No Mags is Official!

I am now legally mag-less. I just finished my FAA  mandated 10 hours within a 50 nm radius, so now I can go back to flying anywhere.  I have to say, the engine is running nice and smooth and is starting pretty well.

If you fly 400+ miles and return to the same airport, should you log that as a cross country flight?

Since I was burning up time rather than trying to get somewhere I decided to put some hours on for a single flight. Departing Carbondale, I headed straight west for 50 miles, then turned right. Using my GPS set to KMDH I tried to keep the distance about 49 nm out. Since I wasn't in a hurry, I throttled back to 2,100 RPM or so, which slowed me down to 145 mph, true. So, when you do the numbers, this big-ass circle was 314 miles in circumference, adding in the 50 nm each way gave me a distance of 412 nm. I did it all in around 3:20.  This was a different kind of flight and kind of fun.

It was also interesting to see my performance at reduced throttle. At only 2,100 RPM I still had a true airspeed of 157 mph and a fuel flow of 4.2 GPH. I was surprised it was that good. I guess the combination of fuel injection and electronic ignition has really paid off. 

On the last of my 10 hours I decided to do some flight testing, as advised in the FAA Advisory Circular Flight Testing for Homebuilt Aircraft. I did a stall series and that was easy enough, putting my "stall" at 70 mph.

The harder part was gathering the numbers for Best Rate of Climb, then deriving the Best Angle of Climb. The middle of those two numbers gives you the Best Glide Speed. Having never done this before, it was harder than I thought. I used 3,000 feet as my baseline altitude and wanted to determine how far I would climb at that airspeed in one minute. 

The procedure I used was to set my Dynon's airspeed bug at whatever speed I was testing for, say 145 mph, then descend to 2,000 feet. I would to to full power and attempt to keep the airspeed right on the money and establish a smooth climb. When I reached 3,000 feet I would start the timer. When one minuted elapsed I noted and recorded the altitude.  This kept me very busy and I had quite a time keeping the airspeed right while doing everything else. I aborted a few attempts, since I hit the watch too late, of my airspeed was too far off.  

When I was finally done I captured 38 readings and it took over two hours to fly. I really didn't need that many, since the numbers i was most interested in  were in the 100 to 135 mph range. As you can see, I took a lot of liberty smoothing the curve, but I think it's close enough for government work. 

 The speeds I came up with were:

Stall in landing configuration, Vso = 70 mph

Best Rate of Climb, Vy = 117 mph (gives me about 1,650 feet per minute.)

Best Angle of Climb, Vx = 110 mph

Best Glide Speed (the average of Vy & Vx) = 113 mph

And here are some theoretical values Maximum Endurance, Maximum Range, and Optimum Cruise Speeds, by Russ Erb:

Vmax endurance = 85 mph

Voptimum cruise = 148 mph

And now I'm ready to fly all over the place, right? Unfortunately, my annual condition inspection expires tomorrow so I'll have to get that done first.  Maybe when it warms up a little.