The Piper Cub and its bigger brother, the Super Cub, may have gone out of production years ago but there’s plenty of competition among replica manufacturers. Two of the best-known are American Legend and CubCrafters, and they’ve both come up with highly developed versions.
In June, CubCrafters announced the latest version of its XCub, the NXCub which has a nosewheel rather than the traditional tailwheel layout for Cubs.
And just a few days ago, American Legend retaliated with the ‘Mother Of All Cubs’, the MOAC for short.
The MOAC is a backcountry special edition of the Legend Cub, with a big engine, aerodynamic aids and robust undercarriage, all so it can land and take off in short distances – as short as its own length – on less than perfect terrain. Think river beds, bumpy trails, mountain tops… that sort of thing.
Horsepower first. The MOAC has more than double the horsepower of the standard Legend Cub thanks to a Titan engine from Continental. It produces maximum power of 208hp, with 187-195hp available continuous. Various propellers can be attached from a simple Cato fixed-pitch prop to a sophisticated Hartzell constant-speed.
The MOAC’s airframe is also highly developed, with flaps running full span from wing root to aileron and up to 40º of droop, square wingtips optimised for reduced vortices, and leading edge slats.
“To appreciate these improvements alone, the aircraft must be flown, as simply watching in amazement does not complete the sensation,” said John Wisdom, CFI and Legend demo pilot.
Perhaps the most critical component for backcountry pilots is landing gear performance. If you don’t remember the days of taxiing and landing on bungee gear and steel springs, your derriere and jarred teeth certainly do.
The MOAC’s landing gear has TK1 Racing Shock Monster nitrogen charged air/oil shock front suspension. It’s designed for the harshest of bush flying zones, with the oil damped system sucking up all the landing aircraft’s stored energy on compression. This is coupled with oversized tundra tires and high performance brakes for pinpoint landings with a minimum of rollout… just don’t nose-over with too shap braking.
The days of bare minimum cockpits has long gone too. The MOAC can be equipped with Garmin’s G3X or G500 glass cockpit, plus added engine monitoring, autopilot, terrain and traffic awareness, and weather info.
CubCrafters NXCub
CubCrafters’ XCub is a type certified aircraft and considerably more expensive than the American Legend MOAC, but it’s been a success thanks to extraordinary performance. Now CubCrafters has decided to certify and offer a nosewheel option, the NXCub.
“Putting a nosewheel on a modern Cub type aircraft certainly surprised some people, but the overwhelming public response has been positive, especially among the more than 300 pilots that have had the opportunity to fly the airplane during the market survey,” said Brad Damm, CubCrafters VP of Sales & Marketing.
“A nosewheel equipped XCub is a very easy airplane to fly. It takes off shorter, lands shorter, and cruises faster than the tailwheel version. Once a pilot is in the airplane and experiences it, the advantages are obvious.”
Just in case an NXCub buyer changes his mind about the nosewheel, it can easily be converted back to tailwheel.
The nosewheel is an extremely robust trailing-link nosewheel assembly and with large tundra tyres as an option for the mains, the nosewheel equipped XCub is capable of handling primitive landing strips and most off-airport type operations. Landing loads on the nosewheel are transmitted to the airframe by a heavy duty truss.
The XCub has achieved a number of significant milestones in its short history. After initial FAA certification in June 2016, the XCub was the first United States General Aviation aircraft to achieve non-TSO’d avionics approval for the Garmin G3X system in 2017. In 2019, CubCrafters collaborated with Lycoming and Hartzell to offer the new light weight CC393i fuel injected 215 horsepower engine and a new high performance PathFinder 3-bladed composite propeller, for the XCub.
