Quicksilver MZ ultralight aircraft troubleshooting.
The MX was probably the most highly promoted and successfully marketed ultralight aircraft in the world, with some reports of over 8,000 having been sold.
One of the reasons for its popularity was the fact that it came as a complete ready to bolt together package, with superior assembly manual, and with all parts neatly packaged for easy identification.
This allowed the average ultralight enthusiast to assemble his kit, ready to fly in as little as 50 hours, in some cases as little as a weekend.
Now no matter how well something is built, someone always finds a way to break it, and no matter how much testing a factory does in a controlled environment, owners always find someway of doing it just a little different and come up with a problem.
An advantage both to the factory and potential future purchasers of an ultralight is a quick build aircraft with thousands flying.
The reason is quite simple, the faster the craft is built and flying the sooner the PROBLEMS, show up, allowing the factory to improve their product.
You can see that if it takes a year to build a craft, and another year to put 50 hours on it, (before problems can be reported to the factory) it would be two years from delivery before the craft was IMPROVED, on the assembly line.
In Canada the MX, and MX11 were probably the first ultralights to be used for training new pilots. In the hey day of ultralight aviation 1981/83, some schools in Canada were putting 50 to 60 hours week on their craft in TRAINING. When you put that kind of hours on a plane primarily designed for recreational flight, it starts to show its age, very quickly!
In an effort to help smooth out some of the wrinkles on the old MX the following is a run down of some of the problems and their possible solutions, encountered in the use of the MX in a training environoment!
Quicksilver Ultralight Aircraft Troubleshooting.
These problems may not show up at all on some craft because of the different kind of demands put on it, while others might be a little closer to the training environment
than at first realized.
The problems areas are broken down into .
1. Engine
2. Airframe
3. Drive train
4. Control system
5. Fabric