Pierre wrote: >>... I was just wondering if anybody out there has ever done aileron rolls or inverted flight with his/her KR? I know it is not suppose to be done, and I will most certainly not push the issue, but I've chatted with a KR builder who sold his plane after just 10 hours. He stated that the KR will drop the opposite wing and flip inverted when entering a high speed turning stall. Now I want to know if the plane will brake-up if that happens and if you can pull the nose through the horison or do an aileron roll to recover. Pulling the nose through will load a few G's on the wings though.<<
Lots of folks have rolled KRs, me included. It's dirt simple and done correctly, should be a 1G maneuver anyway. You're not going to fly upside down for long unless you have an inverted oil and fuel system, and that's unlikely, and if you have it, you'll be paying the weight and complexity penalty for something that you'll almost never use. This plane is extremely strong, and I'm not sure you could even hurt the airframe with airloads alone. See the photos at http://www.krnet.org/mvn2008/ of the "stress test" an old KR boat was put through, and how far the spars bent before failing. We know of a guy who routinely put 6 g's on his essentially plans-built KR flying at probably 40% over gross. I'm not trying to say you should go out and tear the sky up doing aerobatics in a KR...if you want to do that you should probably build something intended for the purpose, but if you fly it in a spirited manner, you're not likely to break it. There has never been an in-flight structural failure in a KR that I know of. I've been trying hard to make my KR2 drop a wing in a stall, and I finally did it the other day by giving it full opposite rudder with the nose way up, losing lots of altitude in the stall, and was clearly begging for it. When it finally dropped the opposite wing, it immediately recovered before it even dropped 45 degrees. In N891JF, you've have to be asleep at the stick to not know you were about to induce something stupid at that attitude and configuration. It couldn't possible sneak up on you... Mark Langford, Harvest, AL ML at N56ML.com www.N56ML.com
