Indeed. However, teaching people to land better means
)and neither of the two is welcome by the industry.
I get the feeling that the real issue is for small schools which are not all that busy. Those which are busy can afford the maintenance. For example I hear constant stories about DA40s getting broken, but the FTOs that operate them happily pay. Their DA42s cost even more but they are great cash generators so it doesn’t matter. This leads me to think that the read advantage of a C150/152 is that you can run it so far into the ground that it is only just holding together, and you can still take students up in it. That description is certainly accurate for everything I ever rented.
Teaching people to land better means them having a passion for flying in and of itself, and practicing landing hundreds or thousands of times just for the joy of doing it well. The training industry is a completely unrelated thing: C172s are the most common basic trainer today in the US, they fly many hours a month with many different pilots and can be maintained easily despite abuse and with little thought. Mostly the students are Europeans and Asians who want only to get the check ride done at minimum cost and in minimum days, and then move on. Not a lot of art to it.
Private owners and real clubs (as in France etc, not a factor in the US) are different. With the right membership and instruction either can fly and maintain whatever they want, chosen on the basis of low fuel consumption and flying qualities if they want many hours of flying enjoyment and practice.
The fact of the matter is you can’t stop student pilots making mistakes and the ability of an aircraft to take some abuse is a requirement of a good trainer.
This will inevitably result in the aircraft being overbuilt and being heavier than would be the optimum.
While instructions will always aim to teach the student to land the aircraft well the student does not always have the experience to quickly judge when things are about to go wrong or the presents of mind to initiate a go-around, I would agree that in an ideal world better training would solve the problem but unfortunately training aircraft have to live and survive in the imperfect real world.
So when Cessna are planning their new trainer? (Piper had their remake already)
Lot of schools operate SR20/DA20/DA40, they are not impressive but just doing well (to my surprise one DA20 managed to fly), at least if someone flew it into the ground it has to be fixed for the next guy or at least he should notice it
I know this thread has started with a question about the Evektor, but since it has already drifted to the generally suitability of CS-VLA for training and the Aquila 210 has been mentionned, I’d like to add a data point.
My club has replaced it’s two C152 with first one, later two A210. They are certified as CS-VLA with a MTOM of 750kg, one of the two is good for VFR night.
The first one, built in 2006, has since accumulated ~3900 airframe hours and around 17.700 landings, most of that in primary training and on grass.
I have been maintaining them since 2016 and they don’t have any more downtime than the three C172s we still have. On the contrary, availability of the Aquilae is generally better, because their base interval for maintenace is 100h, so they have half the scheduled maintenance checks and the asssociated downtime.
The MLG on them is of the metal flat sping type, very similiar to that of early C172s and as sturdy as it can get. The large wheel fairings don’t like grass operations though, and we replaced them with smaller “mudflap” style ones.
The only weak(ish) spot is the NLG fork, the welded construction isn’t really forgiving. On the plus side, it gives ample warning of overstress and doesn’t silently develop cracks and then fail whenever it feels like, as a cast metal structure will do.
Their Rotax engines have another nice feature that’s often overlooked, but already saved us lots of Euros- the overload clutch!
If (when ;) ) someone hits the proverbial frozen mole hill during taxi, the clutch will disengange and the propeller will stop, usually without transmitting the shock to the engine. In most cases, you’ll only need a new prop blade and new linings for the clutch, which comes off with the gearbox. The engine can stay in the plane and doesn’t need a shockloading inspection unless they find damage in the gearbox. In the three prop strikes among the two planes I recall, none has been found.
This is of course a general Rotax feature (optional with a few UL versions of the engine), not Aquila-specific, but worth mentionning.
They have been very popular with sudents and licensed pilots alike since they were there. No one here wants the shagged C152s back, and only people who don’t fit into the A210s (one so far) train on the C172s- they are more expensive, slower and older.
This will inevitably result in the aircraft being overbuilt and being heavier than would be the optimum.
I’m not so sure. We use Atec Faeta/Zephyr for UL training. Carbon, empty weight of 270-280 kg. People learn to land in them without breaking them apart. They are much more difficult to land than s C-172 due to much less wing loading (wind and turbulence catch them easily) but this doesn’t seem to make any difference on how fast people learn to nail a landing, almost the opposite IME, maybe because they get the feel for it right away? I don’t know. None of them has broken, even though they are like paper compared with a C-172.
I think it’s more a matter that if you learn to fly in a C-172, you will fly like that further on. So, when all instructors fly like that, the result is given.
I also think Silvaire has a point.
