Raptor Aircraft

midwestpa24 said:
Whatever the cause, I just thought the idea of, here's a random block of wood, lets glue it to the floor under the pedal, seemed kind of slapped together.
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The weight zip tied inside a zip lock bag right next to control cables bothered me way more than a range of motion stop.
 
231TC said:
Lucky that block of wood was closer at hand than a block of lead, or he would have stuck the block of lead under the pedal.
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You're probably right! Surprised he didn't wedge an extra radiator in there.
 
^that would have made too much sense. With heat rising putting it in the lowest part of the plane (footwell) is the most logical place
 
painless said:
Those guys are awesome. Totally rooting for them to be successful.
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Hopefully they will have a usable airplane when they are done, but I'm extremely skeptical of them meeting their weight and performance goals. Comparing their design to an RV-8, I just don't see it happening. Retractable gear will get them something over the RV-8's speed, but 65 mph? I also don't believe they can get the empty weight down to 750 pounds. That's what a 100 hp LSA weighs.
 
Said today he's only burning about 6 gallons for a 40 minute flight. So that's 9gph, yet his gauges are usually saying what 18gph?
 
Supposedly fixed the cooling so he can climb higher and do more testing, but still flying laps at 4000 feet today. For some reason, he climbed a few hundred feet just before descending to land.
 
Wow. Today's flight had a hell of a descent at the end of it. Close to 1500 fpm down final, 800 fpm average descent. Wonder if something spooked him?
 
Looking back through his flight history it's not that much more than his usual. He might have just misjudged and turned final too soon or maybe the tower needed him to get in faster.

I'd be staying as high as I could as long as I could too in this thing.
 
231TC said:
Supposedly fixed the cooling so he can climb higher and do more testing, but still flying laps at 4000 feet today. For some reason, he climbed a few hundred feet just before descending to land.
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He's not doing any testing. He's flying around in circles filming himself, and when back on the ground, narrating the video with utterly ridiculous statements and conclusions.

His often stated goal is to put 40 hours on the aircraft. For now, that's the only thing that matters.
 
Salty said:
Looking back through his flight history it's not that much more than his usual. He might have just misjudged and turned final too soon or maybe the tower needed him to get in faster.

I'd be staying as high as I could as long as I could too in this thing.
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Misjudged...like every time he's landed and had 4 reds.
 
PM knows better than the folks who developed VASI and PAPI and unlike the RV, Cirrus, and Velocity, the Raptor has its own descent profile.
 
Another half hour flight today. Again climbed just before descent to land. Looks like he's still having heat problems when he tries to go to 5000.
 
Oh, he declared an emergency on his way in. Low oil pressure.
 
Looks like he made it. LiveATC got hard to understand, but no news about a crash.

Edit: They did FOD checks on the runway, so that's good news.
 
Sounds like the expected (inevitable?) fail scenario occurred today, very fortunately in close proximity to the airport. FWIW, he seems to have handled it well; between LiveATC and FlightRadar24 tracking, it does appear he made it to the runway in one piece, and his voice was understandably urgent but fairly calm.

Thankfully he didn't lose the engine on an extended and too-low final...

Bacho said:
Anyone have a link to the live ATC?
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https://archive.liveatc.net/kvld/KVLD-Feb-04-2021-1630Z.mp3

The emergency declaration is at 14:30.
 
kyleb said:
The pay-off is a beer at SOS Brothers (but if you're there, first round is on me anyway). I will pay for the beer bong delivery method if you choose to go that direction. The over/under is based on flight hours. The deciding event is that something aft of the firewall fails (a failure that would leave him dead-stick or soon to be dead-stick) or has a pending failure that is (hopefully) caught in a post-flight inspection.
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nauga said:
I can't think of a single new design auto conversion where I'd feel safe taking that bet...but since I'm the one that called you on it I'll take it. :D
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Looks like I owe @kyleb a beer.

Nauga,
whose word is good
 
flightwriter said:
Sounds like the expected (inevitable?) fail scenario occurred today, very fortunately in close proximity to the airport. FWIW, he seems to have handled it well; between LiveATC and FlightRadar24 tracking, it does appear he made it to the runway in one piece, and his voice was understandably urgent but fairly calm.

Thankfully he didn't lose the engine on an extended and too-low final...



https://archive.liveatc.net/kvld/KVLD-Feb-04-2021-1630Z.mp3

The emergency declaration is at 14:30.
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Declares emergency at 14:30
Reports "lost engine" at 16:30
 
nauga said:
Looks like I owe @kyleb a beer.

Nauga,
whose word is good
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This confused me first reading through until I realized the engine on this thing is aft of the firewall.
 
I thought he sounded stressed (for him) when he first called that he wanted to return, about 2 minutes before declaring the emergency. Probably was already seeing indications of what was to come.

Right about 9.5 flight hours before the engine quit.
 
231TC said:
Right about 9.5 flight hours before the engine quit.
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Sounds reasonable.

PS, not all auto conversions are problematic. Diamond, err, Austro, was eventually able to take a Merc diesel and build a competent product with it. But routinely flogging something to within inches of its life and making up your own rules and expecting the world to cater to your imagination seems to eventually take its toll

But I'll reserve further judgment until we have some idea of what happened

One thing for sure, glad he's okay. Aviation is a serious business and can quickly turn deadly. And good on him for declaring, at least there's some sound ADM there.
 
231TC said:
I thought he sounded stressed (for him) when he first called that he wanted to return, about 2 minutes before declaring the emergency. Probably was already seeing indications of what was to come.

Right about 9.5 flight hours before the engine quit.
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It lasted longer than I thought it would with the temps he was pushing.
 
I'm interested to hear the explanation and the path forward from here.
 
This would be a great excuse to put an airplane engine on it "just for now to continue test flights." Then the replacement Audi never materializes, the fans forget all about it (if asked they'll say "I never liked the Audi anyway") and the plane is several hundred pounds lighter without making a new prototype.
 
231TC said:
This would be a great excuse to put an airplane engine on it "just for now to continue test flights." Then the replacement Audi never materializes, the fans forget all about it (if asked they'll say "I never liked the Audi anyway") and the plane is several hundred pounds lighter without making a new prototype.
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Exactly what I was thinking. Makes a great opportunity to put the super fancy FADEC Lycoming on it, for example.
 
231TC said:
I thought he sounded stressed (for him) when he first called that he wanted to return, about 2 minutes before declaring the emergency. Probably was already seeing indications of what was to come.

Right about 9.5 flight hours before the engine quit.
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Sounded more like he was fighting back tears to me... understandable.
 
Sierra_Hotel said:
I'm interested to hear the explanation and the path forward from here.
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This would be a good time for him to evaluate what he has. From my (extremely limited) vantage point, what he has is a very overweight airframe that does not appear as if it will meet his anticipated performance goals, and an unsuitable/unreliable powerplant system that would need an enormous amount of development to be usable. Look at how long it took Continental to create their CD line of engines.
 
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