Scott McDaniels----I'll bet you have a ball getting to play with new stuff like this. They bring you a new engine variant and say-Hey Scott, take this and put it in a 14A an make everything fit under this. Oh---and the exhaust hasnt been designed yet, and the induction hasnt been done either. Have fun.---
Lucky guy---
Tom
This was somewhat a collaborative effort with Lycoming (a benefit from our customers being a major consumer of Lycoming engines I would guess) so the configuration of the engine wasn't a surprise, but yea, this is what we enjoy doing.
The prototype shop is just a small part of the whole project. It was very much a team effort with engineering starting the ball rolling with a design concept and then it evolving from there as it gets worked on for real.
I was personally only involved in this project to a small degree during the development phase but I did get to do quite a bit of the final performance verification test flying. Perhaps Greg will be sharing details about the development process and testing, some time in the future.
I will tell you, that having the opportunity to make take-off and landing attempts at gross weight, over and over again while you fine tune the technique, while trying for the shortest (demonstrated) take off and landing distance possible, was a lot of fun (if not somewhat stressful at the same time ).
Even though this is what we do, the whole team that worked to get accurate distance measurements was somewhat in a state of jaw dropped to the ground as it began to sink in what level of performance this airplane was achieving.
I still find it hard to believe, but I can assure you, the performance #'s being presented are real and come from a large amount of very detailed flight testing that took place under a number of different pilots.