I finally had the opportunity to fly in a Kitfox 5 and loved every minute of it! I did have one question following the experience though. My father and I recently completed an RV-4 and the control movement in that design is almost perfectly free. Everything moves like it’s on ball bearings. On this particular Kitfox however, I had to purposefully place the controls where I wanted them to go. On the ground, the stick was notably heavy, and the rudders had a distinct weight to them, almost as if there was a friction control in the works. In flight it seemed like I had to really lean on the pedals to get a response. They were far from being “free floating” and seemed quite unnaturally heavy.

So is this a normal condition due to how the control linkage is engineered in the Kitfox, or perhaps the relative weight of the flaperons to standard ailerons?