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Old 5th May 2003, 21:32
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Centaurus
 
Join Date: Jun 2000
Location: Australia
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The clean stall in the DC3 was pretty conventional for an aircraft of that era - lots of pre-stall buffet and some wallowing. But the full-flap, power-on stall was really something else.

My job as a QFI in the RAAF was to convert newly graduated pilots with a total of 210 hours (all on singles) on to the Dakota as their first multi-engine type. When stalling the Dakota in the dirty configuration, it shook up these new pilots (and myself) when the aircraft would try to roll inverted if you failed to take immediate action to prevent further wing drop. Inadvertent use of aileron to pick up a badly dropped wing would only upset the beast more. If I recall, you could lose around 1000 ft during the recovery process in a full-flap power-on (15 ins of manifold pressure) stall.

The Dakota was never a natural three-point landing aircraft. Not like the Lincoln which was a purist's aircraft for three pointers. The Dakota elevator would over-balance as you got near the three-point attitude and this could result in the tail-wheel touching down just before the main wheels. If that happened, the aircraft would quickly swing and one needed to be real nifty on the brakes and rudder to straighten up.

A tail-high wheel landing was relatively easy to perform and was a must in any cross-wind. It was fun to try for a three-point landing in calm winds, but not worth the trouble of keeping it straight after touch-down if you cocked it up. The wheel landing technique had nothing to do with a possible wing drop problem with three-pointer. It was more to do with a damned uncomfortable feeling on the elevators the longer you held off to get the three-pointer.

The most dicey event I had on a Dakota was when the rubber de-ice boot which went along the whole of the leading edge of the wing, suddenly split asunder just as the gear was selected up on take-off. We got around the circuit with almost full aileron and a fair bootful of rudder and did a flapless landing as we were concerned that lowering of flaps may have made the roll situation worse.

Fortunately we touched down just as we ran out of full aileron control. The de-icer boot had split horizontally along the wing from the landing light to the wing tip and the loss of lift felt just like an engine failure on that side. An interesting day.
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