T-3A Weight and Balance
An aircraft becomes less stable as the center of gravity shifts rearward. A more rearward CG can also make an aircraft more likely to stay in a stabilized spin and make recovery more difficult. Move the CG far enough aft and it may become impossible to get an aircraft out of a spin. A Few months after the first accident I began inquiring about weight and balance information on the T-3. Because the entire fleet was new, none of the T-3's had been measured (put on scales) since they left the factory. I asked our maintainers about the weight and balance measurement procedure but no one knew how to level the plane for the measurement. I knew the aircraft's measurement datum line and how to calculate the moments but I needed to know how to level the plane for an accurate measurement. Typically the procedure is to place a level on the cockpit or storage compartment floor. I contacted Hondo's maintenance chief and he said he didn't know how to do it since the procedure hadn't been needed yet. I even contacted Slingsby but could not get an answer. I got the feeling they didn't want us to look into the CG issue too carefully.
I decided to weigh the aircraft anyway. I put a T-3 on the scales with full wing tanks and oil plus me and a cadet with our parachutes on in the seats with the canopy closed--exactly the situation for a normal takeoff. The aircraft was scaled inside a hangar with a known level floor. The weights at all three wheels were taken and the numbers crunched. We were over two inches rear of the rear CG limit! I tried to push this info up the chain of command but because the aircraft wasn't leveled to Slingsby's specification (whatever that was) no one believed the numbers. I know that leveling the aircraft will move the CG but there's no way that was going to shift the CG two inches forward--you'd have to stand the aircraft on it's freakin' nose to do that. The bottom line is we were flying the aircraft with an extremely aft center of gravity and no one wanted to admit it.
One other note about T-3A spins, the aircraft would not recover from a spin if you released the controls, it would actually wrap up and spin faster with the nose lower.