Buy new aircraft for Flying Club

Hi All,
Together with a bunch of guys we are getting our bearings on buying a new (or used) aircraft for our flightclub. We have the following candidates:
- Dynamics WT9
- PS-28
- Aquila 210 (of 211)
- Soneca-200

What are the experiences on:
Performance
Speed
Space (tall people)
robustness

If you have any do’s of don’ts on these aircraft, please let me know.

Kind regards,
Joep

Black Hole illusion / Black Hole effect – why is it a problem for pilots?

Admittedly here we are close enough to see the approach lights

but if one watches the runway aspect ratio and keeps that constant, why should there be a problem?

I see lots of pilots fly really low approaches in broad daylight, dragging the plane in at high power, and with the plane’s shadow showing right underneath it so obviously they are very low. That’s not going to work well at night, but that’s a different issue.

A pilot's Xmas wish list?

I am sure some of our spouses are reading this, so it’s time to give them some ideas

Century IIB autopilot fixed

Just a small write up about how I fixed my Century IIB AP.

For a while, I had no hopes of getting my 50 year old Century IIB Autopilot to work again. The AP was installed in my 1969 Piper Arrow 200 original from factory. It would hold the wings level or keep a heading for about 10 seconds before it started a sharp bank to the left and initiate a spiral dive. Scary stuff. So I marked it inop and burried my dreams of having a working AP. That was until I got in touch with a company called SIBA Avionique in France.

They are a certified avionics repair shop and century AP are in their capability list. I pulled the AP controller and sent it to them. They tested, replaced the failed power transistors, re-certified it with Form 1 and sent it back. Total bill was 600 euros including shipping. I highly recommend the guys at SIBA Avionique. Had I sent the controller for testing/fixing to Straubing in Germany, it’d have easily costed a 4 digit figure plus a few weeks of lead time. SIBA returned the controller within the same week.

2 weeks ago I did the calibration flight according to Century manual. There are 4 adjustment screws behind the front cover on the controller. The first one from the left adjusts roll threshold (fixed the wingrock/oscillation issue), the 2nd is for left bank angle (should be 20deg for turns greater than 90 degrees), 3rd one is for heading centering adjustment and the last one is for right bank angle. The entire calibration procedure is very well detailed out in the Century AP manual. It was a bit of back and forth playing with these screws as somehow they seem to be effect each other. It seems to work better when you adjust left bank first, then center, then right bank.

Anyway, now the AP on my old bird is able to keep a heading within +/-1 deg, with zero wing rock and is even able to track localizer or vor signals. It is amazing how much you can do to get the old avonics back in shape if you do some proper research and know what your are doing. If anyone needs more details including the century AP calibration manual, just drop me a message.