Note from Mike Burns:

> Matt,
>
> Along with many others I have followed your saga of building and flying the
> Windrose. With that of course comes all of the comments and opinions from
> others. The one thing humans are good at is airing opinions !!
>
> There is one item of information which Ii have not seen in any of your
> publications, but perhaps I have missed it. In terms of the Mean
> Aerodynamic Chord, where was the in flight (with you and chute) Centre of
> Gravity at the time of the incident. ???

The center of gravity was watched very carefully throughout the building process. I had a slightly nose heavy attitude when I started the testing. Dave Wells a professional test pilot also flew it on the first flights and felt the CG was correct.

Once I started flying the windrose and became more familiar with the flying characteristics I started to bring back the CG with good results.

I work as a test pilot myself and am very familiar with flying the ranges of CG and can certainly feel it in the flying.

The real culprit I feel with the windrose may be in the airfoils coupled with the all flying tail..... and the flaperons. There needs to be a study of these. The stall is benign if you ease into it. And in calm weather everything seems fine... but there is a hidden problem lurking for the unsuspecting. If you fly in strong thermals it is quite easy to get into a spin... and if you just happen to have flaps on in the down position which one would have in a thermal, ( also makes the ailerons easier to use) your pitching moment is then negative relying on the elevator to give more pitch up. Once in a spin and the resultant recovery the high speed attained somehow blankets the elevator. The first time this happened I slowly pushed the elevator forward and brought it back slowly and it caught at which point I made a very high G pullout. In my last instance there was no recovery since I was also in flutter. The all flying elevator can stall easily as I discovered a number of times.

-mat