NetHeads, Last night I started looking for somewhere to fly today. The weather over the whole eastern US was going to be gorgeous, so I contacted several other KR flyers in distant states to see if I could visit. I was really looking for a good excuse to exercise my new EIS altitude and altimeter functions, as well as gather some more engine and performance numbers on a long trip at constant altitude.
Striking out on that (everybody had plans already), I decided I'd just fly around and burn a tank of fuel instead. I spent a lot of time at 7500' doing various speed and performance tests, and then decided I'd "get some strange" and land at a new airport. I flew to Muscle Shoals and did a touch and go, but when I touched down, the plane jerked to the right and vibrated some. Hmmmmmm. So I did another one, and it did exactly the same thing, but worse. On climbout it occured to me that I had a flat tire! I knew I didn't want to land on M38's 40' wide and short runway with a flat, so I picked Moontown's even shorter but much wider grass strip. Besides...on any given weekend day, there are twenty guys either working on their airplanes, or standing around talking....all looking for something aviation-related to do. And the bonus is that most of them are my friends, or will be some day. Sure enough, there were several standing there "grading" the landings as I came in, and they noticed the big jerk to the right as I touched down. I handled that pretty well with the rudder, but what I hadn't counted on was the drag from that wheel....it wanted to make the plane nose over. Fortunately it didn't, although I was full aft stick and wondering what was going to keep it from going all the way over. I whipped it around to the right to get it out of the middle of the runway, but it didn't go far before the prop wouldn't motivate the plane anymore. Before I could get out, a golf cart and two pickup trucks full of helpers headed my way. We moved it off the runway and two guys picked up the wing while I slid the wheel off the axle. The tire was separated from the rim on one side. As luck would have it, it was 12:05, and the Yellow Pages said that all the local lawn mower and tractor places closed at noon. Several guys offered hangar space for the weekend. One of the guys handed me the keys to his truck and said "I won't need it back until it's dark". The one hope was a small family-owned tractor place right across the road from Moontown. The sign said "Closed on Saturday and Sunday", but there were at least 10 people outside looking at tractors and lawn mowers, so I ventured inside. Bottom line is the guy had ONE 11-4x5.00 tube, and was happy to unload it on me for five bucks. What a life saver! No idea how it got flat. It was a small hole in the tube, and it looked and rolled fine before takeoff, and takeoff was perfectly normal. I'd have been flying again in half an hour, but they were having a community lunch at the airport, so I had a great lunch with a room full of grass-root pilots, and then even got some help swapping out the tube. Every one of these guys is a comedian too. It only took one guy to lift the wing so I could put the wheel back on the axle (a new reason to build strong carbon fiber wings), and a few minutes later I was flying back home. I put 2.9 hours on the plane on one tank of fuel, and gathered some pretty cool information in the process. Bottom line on the top speed at 7500' (cruise) is 157 mph using the current Sterba prop. That's at 75.8% power, based on MAP. That's mainly because it has so much pitch that I can only turn it 2930 rpm, compared to the 3350 rpm that I could turn the Sensenich 54x54 (which yielded closer to 170 mph). RPM makes a difference! These numbers will improve significantly with wheel pants and other stuff like gap seals, which is one reason I'm trying quantify the present configuration. Average fuel consumption at WOT (wide open throttle) at 7500 RPM is 5.1 gallons per hour, slightly lean of peak. Something else I did was trim it up and let go of the stick for 5 minutes. I could make it turn left or right by just leaning a little one way or the other. Resting my hand on the right side of the canopy yielded an even bigger right bank. I could have gone on forever that way, but that's when I arrived at the Shoals airport. The EIS plot of the first leg of the flight is at http://home.hiwaay.net/~langford/EIS/95_plot.gif . The green line is the altitude, with altitude scale on the right. The spreadsheet is at http://home.hiwaay.net/~langford/EIS/95_7500.xls (it's a big one). Tomorrow I fly to my father's farm and do it all over again (except the flat tire, I hope), to visit his 3600' long grass strip. I'm lovin' every minute of this "time machine" thing. You builder guys have a LOT to look forward to! I parked the plane with exactly 150 hours on the meter... Mark Langford, Harvest, AL see homebuilt airplane at http://www.N56ML.com email to N56ML "at" hiwaay.net
