Jim Wilson wrote:
> Actually I tried all the way up to 80,000lbs and still ran into
> problems in the 25000ft range.  There is a little uncertaintly in just
> what I'm observing.  Basically there is a steady decrease in
> attainable airspeed.

I found one bug.  There was a property name typo* in David's changes
that hooked the global environment into YASim.  This resulted in all
temeratures at runtime (but not at solution time) being exactly 0
degrees C.  This is far too warm for the flight levels, which resulted
in an air density that was significantly lower than it should have
been.  Effectively, the airplane was performing as it it were at a
higher altitude than it was.

This improves things a bit, as does the increase of thrust to 63737
pounds (we should probably check that number in, btw).

I did discover, however, that the airplane has a very sensitive "back
of the power curve" behavior.  I had it trimmed for climb at about 230
kias (about 7 degrees of AoA), and topped out at a service ceiling of
FL220.  Gently easing down on the trim, I had it climbing at 500fpm
again at 260 kias and 4 degrees.  Then I had to go to bed, so I didn't
get a complete set of numbers.  But certainly "climbing too slow" is
part of the problem here.  You need to keep the AoA down to avoid
burning all your thrust working against induced drag.

Does anyone have good, hard climb numbers for this plane?  I mean
stuff like: "At NNN pounds gross weight, XXX feet MSL and YYY knots
TAS, the 747-400 can climb at ZZZ feet per minute."  My suspicion is
that we're being bitten by a combination of bad performance numbers
being fed to YASim, and bad pilot climb technique.

Andy

* "degC" instead of "degc".  Norman, you can fire away at the lack of
  symbol safety in the property system.  This is one circumstance
  where it's deserved. :)

-- 
Andrew J. Ross                NextBus Information Systems
Senior Software Engineer      Emeryville, CA
[EMAIL PROTECTED]              http://www.nextbus.com
"Men go crazy in conflagrations.  They only get better one by one."
 - Sting (misquoted)


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