This question is for people that have altimeters on board: what is a typical sport flight's highest altitude - not necessarily "out-of-sight" verticals but "typical" sport flights with loops, split-s', etc.? Looking for a comfortable number to stay under and how to visualize it.

Thanks in advance</p>

Flying my EDFs with the Eagle Tree GPS on-board, I was surprised to see pretty much all my flights were under 400' and many under 300.

Turbine guys like to pull bigger uplines than I typically ever did with my EDFs, so maybe a couple hundred feet more.

Same here, under 400ft never gone above even with a prolonged up line, this may have something to do with my advancing eye sight. LOL Have to admit it was a supprise, this is with a GPS on board my Elan, I think I have been higher when first trying out the vectored thrust on the Rookie for the first time, but comfortable height for me seems to be under 400ft as a natural sight line.

Mike

Your question got me looking back though my old Eagle Tree files. I did find a couple that went over 400', though not many. This one was the highest one I found at 675'.

Here is the airplane, a chart of the flight, and the flight path as seen on google earth (no, I did not really fly off behind myself, those points are GPS errors where the receiver was blanked out by the main flight batteries it was sitting on).

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Thanks guys! Interesting info!

1350 on my gps Eagle Tree

I'm with Marvin!

I've gone over 1600ft once or twice in my Hotspot but it was a real challenge and boy did the plane ever get small. Here's a chart from a couple years ago, breaking 1200ft 2x. Its interesting to get a feel for verticals like this, knowing what your airspeed was prior to turning it around. It gives you a whole new feel for the performance of your jet.

I've tried the GPS expander (the older one) and found it tended to straight line a lot of the corners if you were too fast. it might have also had trouble tracking satellites, since we were somewhat shielded in a valley. The images below are from different flights.

Excellent system in my opinion.

Kelly

I usually pull at least one vertical per flight, around 950-1000 feet, takes about 6 seconds. E/tree alt and ASI standalone.

Hey Kelly,

Did you apply a scale factor to the speed? I don't see anything even close to being over 200 - even in the dives.

PaulD

Yeah, that was a few years ago, before getting a feel for the airframe and it had a different engine setup... Trying to dig up a chart from a power dive, but this is all I have on hand for 200+. The avg velocity was 165 vs 125... It becomes pretty apparent at these throttle settings just how much fuel a turbine can consume if you're pushing it hard.

Kelly