Mil
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From: Quite near 'An aerodrome somewhere in England'
I had one trip in a Q-200.

In addition to the single central joystick which commanded pitch and roll from the forward and rear wing surfaces, it also had a small tail surface. Using this, it was possible to have a variety of pitch attitudes for the same straight and level IAS; I guessed that the trick was to have as much 'up' as 'down' available from the trimmed neutral point. As the control column moves with pitch trim, that wasn't as easy as it sounds! Rather like flying the Gnat in manual, aim to keep the control column 'load free central' at all times!

It had wonderful roll response and attempting to provoke it to stall it in the turn felt like going over cat's eyes on a fast road - a slight jolt but that was all.

Once you get it set up for the cruise, it belts along at a splendid rate of knots and is very comfortable....

But do NOT get it going downhill quickly or you can run out of back stick to recover. Then you'll need to faff about with the tail setting lever and the pitch trim to sort things out.

I didn't know that aeros were prohibited, so did a very comfy barrel roll which felt perfect. Then another!

Back in the circuit you have to set the tail angle so that there's enough back stick available to flare the thing once you slow down on the approach. I was in the RHS, so it was time to balance tail angle and trim to set it up for the approach - which required a fair bit of juggling. Visibility forwards over the nose is poor, rearwards is utterly atrocious. If I had one I'd fit mirrors on the undercarriage spats and a forward looking CCTV. There's no throttle available to the RHS pilot, so I had to call fro RPM values to be set by the other pilot. Landing was straightforward (well, I found it easy, unlike the other guy) and keeping straight with rudder was very easy. But you do need a reasonably long runway.

Overall it was a nice fast aeroplane. But you shouldn't expect to fly it from short runways or do anything more than fast VFR cruising. At which it excels!

PS - It was only after landing it that I discovered that I was technically the commander; the other chap (with zillions of RAF hours) hadn't actually got his PPL at the time!
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