Donald, I feel your pain (and joy)! Congratulations.
I have over 11,000 hours in jets and after my first "beginner's luck" squeaker in the 'coupe, my next half-dozen landings were a crash-and-dash. But on the trip home from Washington, I finally started getting a better feel for the airplane and being able to pick up clues to managing my sink rate and glidepath. By the time I got back to Texas, I was squeaking them on again. For some reason, my best landings are usually at my home field now. There have been a lot of discussions about inaccurate airspeed indications in Ercoupes. Most people attribute it to old ASI's, but in my case it turned out to be a static line that was almost broken at the brass ferrule going into the "B" nut at the back of the instrument. I was reading about 10-12 MPH high. When I flew with Hartmut in Berlin, we dis some stalls and discovered his indicated 10-15 MPH low. He started troubleshooting a pitot leak. Point is, before you start relying too much on your ASI for approach planning, make sure it's accurate. The easiest way to get a ballpark idea is to see if the airplane stalls within a couple MPH of charted stall speeds. If not, use your GPS (make sure it's set for MPH, not KTS) and fly on each cardinal heading for a couple minutes and record your indicated and GPS speeds. Ed Burkhead has a link to the procedure on his web page: http://www.reacomp.com/true_airspeed/index.html . Once you know with confidence what your airspeed is doing, you'll be able to find that "sweet spot" and approaches and landings will be a breeze! Best, Dave --- In [email protected], "Donald" <dongen...@...> wrote: > > Well, after two months of ownership, and never having even ridden in or flown > an Ercoupe, I got a couple hours in today (with my CFI). > Poor old soul has its tail drooping about 5 inches, a generator that will not > charge until you get the rpms up to 2400, CHT that don't work, fuel valve > that will not shut off, window welting so worn and missing the windows will > hardly slide, as well as a few other squawks. Despite all that, she got me > off the ground and back again more than a half dozen times. > First impressions are that the climb rate is nothing to brag about when > probably overloaded, and my skills in landing after being away for over 18 > years really sucks. I suspect coming in too fast is the problem, will have > to work on better landings if I don't finish tearing the main gear off first. > Despite all that, I really enjoyed the afternoon in the air and looking > forward to many more. >
