Here’s a nice video of our Zenair CH-701 amphibian making a takeoff and landing during Oshkosh AirVenture 2008 at the Oshkosh seabase.
Our Zenair has the Rotax 912S 100HP engine with 3-blade Warp Drive propeller. We removed the fixed leading edge slats last year to improve cruise speed and glide performance (at a slight penalty to high-angle climb rate).
For an idea of the takeoff performance in the video, we were off the water in ~11 seconds and less than 1000′ with 1 pilot, normal water gear, 10 gallons of fuel in calm winds. For water takeoffs we use 1/2 flaps.
Call weather on Thursday provided a great day for flying action. We took our CH-701 out for an hour of landings and takeoffs ourselves. The forecast for the rest of the show looks favorable for continued calm-water operations.
We’ve posted the first of many photos from Tuesday. As we get time to upload ones from our other cameras we’ll add more. We also have some video of the Albatross, Cessna Caravan, and Piaggio in action we’ll be posting after the show when we have our hi-speed internet connection back.
Yesterday has a day for flying boats with the arrival of an Grumman Albatross, the Piaggio twin pusher seaplane, and the new SeaMax experimental.
The 1st day of Oshkosh was fairly quiet. A good north breese kept casual seaplane flying to a minimum until mid-afternoon. Following the airshow, we repositioned our Zenair CH-701 Amphibian from Whitman Field to the Seaplane Base where it will stay for the week.
We’ll try and update photos daily through the week.
We heard the unfortunate news today about adventurer Steve Fossett disappearing during what by accounts was a simple pleasure flight in good weather. He departed the Flying M Ranch southeast of Reno, NV in a Citabria Super Decathlon Monday morning on a local flight and did not return. The Flying M Ranch is owned by the Hilton Family of hotel fame. Finding the ranch on a map wasn’t easy - so we’ve created the simple map below showing the location of the Flying M. We suggest you view the map in Google Earth to get an appreciation for the mountainous terrain nearby.
For best results when viewing Google Earth files, it’s best to always have the latest version. The easiest way to do this is to install Google Earth via the ‘Google Pack’ from Google. The Google Pack is free, and will keep all your Google applications up to date. To get Google Earth via the Google Pack, use the button below:
Update:We appreciate the wonderful response we’ve been getting about our Airport Videos Google Earth layer below! We’ve got an inbox full of corrections, deletions, and new videos to work through thanks to your help. If you’ve saved the Airport Video layer to your ‘My Places’ folder in Google Earth, it will update automatically each time you load it.
It’s been a long time coming, but yesterday’s release of Google Earth 4.2 covered widely on the internet it is now possible to embed flash videos, such as those on YouTube into the windows version of Google Earth.
