Flight to Boone, IA RV Fly-in
Added 6/20/2006 - 87.7 hours total timeWhat a great way to spend a Saturday morning! With Boone being only 191nm from home, we thought it would be a great fly-in to attend, especially with the plethora of RV-10 builders who were going to be there. Ray Doerr made an appearance in his RV-10. He may not have any paint on it yet, but let me tell you, that man has good workmanship. Very impressive!
There was all sorts of nasty weather in Nebraska, and South Dakota / Minnesota, so I didn't know if this trip would be much fun. Turns out it was just fine. We had a 30kt headwind going down, so the trip took us about 1.5 hours. The sky was super smooth at our 8,000'+ cruising altitude. I'm getting my O2 fill station together, so I didn't have any O2 ready to go, or I may have flown higher. The flight was completely uneventful. I grabbed the screenshots below to show the performance figures. On this flight, I operating Rich of Peak, to see how that worked out. I did get a bit more airspeed, at our lower altitude, but keep in mind when you look at the photos that I was pulled back between 1-2" of MP. I ran it easier due to the higher OAT's we had. I try to keep the CHT's under 400 in cruise if possible. I think running LOP actually makes this much easier, but I'd rather run LOP at slightly higher altitudes, or 8,000 as a minimum. I added this data to the Performance Page.
At the Fly-in, we had some FANTASTIC BBQ sandwhiches and pie. Those guys really throw a great fly-in meal! I didn't want to waste much time eating though, with all the RV-10 builders there. Many of them surprisingly hadn't ever had the chance to fly in a -10 before, so I thought I better rectify that. I gave a few rides, one of them equipped with 4 adult males, and we were still climbing 1,100fpm, even in the heat of summer. I missed giving Bob a ride...Bob, we'll just have to do it again sometime!
After the rides, we had a deadline to meet, so we called to say we were going to be late, having only 50-60 minutes enroute available to make our deadline. As it turned out, that 1.5 hour flight with a 30kt headwind became a 1 hour flight with a 40kt tailwind on the way home! With a total enroute time for the 191nm trip of 1:02, we were doing great on the way home...still not running it as hard as we could. The WSI was nice to have on the trip down, as we monitored the storms progress, but where we really lucked out was the weather on our return flight. If you look at the image below, that was the weather during the time we were on the way home. I forgot to take screenshots of it, but we made it right up that clear corridor from central IA to Western WI. That WSI weather has to be about my most indispensible feature!
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Finishing the Tedious Work
With a little time during the week, I decided to finally get a template made and paint my "No Step" letters on the flaps, before we have people climbing on them at OSH. Easy job. The photos of the elevator are for reference for another RV-10 builder. I'm hoping they'll help identify the skin overlap recently discussed on the matronics list.
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