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The Polish Mucha Standard was specially
designed for the 1958 World Championships held in Leszno and was flown
into first place by Adam Witek from Poland. I’ve always admired the
Polish pilots and am reminded of their achievements in the war. We had
a very active Polish group at Lasham when I first went there, many of
whom were Battle of Britain pilots with the RAF.
Some time after this, a demonstrator arrived in England but was sent back
as the stalling characteristics were not entirely satisfactory in terms
of BCAR section E and the BGA requirements. At this time the BGA were
not accepting gliders if they had a sharp wing drop at the stall. It was
returned to England some months later and it was at this point that I
became involved.
I was asked to do the stalling and spinning tests with the C of G in the
extended aft position. This is the C of G 1% of the mean chord aft of
the normal aft limit and is for test purposes a small margin to allow
for minor errors in loading when the glider is flown at the minimum placard
cockpit load. As the minimum load for this particular aircraft was well
under 100lbs, this meant an alarming weight of ballast strapped on to
the top of the fuselage just ahead of the tailplane to reach this C of
G position with my weight, 155lbs, plus a parachute.
As all this testing had been done before on the first Mucha, I was happy
to go straight ahead to the extended aft position after only one or two
familiarisation flights to check for any adverse effects of using the
ailerons in various positions during the spin and with the airbrakes open
and closed.
I loved the crisp handling
It was a very good soaring day with a high cloudbase and easy to use,
strong thermals. I loved the crisp handling of the Mucha, better I think
than any other glider being produced at this time. The low circling speed
made it a superb climber so I was able to re-climb quickly for further
spins after the first few. It still dropped a wing at the stall but otherwise
behaved impeccably. Even after the mandatory left and right five turn
spins it always stopped within about half a turn.
After several more spins, as it always seemed to want to drop one wing,
I decided to try a straight stall with the rudder held central and just
keeping the stick hard back with no aileron deflection. When this is done
on some types of glider, including the Schweitzer 2-32, Slingsby Eagle,
Bocian and Puchacz, they will usually start to autorotate and spin and
then unstall themselves and spiral out after two or three turns.
(Did you know you can spin without misusing the rudder?)
This time the spin was much steeper and the rotation faster than before.
After about three turns I applied the full opposite rudder and then started
the steady progressive movement forward on the stick. Nothing changed
and the glider continued to rotate very rapidly in the steep nose down
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