Jim Bair

Big thank you to everyone who responded. It really helps me get a feel for the performance of the airplane. As I try to read the tea leaves and combine everyone's info, I suspect that it will fly very sweetly at 80 kts, turn into a brick at 95, and possibly cruise at 85 reasonably and even 90 if I'm in a bit of a hurry and should have just left home 10 minutes earlier. 🙂

Not sure what the headwinds being 10 deg off track has to do with this in general unless your destination is within gliding range and I didn't understand the wording anyway, but I'll attempt to answer. Also, I assume you mean by keeping it flying longer to mean longer distance? Because the wind direction has zero to do with time aloft. 1. Aviate. Keep the aircraft under control and at the airspeed you want while looking for a place to land and troubleshooting the problem. The solution may be as simple as switching a fuel valve to the full tank instead of the empty one. If that's the case, you continue your trip. 2. Navigate. If troubleshooting didn't work, and you've spotted a place to land, navigate your way to a position that you can do that successfully. To me successfully means, in order a. Don't injure anyone on the ground. b. Avoid injury to yourself and your passengers. c. Avoid damage to the plane. If we can manage this, the top two are generally taken care of. How do we do this? Try to land on the smoothest, softest (meaning avoiding trees and buildings unless we need to rip the wings off to stop the plane and save ourselves), least expensive thing possible, at the lowest possible speed. That means into the wind. That is vital. Landing downwind means way more energy to dissipate and way reduced chances of survival and way increased chances of aircraft damage. Navigating to a spot from which to conduct a successful approach is trickier than people generally realize. I am an examiner and I see people screw it up all the time on checkrides. They very often simply continue straight ahead oblivious as to wind direction and don't set up a proper pattern like they would fly at an airfield, then miss their intended landing area completely. Navigate to a spot abeam your intended point of landing on downwind at your normal pattern altitude and from there, it's a picture you've seen a thousand times. Just pretend you're on downwind and you're doing a power off landing, which you can most likely do over and over successfully. Make your life easy. What's the easiest way to get to a downwind position? Just fly directly over the field you've selected pointed into the wind at approx double your pattern altitude and then turn downwind. In the military that position is called high key and it works really well. I can do that pattern 100x straight successfully into a pretty small spot. Trying to do a straight in to the same spot, I probably couldn't do 100x straight. 3. Communicate. Sure, if you have time and it will help. Remember, it's last on the list. I have seen students have an engine failure (yes, it happens on 100% of checkrides, so it shouldn't be surprising) and establish best glide, have zero awareness we just flew over a really sweet field and I gave them an engine failure there so they'd have a place to go (yes, I'm such a nice guy) and then they point at the radio and say, "I'd declare an emergency on 121.5" so, I make them switch frequencies and tell me their simulated radio call, and then I answer them asking if I can be of any assistance. Then they don't know what to say. They start trying to give their position, which is usually so vague as to be useless anyway. Then they want to squawk 7700. Fine, I tell them to squawk 1234 stby, to make them twiddle the numbers, and by that time they have used up most of their altitude, they haven't chosen a landing spot, we have flown away from the only good one around, they aren't set up for a good landing anywhere, and we end up on an approach to a landing on whatever is in front of us, usually downwind, and by then they are so rattled because they're high and can't get down (because we're landing downwind) that they forget to put flaps down. Sigh....

Hi, I'm new to this forum and possibly about to purchase a Savannah S tailwheel version. Valter tells me I will have the first one in the US if I get one. I am curious as to what people are actually seeing on their speed meter when cruising along at, say, 5000 RPM with a 912ULS. Almost every manufacturer I've ever seen quotes numbers that seem to vary from a bit optimistic to wildly so and generated by the head of the sales department instead of the chief test pilot. I built a Just Super STOL some years back and don't want to end up repeating that experience. I can now say I have flown across the Great Plains in it's entirety, into the wind, at 72KIAS. I think manufacturers tend to get numbers by taking the airplane to its optimum altitude, carefully calculate the TAS, have the throttle full in, then given they are at 8,000' calculate that the engine is at 75%, and bingo, publish a cruise speed at 75% power. Then the pilot levels off at a couple thousand feet, pulls the power back to a nice setting of say 5000RPM and discovers he's doing considerably less than expected. So my question is to you folks who have practical experience with this, what do you actually see on the airspeed indicator in this scenario of a couple thousand feet and 5000 RPM? And does tricycle vs TW make any difference?