Skywagon, interesting reading your post, what particularly stuck out was the mention of "light/moderate rudder" as that's one of the biggest complaints I have about the two that we have - they have bucketloads of adverse yaw, which is not inherently a bad thing in terms of teaching students to use their feet, but the pedal pressures required seem dramatically out of proportion to anything else I've flown - significantly more force required than even a 182 for example, and coupled with the extremely light pitch and roll control it makes for a pretty un-natural feeling which I'm finding even I'm struggling with a bit, let alone the students! I've found you almost need to lead the turn with rudder slightly as if you're flying an old biplane!
Would be interesting to know whether ours have abnormally stiff pedals, or perhaps I've just grown soft from flying the other aircraft in our fleet!
I haven't had any problems with the electric trim so far, although it does seem to take slightly longer for students to get used to than conventional manual trim.
I've found the flap lever is rather difficult to operate from (particularly) the right seat compared to the lever in a typical Piper (haven't flown a 180 or 185 yet) as it requires twisting your arm through an awkward angle, and then gets in the way of the throttle a bit. It also doesn't have clearly defined detents like in the Pipers so you sort of have to pull the lever to what feels about right and then let it go and hope you haven't released it before the detent! I've also had the flaps partially retract on me during an approach once which I think may have been due to inadvertently placing my elbow on the release button of the flap lever while holding the throttle - pilot error but an easy mistake to make, especially for a student! I've been teaching my guys to lower the flaps when they're taxiing with a tailwind of more than about 15 knots to stop them blowing down.
We make sure all our students have done a circuit or two with the flight display turned off before we send them out solo as we only have one display in ours!
On the plus side, the stalling characteristics are about as good as you could hope for in a trainer, the take off and landing performance rivals some dedicated STOL aircraft and the fuel consumption (or lack of it) is quite remarkable.
55kt or a bit below does seem to work well for short final, from memory the POH does recommend 60 or something like that, but as VH-XXX said they float forever at that speed, the ASI usually seems to be indicating about 40 when the wheels are touching the ground.
Last edited by NZFlyingKiwi; 18th Jun 2012 at 10:00.