Can floats be fitted to the Bearhawk?
Disclaimer: I am not yet a float rated pilot, though I hope to be in the near future! The Bearhawk should be an excellent seaplane when fitted with floats (pontoons), but since nobody has flown one with floats yet, many of the installation details have yet to be fully resolved. There are a few airframe items which should be modified before the plane can be operated with floats, including structural, aerodynamic, and finishing changes. Landing and taxi operations on the water impose some additional stresses on the airframe that a land plane doesn’t normally experience. In one of the ’96 issues of “Bear Tracks” (condensed version, in my case) Bob Barrows specified increasing the sizes of some fuselage tubes to better withstand the beating that floatplanes can take. Some provision must also be made for attaching the floats to the fuselage of the airplane. The front landing gear attach fittings are normally used as the front attach points, and the above mentioned newsletter article showed
