Originally Posted by
magpienja
Genghis you have my attention now please tell more, I operate a F2a is there something I should know.
Nick.
The F2 and F2a wings both are of a 1980s generation of wings where there was a certain amount of mucking about by designers to work out what would work, or wouldn't. These two wings share two particular characteristics -firstly they don't have tipsticks (also called minimum washout rods) and secondly they have operator-adjustable lufflines.
These two characteristics made the wings particularly popular with a certain mindset of pilot in the 1980s and 1990s who liked the ability to tweak these wings - in particular they liked the ability to reduce the pitch forces to virtually nothing. This was perceived (with some theoretical justification, but almost certainly the real effects were tiny) to make the wing faster and more efficient; it also certainly made it possible to fly the aircraft with your fingertips.
Unfortunately, it also made the wing very susceptible to what in my line of work we'd call "departures from controlled flight"; in particular it had potential to either an aircraft which lost its horizon rolling inverted, or with sufficient mishandling to a pitching departure. Either can lead to a tumble - and certainly did with a number of F2 and F2a wings; I *think* that you're looking at 7 fatal accidents with the F2a wing which are attributable to a tumble departure, and a reasonable number of non-fatal departures in both types.
Around 2000 Mainair (who had stopped making the wings some time before in favour of the much more stable Blade) accepted a lot of the evidence in that direction and introduced some mandatory safety checks and a flight test, which were there to check that the wing had not been maladjusted in this way. Those checks still stand in Mandatory Permit Directive MPD 2000-03.
So, what you have is a wing which, with some combination of misrigging, mishandling and loss of visual horizon, is more likely to kill you than a different wing.
Is it actually unsafe? - properly adjusted and flown with due regard to the available guidance on tumble avoidance, no I don't think it is. On the other hand, there are other wings - such as the XL, Q or Raven from the same generation, which don't have any similar question mark over them and I'd rather own a Q or Raven winged aircraft than an F2/F2a winged aircraft personally which have similar performance and available product support (or a more modern wing such as the Blade or Q2/Quantum)
G