"I am quite confident that a test pilot can replicate those numbers [performance 'book' numbers] in the factory airplane 50 percent of the time. I can also tell you that with my level of experience, in a 60-year-old airplane, there was a day I couldn't do it." Dave Swartz speaks from experience. Swartz is an aeronautical engineer with the FAA’s Aircraft Certification Service and a pilot. He's also a survivor of a takeoff accident. As Swartz explains in his article More than Math: Understanding Performance Limits in the May/June issue of FAA Aviations News, "It's really a mixed bag…One of my mistakes was taking the book numbers too seriously. They didn't take into account the tailwind I didn't know I had." Full article.
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FAA_News Jun_2009.pdf |
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