Robin DR400
The first thing is to understand how the wing works, once you have this in your mind the Robin is easy to master.
The outboard section of the wing is washed out in terms of Angle of Attack compared to the inboard section, this has the effect of putting the outboard section at zero A of A when in the cruise and so cuts done the indused drag, maximum advantage of this can be taken by cruising at 6-8000 ft.
When slowing down this can be a bit of a problem as it makes the aircraft quite slippery untill the aircraft slows to about 70 kt, this when the outer wing starts to produce lift and drag, as you approach 60 kt the drag increase is very pronounced and as you may have guessed by now the drag rise between 60 & 50 kts is very pronounced so this is a bit of a trap for young players.
My advice is to get the aircraft slowed to 1.3Vs quite early in the final approach untill you have a few hours on the aircraft.
The Robin can carry a lot more Payload than most light aircraft ( in terms of % Weight) so feels almost a different aircraft at MTOW compared with being flown with two people and 80 LTS of fuel. So when you load it up to MTOW don't be surprised at the apparent lack of performance...............it will still be better than a Piper with the same engine!
As backpacker says the nose leg can give troubles but tis is due to incorrect servicing of the landing gear shock struts and should not reflect on the aircraft design. Rather than using the bad practices mentioned above to unlock the nose leg if you have a problem I would take the aircraft back to maintenance and tell them to service the legs in accordance with the maintenance manual.
The 160 is the most economical of the DR400 series and can almost match the 180 for cruise speed but not in climb and take off performance.
I highly recomend the type as a touring aircraft and have taken my 180 as far as Crete, the Robin is best enjoyed on long trips so my advice would be to do the check out on the aircraft and then take it to the sunny end of Europe.
Last edited by A and C; 7th Sep 2012 at 15:01.