Yesterday I got in over two hours of flying and really started to learn the nuances of the aircraft. Lots of takeoffs and landings. Some at CFD and some at Hearne. Then I flew to an area where I teach my students to perform “ground reference” maneuvers. I took this picture while flying some rectangular patterns at 800 feet above the ground. There are some farm roads in this area that not only form a nice rectangle but that also have fields all around them that would make landing safe and easy if the engine were to quit. This is important because from 800 feet I’m not going to be able to glide vary far at all. Also it is an “other than congested area” so it is legal to fly as low as 500 feet above the ground. Usually I demonstrate this maneuver for a student and then I just watch and critique but today I got to do all the flying and it was a blast.
After that I found a nice big hole in the clouds and decided to take her up through it. She climbs really well and is very maneuverable and it was not problem circling up through the opening. Here is a picture of the hole I climbed through. This was taken at about 7,500 feet msl or about 7,000 feet above the ground. It did not take long at all to climb up to that altitude, maybe about five or six minutes. To date, this is the highest I have flown her.
This was taken while I was climbing through 4,200 feet. I’m not proud of my lack of co-ordiantion seen in this picture but I’ll blame it on trying to use a camera while flying. I’m climbing at over 1,000 feet per minute at 75 mph. Best rate of climb is at about 65 mph so she can climb better than this. I have seen 1,600 feet per minute while climbing through 1,000 feet on more than one occasion, The entire instrument panel was designed and constructed by me. All I got with the kit was a sheet of aluminum with the right angle bend at the very bottom.
I finished up by spiraling back down through an opening in the clouds and returned to CFD after the longest flight to date of almost two and a half hours. Again, no issues.