After putting all of the wheel pants and fairings back on and getting some lunch, Tanya and I went up for a little local flight. I didn't aggravate the prop governor due to passenger-onboard. This flight was a chance for Tanya to finally get some real stick time. We ended up just flying around home within about 25mi. for a little over two hours. We climbed up to 9k feet where it was 62 degrees and smooth. Tanya did most of the flying and tinkered with power settings, leaning, climbs, decents, turns, autopilot control, EFIS display options, slow flight, etc.. She found something of interest with each and every little thing now that she was flying. I can't tell you how much it totally rocks having a wife onboard that is a pilot and fully capable of transferring PIC to. I think we are working out a good rule of always annunciating clearly "You have control", "I have the airplane". That way there is no doubt so someone is always in control and the copilot can provide only useful information and not criticism. There is a fine line when multiple people think they are in control. We spent a lot of time just trying to bring her up to speed on how it feels and what kind of parameters are normal in different conditions. Stuff like when we slow down, the oil temperature rises, when we climb too slow, the CHT goes up and how much is acceptable to the builder.
We just flew around among the clouds at 9k' while she explored all this stuff. We were burning barely 7gph. I had a complete blast and we didn't even go anywhere. I was a little surprised at just how much I have learned the intimate little details of how this machine that we built performs and reacts to specific inputs. I can't say that I have ever before known a single aircraft so well to be able to say what power, prop, mixture, altitude would yield what speed or climb or decent, etc. Tanya learned just how slippery our bird is when it comes time to slow down and get down. She flew the majority of the approach and handed it to me 1000' AGL on (long) final
. That resulted in a great demonstration of just what full flaps in a -9A can do with a constant speed prop.
It has just over 50 hours on it now. Much fun! I think we're finally starting to see that it will be possible to "just go fly".
We just flew around among the clouds at 9k' while she explored all this stuff. We were burning barely 7gph. I had a complete blast and we didn't even go anywhere. I was a little surprised at just how much I have learned the intimate little details of how this machine that we built performs and reacts to specific inputs. I can't say that I have ever before known a single aircraft so well to be able to say what power, prop, mixture, altitude would yield what speed or climb or decent, etc. Tanya learned just how slippery our bird is when it comes time to slow down and get down. She flew the majority of the approach and handed it to me 1000' AGL on (long) final
. That resulted in a great demonstration of just what full flaps in a -9A can do with a constant speed prop.It has just over 50 hours on it now. Much fun! I think we're finally starting to see that it will be possible to "just go fly".
