Conducted 3/2/2013 –
After 2 months of weather delays we were able to resume flight testing. It was mostly uneventful. John’s flight report to the Cozy list is below:
“Winter is a perfect time to conduct flight testing in Minnesota…..said NO ONE…..EVER.
For the last two months mother nature has made certain that every one of my available weekends has been blanketed with clouds. But as I went to bed Friday night the forecast for the weekend was hopeful. A fairly good chance that I’d have an entire day to conduct flight testing. Having 4 flights left to complete stall and stability testing, I was hopeful to get 3 of the 4 in on Saturday, and the remaining one Sunday morning if the weather held.
When I awoke Saturday the cloud deck was still at 6000 feet (I’ve been going to 10k for stall testing), but was breaking up. We headed up to the airport and as I was preflighting the plane and getting it ballasted, Christine was working on some patterns for interior upholstery. I topped off the fuel and got under way.
As I was conducting the stall tests it seemed that speeds were a little higher than I expected at this cg (101.7). I had a prior test which also resulted in higher stall speeds than I expected, and I was able to determine that the cause was that the throttle wasn’t completely closed (my plane generates a pitch down moment with power), but I confirmed the throttle was closed. I continued on, and simply noted the airpseeds, remembering that my present duties were to conduct the tests. The analysis would have to wait.
As I returned back to the airport, entered downwind, and lowered the gear, the answer to the higher airpseeds would appear. Looking through nose gear well windows to confirm the gear was down I spotted the edge of a weight in the rear nose ballast compartment. I forgot to remove a 25lb weight from the compartment when reballasting. The added weight put my real cg at 100.4 instead of 101.7. The test would have to be re-conducted. Oh well, I’m now 200% certain of my mid weight mid cg test results. 🙂 “