Ask a Falco pilot about the plane and chances are most of what you'll
hear is about the handling. It's inevitably what people talk about -- read
any flight report on the Falco -- and it is the thing that is most special
about the Falco.
This is no happy accident of fate. When Stelio Frati designed the Falco
over 30 years ago, his primary design goal was to create an aerobatic aircraft
with light, precise, harmonious controls. To the joy of pilots ever since,
he succeeded.
Slide into the seats of a Falco, grasp the control sticks lightly in
your fingers and move the stick about. There's almost no friction. No play
at all. You can tell, even before the plane starts to roll, that the controls
are light.
Start the engine, and you are in for an assault on all pre-conceived
notions of what aircraft handling is about. Even the engine controls are
smooth, operating Teflon-lined control cables. Taxi out and discover the
precise ground handling. The aircraft turns exactly when you push on the
rudder, yet it's not too sensitive.
Charge down the runway, lift into the air, and you're into another world.
It's a whole new sky in a Frati airplane. The handling is so sensuous and
the controls are so light that you twist and roll and frolic in the sky
like a baby lamb in a spring meadow. You'll find out right then and there
why Stelio Frati airplanes are so special and why the designer is so revered.
Nothing flies like a Frati airplane, and the Falco is the most sensuous
of them all.
"All of Frati's designs are variations on a single theme;
they all resemble each other, and each is instantly recognizable as 'a Frati.'
They are finished as smoothly as mirrors, as though needless drag were more
evil than the devil. They have the feel of tiny fighters, for you sit under
a fighter pilot's sliding teardrop canopy, gripping a fighter pilot's stick,
and the thing will be halfway round an aileron roll even before you've entirely
made up your mind to do one. There is no superabundance of room in a Frati
airplane, and they are all extremely noisy, but you will come down from
your first flight in one with an unbelieving stare. It is much like the
first time you ever drove a Ferrari; a damnation of all lesser vehicles
for eternity. For the controls are so light, so delicate, the visibility
so like falling free through space, and the airplane's stability even in
turbulence so arrow-straight and intransmutable that you feel a fool for
not knowing that light airplanes could be like this."
James Gilbert
The Great Planes |
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