PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Affordable and rugged aerobatic airplanes: just Decathlon (and Citabria)?
Old 17th Sep 2014, 21:41
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Camargue
 
Join Date: Apr 2014
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I flew a privately owned Zlin 326 for about 10 years from the early 90's. The 526 has 180 hp (some were 160) and constant speed prop, think single leaver compared with 160 hp and fp prop on the 326.
Nice planes, fun to fly BUT extremely complex engine, inverted fuel/oil but carbs not injection. I think it was sent to Czechoslovakia twice for repairs and was away for over 6 months at a time and even basic parts took ages as they had to be shipped in each time. I reckon you could run an aeio540 for less


Retractable main gear as well, adds to running cost.
Narrow gear track, long fuselage, big rudder, big floaty wing - poor cross wind capability - even after a lots of hours flying 10kts could be a handful

Rate of roll ok, quite heavy for the power, it's a big plane, can do basic aeros and in theory a few inverted ones as well though according to the translated poh on ours very unpleasant inverted spin characteristics. Never tried so don't know if that was scare mongering or not.

Neil's Williams flew a 326 so enough said, it would be a fantastic learning experience as more difficult to fly well than a lot of other aerobatic planes I've flown since BUT as a club trainer it will be far far too expensive to run, too limited in cross winds.

Of course the one I flew could have been a particularly knackered one but these should be owned by pilots who like old idiosyncratic planes and have very deep pockets.
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