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Old 17th Nov 2012, 12:44
  #30 (permalink)  
tommoutrie
 
Join Date: Jan 2002
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actually, therein lies the problem. You only need to remember a profile to fly at all because of the warped logic coming out of flight safety. The only thing you need to remember (as far as the manufacturers are concerned) is that the flaps on the CJ can come up at V2+10. On the Challenger its V2+20. Phenom its V2+1 and so on. And you always do that whether an engine fails or not. Should you lose an engine before V2+10 (for the CJ and whatever for other aircraft) you will lose a large percentage of your available thrust. You may, therefore, need a level acceleration platform to achieve V2+10 in order to raise the flaps and climb away clean. ICAO introduced two certification platforms - 400 feet and 1500 feet. You will probably remember that the straight CJ happened to be certified at 400 feet but most aircraft now are certified at 1500 feet for a level acceleration platform. The reason was to do with time available at max thrust OEI. In fact, the perversion of leaving the flaps down and climbing at higher speeds against the induced drag causes quite a serious problem - should an engine fail at higher speed when you are still in the take off flap condition, whats your plan? Just consider for a moment where you are - climbing at 160kts against the flap, engine fails at 900 feet (very common for a birdstrike) what do you do?

The reason for taking the flap up at the speed the manufacturer suggests is that is where the L/D curves are closest for the different wing configurations. What you get, therefore, is minimal pitch change, and the most efficient combination of lift and drag for the changing speeds. As soon as you are appreciably over this speed you are simply creating more drag than you need to for the lift you need and there is no case at all for doing this on take off. Its arguable that this is desirable on approach so that you have an element of drag control to help lose speed but on take off all you do is degrade the climb profile and therefore have an associated decrease in safety and increase in noise. Where does it come from?

I think there is quite a serious climb performance gradient issue here which I've done some maths on and there is also an awful lot of confusion caused by poor understanding and incorrect teaching by some of the training organisations (not just flight safety). Pilots talk about different profiles for an all engine operating take off and a loss of thrust condition but in reality they are exactly the same. I just really want to check that I'm not missing something and make sure that no manufacturer issues a manual that tells us to do what everyone is actually doing.
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