ORIGINAL: dumorian
But the gasser is just so obvious that I do pay attention to the sound. And the delay due to distance is messing with me. At one point I did a sort of stall rudder aileron turn into a dive... it was moving on pretty good on the way down and I was throttled down thinking I don't want to pull up from this under power... but the darned noise was telling me the throttle was still up in spite of my moving it to idle.
How far out do you fly??
The speed of sound at sea level, under standard conditions is 1,080 feet per second, which is just a couple hundred feet under 1/4 mile by the way. On a warm day, the difference would be much less, as the less dense the air, the faster sound travels.
So even that far out, the engine sound would get to you in about 1 second - maybe less on a warm day. Flying at say 60 mph (which would be pretty fast for this plane), you'd travel 88 feet in a second. At 1/4 mile out, you wouldn't even notice a linear movement of 88 feet.
If that's still too much to know what's going on, I'd suggest ignoring the engine sound and just trust in your radio commands - when you hit idle on the throtle stick, believe that it's what you've got.
The next question though is what's the transit time for the throttle change and then what's the engine response time for that new command?
If you are much closer in, that delay in the exhaust sound getting to you is totally insignificant.
So you can see why I suggest to just ignore the specific exhaust sound, unless of course it stops. Then you've probably got a deadstick and the plane is much too far away to see if the prop is still rotating or not. Mind you, you'll notice a power failure really quickly since the plane will start to descend, regardless of what you do with the throttle stick. [sm=what_smile.gif] [sm=drowning.gif]