Terry Fagg
User
Junior Boarder
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Re:Bell crank failure - 2004/11/19 09:14
It was a wild ride. After a fairly normal climb in strong conditions to about 7000 ft i gradually ran out of elevator control and was flying around with the control columm full forward and maintaining about 50 knots. Moving the stick had virtually no effect.Flying in and out of thermals caused the nose to pitch up and down and was often on the verge of stalling. Airbrakes cause a nose up and lowering the wheel would knock off a few knots as well. It was a simple matter of floating around until i got near the ground. This took about 2 hours to come down. I did a very long low flat approach with the wheel down and just a fraction of airbrake . Got close to the ground , and flopped in with some airbrake and the stick hard back. This actually broke the bell crank right off which had been attached but bent and just about broken right through. I got back onto the home field , but the duty instructor gave me a real talking to about such a bad approach and landing until he realised what was happenning.
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