Elizabeth was out last night preparing for the “short field” she’ll be encountering tomorrow at Rough River. I put it in quotes since it’s still 3,200′, which most would not consider short, but when you’re used to over 4,500’…. Anyway, to do so she and Pete flew to Phillipsburg, a local Dayton airstrip notorious for being short, rough, narrow, and with lots of trees. Along the way they noticed that they were clipping along at an indicated and GPS ground reported speed of 181 kts! This at 3,500′, and without leaning. Now, we’ve been pretty sure that we could do over 180 if we got up a little and leaned out, in fact Scott Swing said as much when he flew our airplane, but we’d not seen that number in level flight for a variety of reasons. Very, very cool, that. I’m convinced that when we get a constant-speed propeller we’ll regularly cruise at 190 or better, but for a fixed pitch prop, our Catto is doing very nicely.
Posted By: Brett FerrellThursday September 30th, 2010 at 9:46 PM