Recent content by Matthew Bourguignon

I would love that, but convincing an insurance company to cover a taildragger for instruction and rental would take a small miracle and a large fortune!

Based on some of the feedback here, it sounds like I’ve got a great excuse to spend a few hours beating up the pattern and experimenting with various flap settings and techniques. I can even stop for lunch at Barnstormers in the middle! Don’t know how I’ll factor out the performance penalty from...

TWENTY degrees?! Seems like outright blasphemy! o_O

No, I wasn’t comparing this to book numbers. I was going from a gauge reading to another gauge reading: “If 29 KIAS stall, then 37 KIAS approach.” Again, I’m not about to dive right into flying that slowly anyway. :yikes:

Max gross, yes. We use the airplane for instruction and we teach out of the POH and Air Plains AFM supplement. We do not teach any contrary numbers, but we do make students aware that the aircraft will float further and take longer to contact the runway due to the STOL kit. They adjust...

You're right. I started typing out a paragraph for landings and then deleted it for being extraneous. Landings I'm doing fine with experimenting on my own. I've found her gross weight stall speed to be 29 KIAS. I'm not comfortable approaching at 37 knots (yet) so I've been playing with reducing...

I use 10 degrees per the book for soft/rough field. Clean wing for short field/paved.

See I too worry about beating the **** out of the nosewheel running down the bumpy grass.

Well now you're addressing another question I've pondered: do I even need to apply a soft field technique? The field is typically dry, albeit bumpy. It's privately owned, and the airpark owner closes it whenever the runway condition is suboptimal.

Due to GA2 being a grass strip, I have to use a combined Soft & Short technique. :rockon: We also have a Penn Yan conversion with no STOL kit. 1979 but otherwise almost your twin.

Greetings, all! We recently acquired a 1979 Cessna 172N with the Air Plains 180hp conversion and a Horton STOL kit including gates, tips and cuffs. It's the third addition to our rental fleet and despite being in pretty serious need of a paint job, it's proved popular with our students! I'm not...

I know you were responding to another commenter, but I’d like to add that our airplane in question DOES make the minimum static RPM.

I would agree, but we never saw 10 gallons per hour on this airplane. We were consistently burning 8.5 gallons per hour, which is what my unconverted 160 hp N model Cessna burns.

That was my thought, but the prop matches what's called out in the Air Plains paperwork, meaning it would've had to have been re-pitched. Why would a flight school located in a high DA region intentionally overpitch their props? It's not like doing so is free.

I thought about drag too. But if we were being held back by drag, we would still see normal-ish fuel burns to go with the lower speeds, but that's not the case. We saw 113 KTAS at multiple altitudes tested from 3000 up to 11.5k. Mixture was always leaned to best power by max RPM method.