Flight 36, expanding the envelope

Another great flight. During the pre-flight I took greater care than usual to make sure that all stuff in the RV was secured or put back in the hangar.

As I already have the basic data needed for Version 1 of the POH/Flight manual, it is time to start thinking about less essential things to verify. One of these things is to test some basic aerobatic maneuvers.

I don´t plan on doing any competition aerobatics or other types of advanced flying, I do not have a fuel pickup that can handle negative Gs, nor an oil system capable of sustained inverted flight.

I decided to start with two of the most classic maneuvers, the barrel roll and looping.

After reading about other RV-14/A pilots doing aerobatics in this model, I decided to follow their suggestion and use a higher speed than what I think I will use when more experienced in this aircraft. This means using 155-160kt IAS as entry speeds for these two maneuvers. It is stated that one does not have to use the normal IAC 4G pull for the looping entry and pull out (less is ok), 4G was anyway what I aimed for.

Reviewing the log shows that my feel for G forces are not way off but not great either, during the entry pull i maxed at 4.88G and for the pull out I used  a max of 3.79G. Other interesting numbers is that I left the looping at only 100 feet below the entry alt and my speed only dropped 3 knots. The top was about 800 feet above the baseline, max/min vertical speed was 9670/-10232, all these figures are from the 1/s G3X log, I will review the internal faster updating log later.

The left and right barrel rolls was done by doing 2G pull up to place my shoes at the horizon and then about 75% aileron inputs while maintaining between 0.5 and 1 positive G. No rudder inputs (at least not deliberate) was made. during the rolls, the altitude went up by 165 and down by 134 feet compared to the starting altitude. Logs are great to have!

My external camera got tilted, I made the best of it :/