PROCEDURE:
- Climb to at least 2000 AGL. Use your own judgment here -- in a high-performance airplane with nasty stall characteristics, you might want more altitude. In a low-performance airplane with very forgiving characteristics, 2000 AGL should be sufficient.
- Slowly reduce speed until the wing or canard stalls.
- Record stall speed: 35 MPH indicated (solo)
- Approach speed is typically 1.3 Vs0. Stall speed x 1.3: 46 MPH indicated (solo)
- Climb to 2500 MSL.
- Slow to approach speed.
- Reduce power to maintain approach speed with 500 foot per minute rate of descent.
- Record approach power setting:____________________
Note: This is the ideal approach speed for this airplane. However, this speed is probably a little too slow at all but the quietest airports.
For example, at Merrill today, the tower asked me to do a 360 to allow overtaking traffic to land ahead of me. I was on final at 70 MPH at the time. I imagine I'd find the controllers being less cooperative with requests to remain in the pattern and that I would find I was told to circle over a holding point while other traffic landed if I insisted on flying approaches at 46 MPH all the time.
As always, use good judgment and do your best to be flexible when it doesn't compromise safety.
Note 2: Flight testing has verified the theoretical approach speed calculated above. 45-50 MPH works very well for a final approach speed in this airplane. I have recently begun flying final at 60-70 MPH until about a quarter mile out, then slowing to around 50 MPH on short final. This minimizes float and makes for better landings since I'm not zipping down the runway at 2-3 AGL waiting for airspeed to bleed off while in ground effect. Since adopting this technique, I have consistently made smooth landings, and have found that N600LW can make some pretty short landings. I managed to exit at taxiway J on runway 25 at Merrill the other day -- about half the landing roll (if that) of my previous landings.
