11th flight On today’s flight I attempted a few things I’d never done before. The first thing I did was to climb to 10,000 feet, just to do it. On the way up, EGT#3 would get up into the yellow if I climbed too long so I had to do lots of steps. I’m hoping that when my engine is broken in better my Sonex will climb better because I would guess I was climbing at about 400 FPM on average – not too impressive.
Once I got up to 10,000 feet I tried something else I’d never done. I remember watching all the warbirds do a ‘wing-over’ when they would return from a mission and decided to try this myself. So I reduced power and pulled up a little and then went hard over to the left with full rudder. After a few seconds I was pointed straight down, accelerating quickly. At this point I started to pull up to slow down (I was getting close to VNE) and guess I saw 2 or maybe 3 Gs (no G meter). It definitely got my attention. I think I’ll wait until I have more experience before I do anything like that again.
Before today’s flight, I emptied the fuel tank and applied JB weld in an attempt to fix the slight leak I have. Unfortunately, it didn’t fix my leak. Since I had the tank empty, I decided to calibrate the fuel level indicator for the Enigma at the same time. The process is pretty simple; you put the amount of fuel the enigma calls for, and then enter the base reading on the enigma for that amount of fuel. I think I had to stop at five different amounts of fuel and enter the number that the Enigma was reading for that value. It only took about 10 minutes to complete the calibration.
Flight time: 2.0 Total time: 14.1 Hours Number of landings: 3 Total landings: 45
