This may or may not be relevant to the subject as I don't have a lot of time in one of these. I did have a partial power loss on mine that resulted in a hard landing which damaged the longeron tubes. I am in the process right now of repairing the damage.

I wanted to know thoughts on flying the plane by feel. Most of my experience is in a 172 and you could really fly that by feel when slowing down. You knew how much elevator you had left and if you were running out you knew you had to drop the nose. You could really fly your best glide speed just by knowing your elevator position without even looking at airspeed.

With my model IV it is tougher because I still had full elevator response even when in a stall. The nose would not drop but the plane would just sink and that's what happened to us as we were trying to get back to the field after the power loss. There is a lot of stuff going on in the cockpit when that happens in a short amount of time and you don't have the luxury of staring at the airspeed indicator. Luckily we were close to the ground when it got slow and the damage wasn't that bad and is repairable.

In a positive way the stall characteristics are very gentle but the downside is that you don't get much warning. I'm thinking an AOA indicator would be a good addition and also maybe a good way of determining best glide slope?