Well, it’s a long time coming. Seriously. I was just looking back, and it’s been 4 YEARS since we flew with a nose pant. Hard to believe. We took that first flight with the nose gear pant on 8/24/10, and within a week (where we took 1 trip with pictures) had shattered it. We had noted a good speed increase, but we did so little flying with it you start to doubt yourself over time. Well, after flying the new pant we can confirm the change is big. Where we would’ve run high 150s or just a tick over 160 kias at 25 squared (down low, say 3,000′ MSL) full rich without the pant, Elizabeth was running over 170 kias and climbing (it was bumpy so holding altitude was tough). We’ll get more data when we can lean it out and go somewhere, but a very nice bump. We still need to install the gear leg fairings, which folks expect to add another knot or 2, so that would be very nice indeed. Stay tuned on that.
I also made some larger vortex generators and test flew those. You can read more about the details here, but basically Velocity builder/owner David Ullman did some work to determine the VG size required to reattach the high energy air to the fuselage. I made a set, and we saw about 15 degrees improvement. I’ll paint and mount them permanently soon, and I suspect we’ll see even a bit better performance when the tape is removed and I mount them more precisely.
Posted By: Brett FerrellMonday October 13th, 2014 at 8:25 PM