I have just bought a 1946 415-C and am looking for information about the speeds for this aircraft. I have the original manual but there have been some mods made to the aircraft over the years; the 75 continental has been upgraded to an 85, it has a bubble winsdshield, and all of the mods to make it a D model except the firewall.. Any advice out there ???
By "all of the mods" I assume you mean the restricted (9 degree) up-elevator
movement. Note that if you don't have the firewall mod, you are not a D and
can not legally use the 1400 pound gross weight.
Assuming 9-degree elevator:
Rotate around 70 or 75, it'll tell you when.
When learning to fly it, approach at 85, then
work down to 80, and never go below 75. Work
down from 80 carefully, as the line between a
nice short landing and not-enough-elevator-to-flare
varies (IAS) from plane to plane, and is rather fine.
When experimenting at these lower speeds, be
ready on the throttle so that if you pull back and
hit the stop before the nose comes up you can
get some power in to raise the nose or go around.
Flight plan for about 100MPH. You'll usually
make it, and rarely do much better.
Experiment some for best rate and angle of climb.
Most seem to give best initial rate at around 75,
but once they get going, 80 or 85 seems better.
Best angle seems to be around 70 or so. In
practice, the two speeds seem to be about the
same.
If you have the C-model 13-degree up-elevator,
then you can mess around with lower approach
speeds. However the 'book' speed of, I think it was,
68 or so is just nuts, and a recipe for a hard landing.
Bottom line is you're going to have to experiment with
your own plane's 'gaits' to see what it does against the
airspeed indicator you have. The good news is, now that
you own an airplane, you can know that one plane that
intimately. It's a real pleasurable getting-acquainted process.
Greg ============================================================================== To leave this forum go to: http://ercoupers.com/lists.htm Search the archives on http://escribe.com/aviation/coupers-tech/
