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Old 13th Apr 2011, 19:37
  #3439 (permalink)  
henra
 
Join Date: May 2010
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Originally Posted by Lonewolf_50

As above, I went back to an older thread where you cited "Flying the big jets" and am happy with the "9000-14000 fpm RoD" for a heavy. It at least puts a boundary on my question, which is good enough.
For my taste these figures seem a tad too low for an A330 @210t.

Light GA Aircraft usually spin at a vertical rate constantly surprisingly close to 6000ft/min. You can see that in most accident reports of NTSB where a light GA Aircraft spun to the ground.

Wing loading of these tends to be around 100kg/sqm.
Drag rises roughly to the square of the speed.
so 4 times the wing loading should give very roughly twice the RoD. Looking at the TU154 we find that it had a wing loading of ~400 kg/sqm. RoD prior to impact given by the accident report was ~12000 ft/min. So exactly as could be expected.
In our given case the A330 had a wing loading of ~580 kg/sqm. That would result in ~14500 ft/min at S/L and ~20000 ft/min at altitude.
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