Sounds cool guys. The only question I have is what altitude did you tell center you would be at when filing your flight plan? You know this kind of blows the old first half even thousands... etc. for vfr flight rules.
Bill Jepson
-----Original Message-----
From: jesse farr <jesse@jessfarr.com>
To: Rotary motors in aircraft <flyrotary@lancaironline.net>
Sent: Wed, 2 Nov 2005 20:01:20 -0500
Subject: [FlyRotary] Re: economy test
Tracy / Ernest: I don't know nothing about flying these fancy computer controlled injected things and I could have probably never figured out who used what for how long over how much distance; but, I put many a mile on an old turbo normalized mooney and while my flight method depended on distance of course, if close enough around, it usually consisted of climb to 14 or 15,000 and a couple of hundred feet per minute descent where clearance height and pattern altitude would work out. The whole point of this is that flight time and overall fuel consumption was usually reduced, sometimes even by as much as a third. At the time I thought I had really found the ultimate "slipping off the step" method of flight that I had often read about.
jofarr, soddy tn
----- Original Message -----
Actually it was 55 mpg during the descent portion of flight. I was looking at MPG averages so speed never entered the picture in my quick & dirty look at this.
But you suggest another way of cross checking the results. Let's see, I think I agree with your miles traveled calcs so lets look at it this way. I burned .106 gal in the 40 seconds of climb and .125 gal during the 5 minutes of descent for a total of .231 gal.
9.4 miles divided by .231 gal gives 40.69 MPG. Not as good as I got by averaging the MPG during each unit of time (48 mpg result) but still a pretty good bump up from 30 mpg in level flight. Not sure where the error is coming from.
Naturally my test results will have to be repeated many more times before I accept them as fact.