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"TWIGGY"At one time our whole fleet consisted of Flexwing aircraft ..... the type that has a wing that looks like a Hang Glider. Popham has a lot of trees around it. There's a big forest just south and some smaller ones just north and this makes for a lot of extremely turbulent air on the airfield if the wind is blowing more than 10 knots or so over the trees ..... which it usually is.
Like most sports in the early days the equipment available is basic. It takes time to evolve. Time saw the Flexwing evolve from the two seater "Sprint" which started life around 1993 and has a 35/40 mph cruise to this "Quik" born in 2002 which has a 40 to 80mph cruise ..... (and capable of 100mph flat out in level flight ).
The trike part ..... that's the bit you sit in ..... was built from a kit of parts by one of our club members in 1984. The kit was supplied by the arch rival to Pegasus - Mainair Sports of Rochdale who are still going strong and manufacture a superb range of microlight aircraft. (January 2003. Mainair and Pegasus have recently joined forces and are now one and the same company but retaining their separate trading names) The wing was manufactured by a company called Southdown Sailwings of Brighton but like so many aviation manufacturers they went broke but their products live on and on and on ............ Twiggy is also enormous fun to fly because it's so slow and once you've got used to having virtually nothing underneath or around you, the the view is absolutely sensational to say the least. CONVERTING TO FLEXWINGS We can convert any fixed-wing pilot to Flexwing aircraft in about 6 hours even though he or she might have thousands of hours of fixed-wing flying. The main flight controls are the opposite way around so it would seem on the face of it that it would be a dangerous practise to try to fly both types. But the reality is that this ain't so because YOU USE ENTIRELY DIFFERENT MUSCLES to fly a Flexwing than you do a Fixed wing.
In the same way a fixed-wing pilot however experienced would get things seriously wrong were he or she to try to fly the different type without the safety of an instructor because the WRONG control inputs would be automatic conditioned reactions at first. However, building the new brain to different-muscle connections in the safety of a dual controlled
aircraft and then with exercises specially developed to 'condition' the CORRECT response automatically,
we build a powerful new set of conditioned reflexes that only operate in the Flexwing environment
and NEVER conflict in the Fixed-wing environment. |
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The Club :: The
Instructors :: The Fleet |
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Flexwing aircraft,
although fantastic machines and well capable of coping with turbulence have always suffered from
fairly heavy controls compared to fixed wing types so we always had to restrict most of our training
to the early morning and early evening and this inevitably made for bottlenecks and severely
restricted our throughput of students. This is one reason why we favour fixed wing flying at
Popham.
The ‘Quik’ has
a price tag to match of course. It's a beautiful piece of craftsmanship, sheer luxury and an
absolute delight to fly ......
So we thought
we'd like to go back to basics and reintroduce our Twiggy here!
All flying ..... driving a
car, motorbike, push-bike, whatever ..... is achieved by simply generating a set of conditioned
muscular reflexes for given situations. In other words you can't do it until you've forgotten
how! You can't do it until you do it automatically without having to consciously 'think' what
you're doing.