Falco Facts
Description
Performance
Specifications
Engineering
Construction
Handling
1999 10th Annual West Coast Falco Fly-In
Falco Handling
Nothing Flies like a Frati Airplane
Ask a Falco pilot about the plane and chances are most of what you’ll hear is about the handling. It’s inevitably what people talk about – read any flight report on the Falco – and it is the thing that is most special about the Falco.
This is no happy accident of fate. When Stelio Frati designed the Falco over 40 years ago, his primary goal was to create an aerobatic aircraft with light, precise, harmonious controls. To the joy of pilots ever since, he succeeded.
Slide into the seats of a Falco, grasp the control sticks lightly in your fingers and move the stick about. There’s almost no friction. No play at all. You can tell, even before the plane starts to roll, that the controls are light.
Start the engine, and you are in for an assault on all preconceived notions of what aircraft handling is about. Even the engine controls are smooth operating, Teflon-lined control cables. Taxi out and discover the precise ground handling. The aircraft turns exactly when you push on the rudder, yet it’s not too sensitive.
Charge down the runway, lift into the air, and you’re into another world. It’s a whole new sky in a Frati airplane. The handling is so sensuous and the controls are so light that you twist and roll and frolic in the sky like a baby lamb in a spring meadow. You’ll find out right then and there why Stelio Frati airplanes are so special and why the designer is so revered. Nothing flies like a Frati airplane, and the Falco is the most sensuous of them all.
