In Delmar's words, how much fun does this sound...?:
http://www.avweb.com/news/osh2002/183335-1.html?type=pf "When I flew it, I had payments to make, so I had no choice but to start flying airshows right away. My first show, we started at Sun 'n Fun in the spring. My first flight in it was climbing in and going to Sun 'n Fun." Since then he has amassed 1138 hours in the R-2, more than Doolittle, more than Lee Gehlbach, more than anybody. And the plane he calls the "shortest, snakiest taildragger ever built" is still a handful. He knows overconfidence will kill him and the first thing he thinks when he gets in the plane is how he's going to land it.
"When you fire it up, you've got this huge engine on a little airframe and that feels very good, like a sportscar. It's rumbling away...it makes you happy just warming up and then when you taxi out to the runway you can't see anything, you've just got to get a little sideways and look down the runway. And then you go for a ways and wonder what's up there again and you look again. And, you can't really go back and forth because you have to go so far to see anything, it's not like a Stearman or something, you can't s-turn back and forth and see something, this one you have to get 90 degrees to see down the runway."
It's got aileron reversal
"First I bring the power up and I use all of it, it really goes nice and straight. You got the stick forward and you're waiting for the tail to come up, because you can't see anything until the tail comes up. And you get the tail up and then you can see down the runway, you need to hold it on until 120 (mph), because it's got aileron reversal. If you dial in an angle of attack around 100 it would fly off, but the ailerons would be reversed at that speed, so if you move the ailerons you would snap in. On my first flight, I got pilot induced oscillations—first in yaw, and then when I rotated, in pitch. I got through that and it hasn't happened since. I was sitting on a seatback parachute…I was moving back and forth and the airplane was out of sync with me. We got the seat fixed."
"You fly with kid gloves...it's a very light touch. It doesn't have any stick pressure and sometimes it uses negative pressure. But once I got accustomed to that, I liked the way it flies. The rudder is 13 inches deep and 6 feet tall, very large when you look at it…and it'll beat you to death. You hit the rudder and your head hits and canopy. See, the canopy's pretty scarred up there, I always seem to hit my headset on the left side for some reason."
"It's so pitch sensitive that you could put one finger on top of the stick and you could break the wings off the airplane, just by pulling the stick back with one finger. That's how sensitive it is. Like yesterday, I pulled for the barrel roll, and pulled about 10 g's just because that thing is so pitch sensitive."
"On landing, you need to keep speed up so you don't get into aileron reversal, and you need to see the runway, so usually when I'm downwind, when I cross the numbers I start a turn and come right down to the runway and level out and touch down and try to touch down easy because the shock absorbers on this thing don't work well, and it'll tear the gear off the airplane. Then your elevators quit working at about 80 mph, so the tail will come down on its own at about 80-100 mph and that is too fast to be going down the runway and you can't see anything in front of you. And there's so many curved surfaces you can't look out one side and tell if you're straight, so you try to put your head back against the headrest and you try to keep the same amount of runway on both sides—-you can only see a little pie shape of runway behind the wings and you try to keep the same amount."
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an Immelman from take off and under 500 ft.
