PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Thought you might like this Tiger Moth review...
Old 7th Feb 2015, 17:55
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Fantome
 
Join Date: Jun 2005
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You can pay for a ride in a Tigerschmitt at Tyagarah, near Byron bay NSW

If you go further and decide to be checked out, you would not then necessarily agree with the anonymous, sarcastic author of the following, for the DH82 does or did have great attributes as a trainer. The thousands upon thousands who did their basic training in Tigers in the Second World War are testimony to that. It does take some precision to fly a Tiger accurately.
Having got the hang of it, I swear there is nothing more exhilarating than to find a nice wide open paddock on a summer's day, then indulge in half an hour's circuits, judging it finer and finer with each successive circuit.

Here's that spoof -


I've plenty of soul, just no patience for that horrible abortion of an aeronautical design, the DH82. It's all well and good to BE FLOWN about Byron Bay in one, but to BE THE ONE FLYING is an experience I wouldn't wish on my mother-in-law or my worst enemy, which ever one happened to be standing closest.

I list only some of its foibles as a complete list would do your head in.

1. The engine's upside down, which is a bad place to begin the whole design process for a start. Open the tap and it makes more noise than horsepower.

2. The glass wasted on the joke of a windscreen would have been put to better wartime use making storm doors for submarines, where they would have been found infinitely more effective than they are as windscreens on Tiger Moths. A louder, draftier, more uncomfortable place cannot be found in all aeronautica.

3. The ailerons are misnamed. They should be called "Adverse Yaw Generators" because that's all the confounded use things are. Either that or the ones on the example I flew were reverse-rigged.

4. The designer of the trim system deserves a special place in purgatory for this nasty little device. The trim control is notched, not smoothly adjustable, which means you set the power setting you want, find the trim notch closest to that, then fiddle about with the throttle for the entire rest of the flight futilely fighting to find the exact point of trim - never have I been so utterly and needlessly distracted by so necessary yet so useless a contrivance as that rig!

5. To top it all off, the harness was invented by Harry Houdini in his early years as an INscapologist when he thought the crowds would pay to see him get INTO impossibly difficult and complex webbing and knots. I had an easier time learning to tie a bowline on Helsal in a Force 8 than I did trying to understand the Cat's Cradle that is the harness in a Tiger Moth.

Other than that, they're fine machines and every aviation museum and aeronautical university should have an example of one - so they can be studied in excrutiating detail as examples of every single thing NOT to do in designing a basic trainer.
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