The things that struck us as we reviewed the 100 most recent Cardinal RG accidents were what we didn’t see – there were almost no bounced landing events (one) and for all the hand-wringing over the reliability of the landing fear on single-engine Cessna retracs, only three resulted from a mechanial problem that prevented gear extension.
The fixed-gear Cardinal series has a history of bounced/porpoised landings leading to firewall damage. That simply isn’t the cse with the RG model. Our working hypothesis is the different landing gear geometry. No matter what it is, we were impressed by the adsence of touchdown problems with the RG. We can’t recall another aircraft we’ve reviewed with such low numbers. Also, we only saw two landing overshoots – and one was a student pilot on a 1500-foot strip- an unusually low number.