Hi Dan,

For me the altitude is most of the times a result of winds, weather, and distance.

When I flew the C182 I thought the weather is always good above FL180… Now I know that FL250 a lot of time does not get you always on top.

My plane starts getting mushy at FL240-FL250. I don’t have the winglets – not having them makes you faster at lower altitudes.

Getting up there takes a while and you burn twice the fuel. On a regular summer day (75F) at gross weight I climb up to 10.000 ft with about 1000 ft/min and after that with about 750 ft/min to keep the heads below 380…390F.

Flying in the clouds I lose up to 15 kts (the moisture makes my wing slow) plus I have some problems with paint nicks (static discharge – although I have static wicks that are grounded good).

Little ice on the wing slows you down even more.  High altitudes in combination with clouds means always a possibility of ice even if there is no airmet for ice. I flew into a peaceful looking cloud once at FL210 (no icing airmet) and got hit by supercooled drops – I almost peed my pants when I collected half an inch within 20 sec and the stall warner came on…

I use two internet tools for finding the altitude:

-          Fltplan.com : you can set up a profile for your plane (climb, cruise, decent speeds with fuel burn) – it calculates the flight time with fuel burn for different altitudes – you might find that it is more efficient in some cases to stay lower

-          Aviationweather.gov : their flight planning tool shows and forecasts the relative humidity (clouds) plus other things for the cross section of your flight – you can make decisions for staying below/going on top - very impressive!

I flew my plane now for about 250 hrs (based in OH) and I am still learning a lot – what I learned so far: the plane will go faster the higher you go but you don’t want to be up there all the time (especially if the weather is questionable)

FL320 with a climb rate of 3000ft/min and a sound icing protection would be really nice – but then we are talking about a way different budget.

Ralf

Greetings,

As I build my IV-P kit, I’m always watching with anticipation the other IV-P planes out there and how you guys are using them.  One thing that has struck me is that it appears most of you with piston IV-P’s are flying them around in the low- to mid-teens rather than in the flight levels.  I’m curious why this is the case…  Trips not long enough to justify the climb?  You want to stay VFR?  Performance or handling issues up high?  Etc.

Would love to hear from some of you on the operational practicalities of using your IV-P as a X/C traveling machine.  My expectation is that I’ll be using mine a lot on lots of 1,000nm X/C flights and am planning to fly in the FL220-FL250 range.

Thoughts?

Dan Olsen

N320DK – 320MKII, 700hrs

IV-P in progress