40.3 Hours!

That's right.. N523RV has 40.3 hours now and is free to roam about the country and take passengers!

This past weekend I finished flight testing and flew a TON of time... 8 hours on Satureday and another 4. something on Sunday. Did some climb tests and some stall testing. Did a fuel burn calculation. Mostly a lot of cross country. Sunday morning was a very windy day, so I got to practice some crosswind/strongwing landings. I landed at EMP on 19 with winds of 150 at 21 gusting 26. It was an OK landing but did plop it down a bit.

Overall impressions: The RV-9A is a fantastic airplane. It is an extremely smooth flyer, very steady. It is very easy to land although it takes some practice to get it slowed down. The tip-up canopy provides great visibility. From a speed point of view I'm getting about 178mph at 2550rpm without gear leg fairings. The engine plenum is doing an excellent job of cooling.. probably too good! So far I've had to keep the oil cooler completely blocked off to get the oil temps to get to 180, keeping in mind that the weather has been in the 40's.

Outstanding Issues:

The James Aircraft induction system is causing turbulent airflow in the airbox mounted to the carb which is causing mixture problems. This has been confirmed by Will James and he is working on a better setup.

I have a small shimmy somewhere. I'm not sure if it is the nosewheel or a main gear leg. I only get it when taxing.. never on landing or take-off. It 'might' be a sticky brake as I noticed when I pulled the plane in the hangar the left brake was squeeking.

CDI isn't working.. haven't done any troubleshooting.

My artifical horzion (RC Allen Electric) wanders and doesn't stay level. I got it from another RV-9A builder who only had it for a couple hundred hours.. it shouldn't be failing but I have heard NUMEROUS reports of problems with the electric RC Allen units.

My Low Fuel sensors still don't work even after a modification to the brain by Rich.

I'm noticing a very small amount of brake fluid on the right brake actuator on the pilot side.

What Now?

With 40 hours on the plane, I am going to do a thorough inspection of the whole plane... probably use the annual condition checklist. I have the cowl off and am in process of doing an oil change. I did a very close visual inspection of the engine already and identified a few oil drips. One at the temperature vernatherm, another at the oil pressure sensor. Everything else in the engine comparment looks pretty good. No chafing that I could see anywhere.

Sandi and I are planning on cross-country trip this weekend to celebrate and to give her a first ride. Still undecided where we are going.

Watch out! Here we come!

6.2 hours - Stall test, simulated engine out, cross country

I racked up another 6.2 hours on the plane today. Hobbs now reads 27.9 hours. With the weather getting warmer I moved into the actual test phase of flying. Up to this point I was in 'engine break-in mode'.

Stall Testing
First up was some stall testing. I did some basic stalls.. power-off, power-on, flaps, no-flaps.

Power off, no flaps: 59mph IAS
Power off, full flaps: 49mph IAS
Power off, half flaps: 51mph IAS
Power on: Somewhere less than 55mph. I tried a couple of these full-power stalls and the climb angle was very extreme and made me a bit uncomfortable. I got down to 55mph before I recovered it but it never really stalled. Mike found his to be about 53mph and I guess mine would be very close to that. I'll go up with an instructor after the 40 hours are off and do some. I just didn't want to get to far outside my comfort zone.

Simulated Engine Out

You just never know when it will happen, so when I was about 7.5miles out at about 6,000 feet, I pulled the power all the way back and setup a glide of 70mph which is what most RV'rs are using for best glide. This wasn't true testing, I just wanted to see if I could get back to the airport and land without power. I easily made it back to the airport and had to do several 360's overhead to loose some altitude and then easily made a short base and final approach. I was pleased with that. The descent was about 550fpm at ~72mph or so. My ground speed was about 90kts. Again, this was all unscientific. An upcoming flight test will determine my best glide.

Cross Country Flying

The rest of my time was spent flying across my flight test area. I went up to 8,000ft and noted some airspeed numbers which I'll crunch later. Took several pictures of things. Lots of grass burning going on.

4500 ft at 2450rpm

My true airspeed at 8,000ft, 2450 rpm came out to 149.6kts.

(It's now Sunday morning and looks like no flying today.)

Maintenance...

I managed to go out to the airport last night and do a little work on the plane. I used some laquer thinner to remove all of the primer overspray on the rivet lines and various places on the fuselage to make the plane look better. I didn't like having gray lines all over the place.

I pulled the cowl off and checked over the engine real good. Found a small drip of oil on one of the oil cooler fittings. I tightened it a bit but I bet I'll need to disconnect the oil line and give it one good turn around before the drip stops. Everything else looks good under the cowl. Thanks to my builders inspections, I secured a lot of wires/hoses so nothing is shaking loose anywhere.

The real reason I needed to go work on the plane is to reinstall the low-level fuel sensor brain box. I couldn't get it to work so I sent it back to Rich Meske at Aircraft Extras and he fixed it for me. Apparently the box was setup for the new style sensors but I had the old style, so it was a quick fix and a quick turn around! Thanks Rich. I've been avoiding putting it back in because it means I have to crawl underneath the panel and that is never really fun. Mostly it just makes your body hurt. I managed to get it remounted on the sub-panel and hooked about half of the wires back up before my neck gave out and I called it quits for the evening. I have just a couple more wires to hook up and I can test it again.

"Test flights bring dream closer to reality"

We didn't make the front page but did make Page 3. The photographer will come back out sometime to get some shots of me flying. (There are a few errors in the article but hey.. I didn't get to review it.)

More holes in the sky over Kansas

Rained all day yesterday so not a bit of flying.. we did need the rain though.

This morning it was overcast but looked like we'd be able to get some flying time in. First fligh of the day was 1.7 hours just bombing around locally since it was pretty hazy and I didn't feel like venturing to far out and having the weather go south.

Flight 2 of the day was some cross country from flying from Ottawa down to Chanute (CNU) and then over to Butler (BUM) and back. The cloud bank overhead was heading east so I climbed up to 10,500 and played around the back edge of the clouds for a few minutes. It was nice and smooth up there. :-)

Flight 3 of the day was more cross country over to Emporia (EMP) to pick up a sectional chart, then over to Fort Scott (FSK) and then back to Ottawa.

I put 5.3 hours on for the day. It seems that putting on the main wheel pants has actually slowed me down some. I'm only getting 150mph indicated at 2400. I'm going to pull them off and see if that makes any difference. I have the filtered airbox back on again. It also seems to affect my mixture and top end RPM. I'm not sure exactly why. It could be my imagination. I need to fly with and without it on the same day to see what affect it really does have.

Overall the plane is flying great. A breeze to handle and land. Visibility through the tip-up canopy is fantastic. (I'll never understand why someone would build a slider.) Handles very well in crosswinds. I haven't done much in the way of actual flight testing since I'm breaking in the engine for the first 25 hours and the weather has benn pretty cool. Next flights I'll start doing some actual flight testing.

Hobbs: 21.7 hours