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N619KB takes flight!

kbehrent

kbehrent

Well Known Member
After 13+ years of on/off building, N619KB took off for it's first flight on Sunday, November 20th @ 9am. The flight lasted for about 28 minutes and everything functioned as expected with no issues to report. It was was a joy to fly, smooth, and appears not to pull to either side. Landing was a breeze.

I want to specially thank my friend Marv Scott (Tech counselor, Tech Advisor, all around guru) for his help and encouragement to finish the project and all the members of EAA chapter 326 with their support and harassment to motivate me on.:D

Special thanks to my wife and kids who supported me all these years.

I'll post more specifics on the flight later today. The entire flight was well documented. I had a Drift HD camera in the cockpit recording video/audio (you get to hear me talk to myself :eek:), inflight video from the chase plane, and video from the ground on the takeoff and landing. I'll post a mix of those later after I've had a chance to process them and figure out how to put them up on youtube.

Videos added: 11/28/11
I'm having difficulty uploading my cockpit video taken from my Drift HD due to it's size into Picasa, so i'll try setting up a youtube account and try that..stayed tuned. Below are the first takeoff/landing videos that my wife took with her camera.

Takeoff Video:
https://picasaweb.google.com/106381637754779778718/FirstTakeoffForN619KB#5678631666084009394

Landing Video:
https://picasaweb.google.com/106381637754779778718/FirstLandingOfRV9AN619KB#5678635080192709986

RV grin:
https://picasaweb.google.com/106381637754779778718/N619KB#5678617243704535042
P1060410.JPG
 
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GREAT

Great job Kevin. I know the feeling. I just flew my RV-6 14+ year project a few weeks ago.

Wishing you a safe and uneventful phase 1.
 
Not only congrats, but thanks for serving a term as our EAA 326 Chapter President while you were building!
I'm working as hard as I can to catch up, N89SE is at the hangar, and the controls are rigged.....fuel lines next!
Again, congradulations for a job well done and a beutiful ship!:D
 
SHIPCHIEF said:
Not only congrats, but thanks for serving a term as our EAA 326 Chapter President while you were building!
I'm working as hard as I can to catch up, N89SE is at the hangar, and the controls are rigged.....fuel lines next!
Again, congradulations for a job well done and a beutiful ship!:D
Click to expand...

Thanks Scott.
Actually I served two terms as President with a four year break in between. We have a great chapter and it was a honor and pleasure to serve.
 
Flying Update - 11/28/11

I've added the takeoff/landing video that my wife took with her camera on the first post of this thread.

I tried loading the inflight video from my Drift HD camera in Picasa, but it won't load due to it's size (2GB). I will create an account on youtube and try again later.

The inflight video came out ok. I recorded it using 720 instead of 1080 because I was afraid I would run out of space on my 16GB card. The video came out to be @ 33 minutes and took 2GB. The audio came out ok. You can clearly hear radio traffic and my chase plane (Marv), but when I spoke the audio was is loud due to the intercom volume was set to high. In subsequent flights, I turned down the intercom volume and you can hear me a lot better. So, the new Drift HD audio works great if you plug the external mic jack into the passenger headphone jack. I got all I needed to do this from Radio Shack.

I've been busy flying!! I have 7+ hrs now with only a few minor issues. After the first flight, we popped the cowl and found a small oil leak coming from the 90 degree fittings on the oil cooler. Fuel lube didn't work so good so we tried some white permatec (?) stuff that Marv had and no more leaks!

The second issue is my GPH reading on my AFS is showing too high compared to what the Eagle system is reporting in their data. Working with AFS to resolve that.

The last issue is that the Eagle ECUs are signaling a low voltage warning. From the data logs, Eagle PMU measures the voltage while under load and it's seeing 10+ volts. It still works perfectly well, but it made us spend part of the weekend checking voltage levels. I had the Eagle EMS connected to the E-Buss, but we found that we had a .7v loss just going thru the diode!:eek: So, the Eagle EMS is now tied directly to the Batt buss.

The engine runs really smooth. It restarts with ease, no more hot starts! Once we confirm the low voltage is solved, Dennis with Precision will help fine tune the fuel system once I get him some more data logs.
 
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