Most of my instructional writing starts with the notes I make while planning a session of flight instruction. In this case I was doing a checkout in a Grumman Widgeon and I wanted to give special attention to the Widgeon's porpoising tendency. While floatplanes are generally stable in pitch, that's not always the case in hull seaplanes, which tend to be unstable at certain pitch attitudes. Some are more sensitive to this than others, and none is more twitchy than the Grumman Widgeon. The wrong pitch inputs in a Widgeon can lead to a divergent oscillation that if left uncorrected, can bend things after just a few cycles.
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