by Michael Stephan
We had a few first flights last month. Jay Pratt completed and flew another RV. This time an RV-6. We will hear about that one next month, and Eric Calorette flew for the first time his 4 seat Sling TSi.
We visited his project in Sherman just a few months ago, and now he can fly his project to Chapter gatherings. Congratulations to Eric and Jay!
I asked Eric how the flight testing is going and he replied: “The flight testing went well and my numbers were right in line with what the factory said they would be. T/O is pretty quick, rotate about 55 right to 15 degrees to catch and maintain 75. With the turbo providing full power to 15,000 it just keeps climbing. Most of the testing was around 5,500 feet where I’m seeing 120-130 TAS on 7 gallons an hour. The plane is a lot more slippery than a 172 and it is an effort to get it slowed down. I’m impressed with the avionics and have already done several fully coupled LPV approaches down to 200 feet.
I have a few squawks I’m working thru. The first was a FPCM (fuel pump control module) fault for about 2 seconds then clears. It happens about 40% of the time when turn on or off the #2 main fuel pump. Talking with the manufacturer they had a solution with some diodes in line with the fuel pump wires. They also identified that I have one of their old boards in the FPCM and they are sending out an upgrade.
I was also occasionally getting a VPX alert of a flap runaway. The VPX is very easy to reset the fault and I adjusted some end stops in the VPX programming.
Lastly I am getting an intermittent engine surge when I am feeding from the right tank, have both main fuel pumps on ( after switching fuel tanks) and subsequently turn off the #1 pump. I reached out to the Sling community and I am not the only one and I am still trouble shooting. The surge is associated with a very short and slight drop in fuel pressure and it feels like you’re going down the highway and someone tapped the brakes for a split second. I have tried different fuels and have not got it narrowed down yet.
I am now out of flight test and took my wife over to Cedar Mills the other day. I was a little worried about the wheel pants on the grass strip but it was a non event.”
