Aero-Tips!
A good pilot is always learning -- how many times have you
heard this old standard throughout your flying career? There is no
truer statement in all of flying (well, with the possible exception
of "there are no old, bold pilots.")
Aero-News has called upon the expertise of Thomas P. Turner,
master CFI and all-around-good-guy, to bring our readers -- and us
-- daily tips to improve our skills as aviators. Some of them, you
may have heard before... but for each of us, there will also be
something we might never have considered before, or something that
didn't "stick" the way it should have the first time we memorized
it for the practical test.
Look for our daily Aero-Tips segments, coming each day to
you through the Aero-News Network.
Aero-Tips 07.18.06
I was training a pilot in a new-to-him Beech A36. The A36 is the
larger, six-seat, conventional ("straight") tail variant of Beech's
60-year-old Bonanza design, and the immediate predecessor to the
current-production glass cockpit G36.
Like many A36 owners, my client bought the airplane for personal
and business use, typically flying alone or with one passenger on
board but sometimes with more passengers and their baggage. The big
Bonanza's aft cabin, with four seats in a "club" arrangement and a
small aft baggage bin, looks tailor-made for such use.
But "weight"
But wait -- when we got to the
Weight and Balance portion of our ground school we looked up
specific his airplane's useful load, 1111 pounds (from its Weight
and Balance information). Add full fuel (74 gallons usable, 444
pounds) and the full-fuel cabin load is 667 pounds. That's not even
four people -- and THAT assumes an FAA-standard 170-pound adult!
And it leaves no weight for baggage.
Note: This all assumes the resulting
airplane is loaded within the critical center of gravity envelope
-- a topic for a future Aero-Tips.
Options
Now, this particular A36 has air conditioning (70 pounds), a
standby generator, and a lot of other options that eat up useful
load. This is not a Bonanza-specific problem--there are very few
airplanes that can carry full fuel and all the seats filled, and
still be within safe (and FAA/insurance legal) weight limits.
This leaves you several options:
- Leave people behind
- Ship heavy baggage ahead to destination
- Spend thousands (or tens of thousands) for modifications that
include a tested safe (and legal) gross weight increase...
accepting the performance reduction that results from flying at
higher weights
- Take off with less than full fuel and fly shorter legs
What? That last item sounds sacrilegious to many people, who are
taught (by well-meaning instructors) to always take off with full
fuel. But in the case of my client, taking off with half-full tanks
adds 222 pounds to the payload, leaving about two hours' fuel with
IFR reserves (assuming careful engine management).
Can you ignore the weight limit and still fly? Not safely (you
don't know what will work until you test fly-with unsuspecting
passengers as "test equipment"), and certainly not legally. My
client put it best:
- it's a moral question whether you can expose passengers to an
untested flight regime; and
- operating within limits is all about piece of mind.
Aero-tip of the day: Considering purchase of a
specific airplane? Ask the seller to give you a copy of the Weight
and Balance information before you go any further. Make
calculations for the way you plan to fly the airplane to see if it
meets your mission, and what options you might have to exercise to
stay safe.