Had a couple of demo rides in the M700.
When my M600 was finished with its annual, in Boise. I had arranged for the service center to fly the M600 back to my home drome. better than that, they offered to pick me up in a brand new M700, and pick up my plane myself. That seemed like more fun. Had forgotten what a beast this plane was.
Remembering from my last time in an M700, I was ready for the crazy quick time to rotation on auto throttles. The ground roll was short. I didn’t measure it, but once the AT kicks in, it is gauges green, airspeed, alive, cross check, stay on center line and rotate. Happens about that fast, and you are gear up, flaps, up, and looking to not bust the initial altitude. The M700 has the shortest ground roll of any of the high performance cross country turboprops out there.
Like all the M700’s at least the ones that the demo pilot has flown, they all beat book performance, like the M600. We were over 300 knots true at FL240 and FL260, which is not the optimum performance altitudes, but still making the advertising numbers.
The fit and finish has continued to improve. My M600 is starting to look a little 'legacy" in comparison. but the handling is amazing. They changed the rudder from the M600, and it is so light on the rudder inputs even with the 783 ESHP pulling the 5000 lb as loaded airframe on take off. At our take off weight, we had more power to weight than a standard P51 Mustang. The lowest climb rate I saw going up to 25,000 feet was 2100 fpm, and I was not even climbing at Vy was mostly Vy+20 knots. The Vy climb attitude is frankly a little uncomfortably nose up, especially for passengers. And all you see is blue sky.
Coming into Boise, we broke off IFR and went over to a little valley to demonstrate some of the envelope protection. It is really impressive. first did the AP where I leveled off with insufficient power to fly, a common cause of loss of control in TP’s, and any aircraft really. Getting too slow. Unlike common ESP, it can drop the nose to preserve airspeed, but in the case of the M700, you don’t even lose altitude, because the autothrottles comes on and very gently (depending on how fast things are deteriorating) adds power to maintain a healthy margin over stall.
I think there are quite a few planes that do this on AP. But not sure how many do what we did next. I pretended I was an inattentive pilot, hand-flying, no automation, and did the stupid pilot trick of climbing without putting in sufficient power, which resulted in a fast rollback of speed, heading quickly towards stall. Autopilot off. Autothrottle off. The computer sees what is about to happen, and looking at the trend vector announced autothrotte, and before I can really even intervene, has added just the right amount of thrust to preserve the airspeed in the climb preventing the stall.
Quite a bird. Definitely one of Piper's most impressive aircraft in history.
Some random pics including showing 302 Knots true in level flight at 24,000 feet.
www.piper.com
And the much cooler temps that result as well.
