11/12/2007

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I went up on 11/10 and did 4 stalls. All were with power off. Two were with full flaps and two with no flaps. The first two were to verify that nothing weird would happen and the second two to calibrate the angle of attach sensor on the EFIS. According to the manual I need to do full power stalls clean and dirty but I will save this for another day. Every stall was preceded by about 2 knots by a very strong buffet. This was almost exactly as described in several old RViator articles. I have not yet installed cuffs between the landing gear leg and fuselage. All four stalls broke cleanly with no wing drop. Lowest was with full flaps at 53 knots as per my yet un-calibrated airspeed indicator.

I the descended, did a low approach at Navasota and then flew back.

Today I upgraded the firmware in the EFIS and EMS to version 4.0.0. The big feature of this release is the use of a proprietary bus between the instruments and OAT sensor. This is in lieu of a serial jumper cable between the EFIS and EMS.

I took it up at lunch time. My plan was to fly to Conroe to swing the compass (it has areas far away from metal hangars). I didn't have time so I turned around and came back. (Oh my, look at the time! I shouldn't have gone flying today.) On the way back I was told to follow a King Air on about a 12 mile final on the localizer and a Geronimo was told to follow me . Since I was far from the King Air and the Geronimo was close behind make I was told to make the best available forward speed. I did. I made it up to 174 knots indicated (75% power) before they told me to slow down 30 knots. During the flight I noticed several "bus configuration" errors from the instruments. Other than the error messages I didn't notice anything else wrong. I must have missed something in the manual.

Today was a lot of fun but I need to stay focused on phase 1 testing.