Liberty XL
 

Anybody have any recent experience how this aircraft has been holding up in the training environment?

Did they ever solve the problem with the stiction that affected the elevator forces? One large Florida operator grounded the fleet and they were sitting around the field with the wings off. I note their current ads do not show any Liberty XLs! And they are just down the road from where they are made.

I flew them at the large Florida based school who did have them for a short while. Great visibility but shocking initial climbout which wasn't the greatest when you were flying from an airport with large trees at the end of every runway and a 2000 ft density altitude. The C150 seemed to perform better on the initial climb out.

It was great for cross country flights due to the vis but I felt the FADEC took away a lot of the learning processes involved in getting to grips with carb heat and mixture.

The problems from what I've heard (purely anecdotal) are due to the landing gear strength. The stick control system is a lot more fiddlier than your traditional control column and it was sometimes difficult to get back to earth without a rather large bump.

If you check on NTSB.gov and look at the incidents at KOMN, three of the entries in the last 5 years involved said aircraft type, two of them list improper go around technique as a probable cause and one of them due to a hard landing. The aircraft was withdrawn soon after the third incident.

So in all, good as a tourer but personally it is my opinion that there are better training aircraft out there.

There was an issue with the elevator bearing which could require up to 2 pounds of stick force to move it. As the control forces continually varied, anyone trying to fly it by feel rather than attitude, came down with a bump! Plus the finger brakes and slender undercarriage. I test flew one with the Liberty rep and concluded it was not as forgiving as a 152.

Ah the finger brakes. Forgot about them. They were bloody awful. I remember hearing about plans to change this to a more conventional braking system so the newer models may have toe brakes installed. Not entirely sure though.