Hello James,
Rich Henning put his own air conditioning system together but did use an external condenser duct/housing from AirFlow Systems. Rich contends that his Legacy is faster with the external housing. Russell Steiner installed an AirFlow Systems AC in his Legacy. It looks very nice and one hardly notices it on the bottom of the Legacy. AirFlow Systems and Bill Genevero have been making AC systems for experimental aircraft for a number of years and have an excellent reputation.
Unless you live in a hot and/or humid climate I would be reluctant to add the 25 to 30 lbs of weight of an AC system to a Lancair Legacy. Until recently I live in Houston Texas and considered an AC as mandatory safety of flight equipment for summer Legacy (bubble canopy) flights in that very hot and humid region. People who have not experienced Houston in August cannot fully appreciate the extreme climate. So I worked with Flightline AC/John Strain, http://www.flightlineac.com/ to develop an AC system for the Legacy that didn’t introduce additional drag from the external condenser and could be removed in a few minutes when the payload capability was more important than cockpit environmental control (internal electric compressor and condenser). You can learn more about it at our website below. Although Flightline has many AC systems flying in a variety of aircraft, this particular implementation in a Legacy has not been flight tested yet…
Our Legacy airplane is not yet flying because of a shortage of time to work on it and the time spent developing modifications for our Legacy. Also, for over a year our project has been at a standstill with my wife Allyson and I on assignment in Colorado and the Legacy is still in our hangar in Houston. We just bought a hangar last week, though, at the Rocky Mountain Metro Airport (near Boulder, CO) and will be moving the project up to Colorado in the next few weeks. I notice you’re based in Loveland, CO just about an hour north. Once we get settled in please come by for a visit.
Back to air conditioning... I think the environmental control provisions Doug Brunner outlined (shades, slightly open canopy on the ground) should be fine for the summer climate here in Colorado. I would not go to the trouble, expense, and weight of installing an AC system if most of your flying will not be in hot locations. Since I’ve already installed mine, and it’s easily removable, I will have one. It will be nice on those few hot summer days here, where the sun is particularly more intense with a mile less air to filter it, when taxiing or loitering around at low altitude. It will be resting on a shelf in the hangar most of the year.
The common advice to keep it simple and light weight should be your dominant policy/philosophy as your build your airplane. Also, developing improvements/modifications will add considerable time to the project – more than you can imagine – our project is witness to that. The key word is developing mods, not incorporating available mod’s. As good as the Lancair Legacy’s stock kit is it has some weaknesses. Some of the mod’s available actually reduce build time because of better part fits than the stock parts.
The Lancair Legacy is an excellent airplane and the community now has the benefit of over 10 years of flight history. That history has shown a couple of things that can bite us. The Legacy has relatively light stick forces compared to certified aircraft and a high performance wing that won’t give the pilot much warning as it approach a stall condition. So installing an angle of attack sensor/indicator system is advised by most and the Legacy stock wing is already setup for the Advanced AOA System http://www.advanced-flight-systems.com/Products/AOA/aoa.html originally developed by a Lancair builder and pilot – Jim Franz.
Also, although the Legacy’s ancestors the Lancair 360/320’s, can fly with the canopy unlatched without incident, the Legacy’s slightly different shape is not so forgiving of flight with the canopy unlatched. The accident of a Legacy departing from Sun N Fun a few years ago appears to have an unlatched canopy as a root cause – control instability that led to wing stall at low altitude. And we have a canopy unlatched non-fatal accident with the surviving pilot reporting hyper-sensitive pitch control and instability that resulted in a crash landing (in Colorado by the way). I believe the pilot reported on it in the LML – worth a search.
The design of the stock Legacy canopy latch mechanism allows the canopy to be down in its latched position but not be latched. Then after takeoff as the pressures change the canopy will pop open and change the airflow over the horizontal stabilizer. So, it could improve flight safety to have an indicator on the panel that the canopy is down and latched, or not – simple enough to do with a couple micro switches (on canopy and latch handle) and a red light on the panel. Also, before this issue was known, I’d developed a mod that props the canopy up an inch when unlatching it to help get it open. It has the benefit of not allowing the canopy to go all the way down to its latched position unless it is actually latched. That feature helps one recognize that the canopy isn’t latched since the wind and prop wash coming in the cockpit serves as an indicator, too. The mod is described on Don Barnes’ Legacy website in the Builder’s Tips section http://lancairlegacy.com/tips_canopy_fixes.html . I was very happy to see Jim Thomas report on the LML that it helped him recognize that his canopy wasn’t latched before takeoff once and that it might have saved his life.
On our Legacy, we’ve adopted wing root fairings by Ron Jones/ Legacy Innovations http://legacy-innovations.com/about_us.html , closing inboard gear door mod by Adam Molny http://www.ronk-air.com/ and of course the improvements we’ve developed ourselves (overhead adjustable rudder pedals, cockpit and panel redesign). Andy Chiaveta/Aerochia http://aerochia.com/ has developed numerous improvement for the Legacy, especially for performance improvements and racing, that are worth considering.
Best of luck as you set off on this adventure. Come on down for a visit in a month or so after we’ve got our Legacy project moved up to Colorado.
Valin Thorn
Legacy Project
Soon to be in Colorado
Starflight, Inc.
1145 Timber Lane
Boulder, CO 80304
281.486.4663
http://www.starflight.aero/legacy
-----Original Message-----
From: Lancair Mailing List [mailto:lml@lancaironline.net] On Behalf Of James Seilbach
Sent: Friday, October 12, 2012 5:48 AM
To: lml@lancaironline.net
Subject: [LML] New Legacy Project
Hello,
I am starting a new Legacy Project in January with 2 weeks of builder assistance in Oregon. I will be building it a KFNL in Colorado. I am trying to decide which options to build into my project and have been exhaustively scouring the internet looking for ideas/suggestions. I have learned a lot from searching through the archives of this list, Thank you!
One option I am considering is AC, and it looks like N33RH had a pretty interesting AC installation with a duct on the bottom of the aircraft. I haven't been able to find out where it came from. I believe the aircraft was built by Rich Henning, and I found a website with some information on it (http://www.lancairlegacy.com/RHGroup.html), but the contact info, email and phone number, are out of date. I spoke with Lancair and they do not have any updated contact information for him either. Does anyone have current contact information for Rich, possibly he is still subscribed to this list?
Thanks in advance!
James Seilbach
james@seilbach.com
970-691-9305
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