About 2 months ago I spent and afternoon with Roger Freeman the owner and pilot of this Dr.I at the Pioneer Flight Museum at the old Kingsbury Aerodrome just outside San Antonio TX (where I live) and climbed in and tried this one on for size. Spent a pleasant couple of hours talking to him about flying it or one similar (he has built 3 including the one in the USAF museum at Wright Patterson) and at the end of it I was pretty satisfied that I didn't need to. Basically have to buy it and if I got it back down properly (which is the trick) then I could sell it back to him. I don't blame him one bit. He said absolutely NO WIND is required before he will take it up. PERIOD. Crosswind landings are just a disaster and even if you have a large field and can approach from directly into the wind, the slightest deviation in wind direction (shift) is going to be a real problem. Once the tail goes down you are a passenger. Period. Taking off was not that bad because you didn't have it on the ground that long and your escape was to get it in the air. Once there, he said that the airplane will continue to try and "swap ends" because of the torque which in this case was from the 80 hp LeRhone engine. He said that he ended up putting bungies on the rudder bar to help keep it straight because if you were flying it somewhere and you relaxed, it would start trying to bring the tail around in a flat turn. I asked him about that flat turn and how the pilots during the war described doing that and he said HAH! good luck NOT making a flat turn... that is what the plane wants to do, and if you let it... it will reverse course in a flat turn no problem. I described some of the behavior I have seen in RoF and he was not familiar with the game but said a strong NO to any of the traits seen in the game. It just doesn't do that. He said that turning into the torque was just not what you wanted to do, it would fight you and the turn would be resisted but turning with the torque it would come around in a hurry and was easy to control. He said you could make 3-4 turns with the torque in the time and space it would take you to make one against it, there was just no reason to fight it, you could make a 270° degree turn faster than a 90° against it. He felt that the stagger of the wings was insufficient and showed me where they (Fokker) had made the plane better by removing the middle wing, but it didn't have the integral strength without it... and the plane would have probably flown better/faster if they had just made the middle wing more of a spar than a wing. He pointed out the more extreme stagger of the Sopwith Tripane and said they go it right by spacing them further apart and prevented the pressure conflict between the wings that the Fokker exhibited.
The trick is making a coordinated turn and then he pointed out that the ailerons were only on the top wing and that as such they were above the roll center (a LOT) and so when you banked the plane the ailerons were trying to roll the plane about an axis somewhere around or above your head... NOT the centerline of the fuselage, which when I looked up at the top wing made perfect sense. My first question to him was "does this thing fly as goofy as everyone tells me and he said "oh hell yes, it is a one of a kind" and went on to add some frills and dressings about the flight characteristics. He flies it, he enjoys it... some... but it is a risk every time you take it up. The only real damage they have incurred was when one of the ax handles broke and the wingtip dug in and basically cartwheeled it around, but the damage was minor and the lesson was learned.
I asked about the D.VII sitting in the hangar.....he said Nah, you can take that up right now and turn it inside out, it's a beautiful well mannered plane and no wonder that the Allies were scared of it, they had every right to be. I had about 4 years in the CAF in Harlingen, TX when it was the CONFEDERATE Airforce, and spent an astronomical amount of money playing with old airplanes and I thought I had pretty much learned my lesson on that, but I wanted to get a little closer to these machines just out of curiosity. The only one that really winds my clock is the D.Va which they are building and it is really something. Just a gorgeous plane, and would be a real hoot to fly one, but once you have.... it drops off really fast as I have no desire to own another airplane but they are really enjoyable to see, but you don't fly them around to airshows (thank goodness) and you just don't go fly one of these and relax because of all the things that are involved. We spent more time honestly talking about the old days flying freight and did you know this guy and that airplane than we did these machines but I guess it is akin to an itch you just need to scratch to remind you to stay away from the poison ivy.
