Flight test

OK, with the first flight out of the way it was time to get on to the nitty gritty of flight test. Technically the first flight is part of the flight testing but it feels completely different. Per the FAA rules my plane needs 40 hours of flight test time before I can carry passengers or exit my designated test area.

My assigned test area is 50 nautical miles around Cambridge airport in Cambridge, MD. This allows me to get over to the Delaware shore and over Seaford, DE where I grew up. Not bad but still the airplane can easily cross 50 nm in 20 minutes... Pretty limiting but those are the rules.

Right away I start talking with my Guru's about fixing my "can't slow down problem" They don't think it's a big issue but they also think it needs to be corrected. The fix turns out to be easy. I swap out a shim under the horizontal stabilizer the original shim was 1/8 and the new shim is 1/16. I do this and now the airplane slows down just fine. More aft weight or a more aft center of gravity has the same effect but I don't want to carry ballast unless I have to. The shim fix works just fine.

The test flying consists of flying the airplane in every imaginable condition that you would encounter. Climbing, Gliding, stalling, loops, rolls and many other maneuvers. I did all these things. The airplane design is well documented. There are over 800 of the same model flying and nearly 5,000 of the same make flying so I wasn't worried about how it would perform. Lots of the test flying became verification of how it was performing.

The one thing I paid special attention to was fuel burn rates. I wanted to know exactly how much fuel the plane would burn at different cruise altitudes. The reason for my concern was that I had some major trips planned in this plane and when you want to travel and stretch the range of your bird you must know positively how much fuel you have at all times. no questions, ever. Insurance companies feel so strongly about this that if you EVER run out of fuel in a aircraft you may be uninsurable for life. Ouch!

Test flying went well. No major problems, the aircraft did what it was supposed to do. Now armed with 40 hrs of flight experience in the airplane and good knowledge of how far it could go it was time for a trip.