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Eddie's Zodiac XL Project
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Date: 5-10-2008
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Number of Hours: 1.00
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Manual Reference:
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Brief Description: Fitted the wing fairings
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I forgot to take photos today, as I was so distracted with the fitting and initial test flying with the wing fairings finally fitted. I have yet to collect some worthwhile data, but one thing I can say for certain is that stall speed has been reduced quite dramatically. I did 4 circuits in all, but it was at the wrong time of the day as the thermals where a little rough.
First take off was with half flap and climb seems to have improved but I was getting bounced too much for this to be accurate. In circuit the big thing I noticed was the response of the ailerons is much improved, they are much more in balance with the elevator. Cruse downwind required 200 rpm less to fly at 110lknots; pervious was 2600rpm. Landings, it seems to take a little more effort to slow the plane down and the flair is greatly improved.
I did a few more landings with various stages of flap and it feels like a different plane.
Last landing was no flap and this one blew me away, previously the aircraft would stop flying at around 35knots, this now seems to have drop by a good 8knots or so (I'll need to do lots more landings to confirm this, but it was great, even when the stall did occur it still wanted to keep flying. This would have to have been my best landing to date and I now have 36 happy hours on the airframe.
Next week I'll post some photos, the fairings look fairly ugly in primer at the moment; I'll also gather some data in nice smooth early morning air.
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