Originally Posted by
A Squared
So, how much experience do you have flying recip airliners from that era? I have quite a few thousand hours in them. Different airplane, same engine. I can tell you a couple of things, one is that on a hot day, in good VFR conditions it was absolutely normal to make a very shallow initial climb. The reason being that you wanted to build airspeed rapidly, to increase the cooling airflow over the cylinders, which will be hovering around redline very quickly, and also to more quickly reach the airspeed at which you make the first power reduction and also allows you to turn off the ADI, which causes the fuel air mixture to enriched. And yeah, you most certainly do get a positive rate indication on your instruments with a very shallow climb like that. Gear retraction at my airline was called as soon as the VSI was above zero and the altimeter was showing positive movement. the would be pretty much what you saw in the video. There's aren't turbine aircraft, they don't fly like turbine aircraft, you don't fly them like turbine aircraft, and they don't look like turbine aircraft when you're watching them.
Only airplane with a radial engine I have ever flown was a T-6/Harvard (also in South Africa). Of course that is no airliner and it has plenty of power.
Anyways, from your experience would you rate the climb while over the runway (and of course still accelerating) as normal for these kind of aircraft? Of course the density altitude of at least 5,000ft (not sure about the OAT that day) plays a big role, too.
I am just interested if they still had power from the left engine at that point. There is no visible yaw and no bank towards the "good" engine but unfortunately you can't see the rudder on the video or any of the pictures after lift-off.
Does anybody know the blue line speed of a CV-340?