Apparent LSS in day VMC aircraft
Reading Tim Cripps' write up on the Savannah in the current Pilot, combined with some in-depth discussions on another aeroplane with another TP recently, has caused me to think deeply on this.
I spend most of my time certifying aeroplanes for day-VMC ops, usually by PPLs. Here in the UK it's always taken as sacrosant that apparent LSS must have a clearly positive gradient, and we routinely (as was certainly the case with the Savannah, as anybody with access to the September Pilot will see) end up modifying aircraft in the UK certification process to improve the low, neutral or occasionally even divergent (CH601 for example) LSS seen on a lot of foreign aeroplanes.
Allied to this, the UK is unusual in requiring a minimum value of manoeuvre stability (15 lbf / 7daN to reach N1) in most cases. Admittedly most foreign types I've flown don't have a problem meeting this, but one or two have.
Now pretty much all of us in the UK agree that our position is a good and reasonable one - whether you're talking to associations like BMAA/PFA, CAA, or manufacturers like Pegasus who recently put the German FlightDesign CT through UK certification and ended up redesigning large chunks of it. So within this sceptred isle, we have a consensus - and all for good reasons, controllability by low hours pilots, accurate height and speed control, reduced risk of Nz overstress, etc. Yet, nationally, we seem to feel that we're the only people in step, and the rest of the world is wrong.
So what's going on here? Are we being OTT, and the rest of the world has the better idea? Is it simply that we look at aircraft in more depth here, and pick up things that tend to get missed elsewhere?
I'm not trying to make any kind of point here, I'd really just like to try and understand why here in the UK we seem to be at odds with much of the rest of the world?
G