pmccoy
Well Known Member
I had an interesting flight this week. Flew one of my normal routes between Chino, CA and Big Bear Lake, CA. On the way home I was direct to Chino on flight following to go through the maze of Southern California airspace. After take off from Big Bear, it's normally a 22 minute flight with a nice 300 to 400 ft per minute decent the entire way. This particular flight seemed to have lots of traffic call outs from ATC. I was on an altitude hold at 6,500, then another at 4,500. As I was getting closer to Chino the altitude hold was not being released. I saw a couple of planes pass about 1,000ft below my path. When I was 7 miles out, I was still at 4,500 on hold. Time to slow way down. I know I can slow down the RV-9A pretty quickly, but I can't slow it down and loose a bunch of altitude at the same time. This is not a surprise to anyone, but I had to be thinking about it if I wanted to nail the upcoming landing. When ATC released me for my final VFR decent into Chino, I was 5 miles out and had already slowed to 75-80 knots with flaps out. The issues was I now had to drop almost 4,000ft in the last five miles on final. No problem since I had slowed down first. Pulled the rest of the power and floated down with full flaps at 65-70 knots. Put her down just at the end of the runway, after having one of my slowest final approaches on record. If your flying a one of the short wing RV's with a constant speed prop, you might read this and wonder what's up. I did my transition training in a 7A and was amazed at how fast we could drop altitude with the power out. With my fixed pitch prop and larger wing, the 9A flies great. I really love it. Sometimes you just have to keep your head in the game and make sure you are doing the appropriate planning as ATC modifies you normal approach.
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