Category: Testing

Here’s an update from about 37 hours since the first flight. I found a few hours ago that I was getting high oil temperatures. This turned out to be an indication of several minor factors that were working together. First, the ambient temperatures started rising with the arriving spring season. Second, I didn’t really come…

Today I continued adding ballast to the Bearhawk to test how it performs at heavier weights.  My ballast is 80 pound bags of concrete, so I started with 160 pounds in the back seat.  The weight wasn’t really noticable during a few stalls and some phugoid tests.  Since I was flying with close to half…

I have found that the engine is running a little less smooth than I think it should. This is a challenging problem, in part because it may be running just fine. I have a fair amount of experience in single-engine piston airplanes, but most of it is not in recent times. At idle, I hear…

Last week I drove down to Charlotte to pick up the airworthiness certificate. I got back into town with it just as a cold front did, and it took these 9 days to get a day with the right combination of me being in town and the weather being good. The weather was perfect all…