story

za Xenon climbing at 1200ft/min

by Greg Vos
Flight Examiner

FAFK was at 15c xenon climbed out at 1200ft/m my weight 72kg and 60litres of gas 😁😁😁


With our local authorities affording us to do flights to remain current and with a nice clear day in Cape Town I headed to the local airfield last week for a bit if fun, just me no pax... in short it was time to play😈😈


I rebuilt this xenon from the ground up so I am familiar with its mechanics and as pilot it's limitations, what was a surprise is? as I was climbing out like a home sick angel I noticed something I have never seen in a Gyroplane. The rotor Rpm was coming down as I was still in the climb, normally with  Xenon we witness around 340 odd to 380 odd Rrpm, so as I was mindfully going through the aftter take off checks I was surprised to see the Rrpm coming down,  turning my left hand subconsciously in an attempt to increase rotor speed I quickly realized that I'm not in a helicopter and that as I always tell a student we cannot control the Rrpm after take of so forget about it....


 


ok so surprise turned to concern as it went through 308; then 300 and finally the display went from green to yellow and now it had my full attention 😯and settled at about 296Rrpm.


 


I quickly leveled off at just within out upper limit of 2000ft and then realized that now alone with very little weight and no ballast that I was unable to get the rotor to settle in the mid 300, alone in the circuit I was not concerned with circuit height or other traffic, and used the time to simply sit back and play .... it was an interesting few minutes that I enjoyed and realized the machine is a very diffrent animal when it's light.


I was also thinking about my older M16 I used to fly  and how I managed to pull the rotor to for me a record high if 525Rrpm in a tight turn, in fact I yanked and banked the M16 so hard I nearly passed out 😁 ...and thought how diffrent we have to fly every diffrent type of gyro.


Anyway the xenon as big and ugly as the tub is never fails to impress me it really is the Bentley of gyroplanes or Lexus, cheap to buy and easy to work on and the side by side is great for pilot pax interaction.


added some pics of the day