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Old 2nd Oct 2006, 14:13
  #11 (permalink)  
IO540
 
Join Date: Jun 2003
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That one has a ceiling of 25k which should get you above anything that doesn't "stick up". Especially with a turbo.

However:

I have scrapped a number of flights this summer due to forecast tops around the departure/destination of around 22k. On the face of it you would be OK there but in all those cases I found that these high tops were due to the stuff being pushed up; they were not the normal stratus cloud which rarely seems to top 16k. In these cases I was looking at the 0C layer being about 10k so one would have had 12k of freezing IMC to climb through. Rightly or wrongly I would not do that without full TKS.

So it seems to me that if one is to make use of a 25k operating ceiling, one also needs all over de-ice.

Lancair love the 25k ceiling because it enables them to achieve very impressive TAS figures. But can you imagine the oxygen flow rate? Over 18k you also need a mask, not a cannula, and you can't use a demand regulator with a mask, so you are looking at a flow rate about 4x higher than it would be with a cannula+demand reg. I would be suprised if the oxygen lasted as long as the fuel
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