I have to admit every time I fly my buddies Arrow one of the things I appreciate is the manual flap lever, one click, two click.....I feel the plane respond to my exact position of the lever.

Dont get me wrong, I like the electric flaps on my bo, and the hydraulic pump flaps on my mooney were intriguing with pump them up and relieve pressure, you dont get the tactile feed back from actually moving the flap with your hand like you do on the mechanical flaps.

There I just said something nice about the "other" brand...dont hate me ...but I feel better now...

I've always been a fan of manual flaps.

It gives you good "feel."

But, so do electrics.

You just feel them w/ a different part of your body.

As an airplane gets heavier, manual flaps just get impractical.

Unless you are Arnold (pre-Governor) or The Rock.

I too liked the overhead trim knob.

Reminds me of some older manual sunroofs.

Remember those?

My Seneca III had manual flaps. One thing I was taught... with passengers in the back, deploy them slowly/gently. To minimize the rate of pitch change that they felt in the back end. After I was taught that I became more sensitive to what riding in the back was really like. And a Seneca is a small plane. Bigger aircraft, you don't get the luxury of easing the flaps in. But with four and six seat aircraft I found that I can really make the passengers ride nicer if I was gentle introducing the flaps.

I loved the manual flaps on my Archer. Simple, reliable, and had good tactile feel. Passengers sometimes thought they were the emergency brake based in how the handle looked.

That was one of my favorite features on the Warrior I trained in, and I miss it. Fast, easy, right to the setting I want. No motor to worry about going out.

Also the best feature on the C185. Pretty hard to beat a manual flap system on a floatplane.
Impractical on bigger aircraft.

I also have a strong preference for the old Johnson bar! It's especially handy for touch and go's. You can drop the flaps in a fraction of a second, and you'll never confuse the flaps for the gear handle!

If you like mechanical flaps, you should have had the mechanical gear on your Mooney. It was a love/hate item with Mooney pilots. I was in the love it camp. Once you got the motion down, it was a one second system!

Funny enough, one of the repairs I had on the Warrior was the manual flaps. The teeth on the 'ratchet' had worn off and that sector had to be replaced. Compared with the adventures getting the flaps on our Bo to come back up (chronicled here), it was a ridiculously simple fix.

Manual flaps also valuable on short field takeoff. IMO electric flaps are a step backward.

I like them to, especially as they will most likely help a pilot to recognize a split flap situation faster. Thats one reason I'm not a fan of pre-select flaps.

I like designs that prevent split flaps. Manual or electric....

Tim

I watched a skydive pilot swoop in on a close, steep base to final turn in a C-182 once.

It was a '58 model, I believe, with manual flaps. He went for the final "click" at a hundred feet or so and one of the cables broke. That side retracted fully.

Luckily he still had his hand on the handle so he just retracted the other side, slammed in the power and missed the ground by just a few feet. It was exciting to watch....

Cirrus has a single bar connecting the two flaps, the electric motor turns the bar. I believe this model was taken from some early Piper's, but I cannot find which one.

Tim

I used to think so too, but some math shows that deploying the flaps late in the take off roll doesn't help much, if at all. There's hardly any additional drag from the flaps in the early part of the take off roll because you're going so slow, so there's hardly any penalty for putting them down before you start rolling.