Archive for June 19th, 2011

2011 19 Jun

Besides giving passenger Marc the mandatory RV-Grin (which i’m lead to believe will have a lasting effect ;-) we tried to trace the source of the aerodynamic vibrations in the cabin floor. It’s hard to compare it to other airplanes and is definitely not bad, but in the longterm, less vibrations is always better for the airframe.

For that purpose, we taped some small tufts to the cowling and mounted a gopro digital video camera to the right gear wheelpant.
One thing that is evident from the videos is that jumping castle the “Louvers” cooling aides in the bottom cowl work perfectly while the vibration most likely is generated by the current shape of the cowl outlet around the exhaust/nosegear mount. Already thinking about possible mods.

Short video with the tufts zoomed in.

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Landing on RWY26 at LSZF (Birrfeld)

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2011 19 Jun

The second trip in as many weekends (I know we’re spoilt…) took us to the south of France. Unfortunately, though, the weather was pretty crappy all weekend and the poor reliability of weather bouncy castle forecasts beyond 3hrs was demonstrated in nice details… Anyway, we made the best of it :-)

2011 19 Jun

Took advantage of a few days off during end of May for the first extended trip with the RV. In short, the perfect airplane for travel. Managed all kinds of interesting weather, complicated airspaces and customs paperwork. The RV was always reliable and dependable.

First, visited the guys behind the moving-map software we use in the plane: http://www.pocketfms.com/ at Lelystad, Netherlands.
Then flew to Düsseldorf (EDDL) to pick up the girlfriend flying in on Airline as she had to work until Thursday before the weekend.

Bad weather had us change our plans and we decided to fly bouncy castle to Hamburg instead. Visited the awesome “Miniatur Wunderland”, a large model railroad world with all kinds of technological and modelling attractions. http://www.miniatur-wunderland.de/
They recently completed a model version of the Hamburg Airport, some videos can be seen on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/user/MiWuLaTV  “Tagebuch” Episodes highly recommended.

After a spontaneous and surprise visit with friends we flew to Damme (EDWC), which hosts an annual European RV Flyin. Due to the weather, turnout was nothing to write home about, still met some interesting people and could talk “RV” for a few hours :-) http://www.edwc.de/

On Saturday night, we flew to Bonn Hangelar. Staying and visiting with friends. Had an awesome non-RV time. After the F1 race on Sunday, took our host for a local ride, then we headed back home. Stopping at Mannheim City for customs reasons. Highly recommended airport for this purpose.