Our October 1994 issue led off with the “wet and wonderful” Seawind 3000 composite amphibian and a thorough flight test of Nat Puffer’s Cozy, all of which seem right in line with our coverage of the Long-EZ this month in our recurring Buying Used series.
The ever-young LeRoy Cook flew the Seawind in Florida for his report, saying that after a change in ownership and “the new guidance of SNA, Inc., kits are available and being shipped. At long last, a half-dozen Seawinds should be up and flying before the year’s end.” During the flight test, LeRoy said that “wide open, the Seawind 3000 is a 200-mph airplane, and with 75% power it trues out at 191 mph at 8000 feet.” That’s with the six-cylinder, 300-hp Lycoming IO-540 in the big pod cantilevered from the vertical stabilizer. The Seawind was offered as a kit through 2002, when the company stopped that effort to focus on certifying the design. Roughly 80 kits were completed. In ’94, the kit price was $41,900, though a Kwick Kit was a $9800 option.
Also in this issue is a fascinating feature on Cozy designer Nat Puffer’s efforts to test for deep-stall characteristics in a canard design. It began when test pilot Jim Patton found himself in a main-wing stall with a rotational component during tests of the Cozy with a far-aft loading. One of Puffer’s solutions? A 135-pound movable weight inside the cockpit to allow real-time changes in CG so they could “inch up” on the adverse flight characteristics in a single flight. Eventually, Puffer’s testing proved that two relatively simple changes—shortening the canard span by a total of 6 inches and adding small winglets below the vertical tip sails—allowed him to get acceptable behavior at the aft CG limit and still have good pitch control at the forward limit.
Our Avionics Special section revealed the boom in GPS navigators, featuring the new Magellan Skyblazer, Garmin’s 95 XL and the II Morrow Apollo 920, among others. We also featured the new II Morrow Apollo NMS 2001 and Garmin GPS 1550 TSO panel mounts. Bendix/King’s KLN 90B, Arnav’s FMS 5000 and Northstar’s M3 rounded out the choices. Don’t forget that Bendix/King had recently refaced its popular radios with a gray plastic visage and referred to them as the Crown series, aimed at the low-cost and homebuilt side of the market.
