June 22-24, 2018
Now that it’s summer and the doors are off the Cavalon, I wanted to branch out a bit and stretch the legs, so to speak. Up in the Dallas/Richardson area, I have several family members so I figured a flight up there wouldn’t be too much to bite off. After making sure everyone was going to be available, and that we’d be picked up and housed for the weekend, we set our sights on the June 22-24 time frame.
Friday morning, June 22, a quick weather check showed that a later start would be better than an early one (due to low clouds). So we got to the airport, stowed our meager luggage (which is all the plane will hold) and got things ready to go. With the tank near full, full luggage and two people, this was going to be an MTOW (the aircraft is at Maximum Take Off Weight) departure.
A few weeks ago, I intentionally did a full MTOW take-off and landing, just to make sure I could do it in the summer. The roll-out was longer, of course, but I ensured the rotor was up at a higher rpm than normal before I engaged the throttle. I also kept the brake on until that moment, to ensure we had all the runway available to us.
We got off the ground without much of an issue — around 12:10pm — even though there was a density altitude of over 2500 feet! The climb out was slow so my turbocharger was engaged much longer than normal but still a lot less than the 5 minutes maximum. Before long, we were at 1500 feet and heading NNW across Lake Anahuac. On days just prior, the weather forecasters had predicted a nice tailwind. Today, though, the wind had moved around so it was
blowing from the SW, not from the south, so our anticipated tailwind was reduced to almost nothing. Still, that’s better, by a long shot, than a headwind!
The flight plan for this trip was about as simple as they get. It was a straight shot, with no deviations required. I did go under the Class B just a bit, but I was planning to be lower than 3,000 feet, so I wouldn’t come anywhere close to that airspace. Between Anahuac and Rockwall, there were no other airspace I had to avoid or otherwise deal with. Easy! The only thing left to do was get in the plane and go, and so we did. Here is a shot of the panel just after we got airborne:
There may be some readers who will wonder what everything is, so let me explain some of it. (If you’re in the know, then skip down a couple of paragraphs.) The largest component — just left of center — is an iPad Mini 4. I run my navigation software on it. The other rectangular device — just right of center — is my smart-phone. It, too, runs my navigation software. I run both for redundancy. And having two screens lets me zoom into one or look up information while leaving the other one as it is. Either or both of these devices can be connected to my ADS-B “network”, but usually I just have the iPad connected. The ADS-B allows me, among other things, to electronically “see” other aircraft that are similarly equipped.
The round instruments on either side of the smart-phone are (on the left) the airspeed indicator and (on the right) the altimeter. On the far right side are all the switches and circuit breakers that control power to all the instruments. On the far left is a cluster of analog gauges that tell me rotor rpm, engine rpm, oil pressure and temperature, water temperature and a fuel gauge. Scattered around the rest of the panel are my radio and transponder, compass, manifold pressure gauge, pressure system gauge, temp gauges, and more. At the top of the panel is where I put my SPOT locator, for emergencies. Behind it and partially obscured is the vertical card compass. There’s not a frivolous instrument on the panel, which is the way it should be. If you’re not accustomed to it, it looks complicated but with some training, it is easy to figure out.
Another great addition to the cockpit is my wonderful co-pilot! While she is not a 
pilot, she does understand a lot about aviation and is always willing to learn more. She doesn’t want to become a pilot, but she definitely wants to know enough to help me out when I need it. And, it’s fair to say, she is excellent and a great help! So, yeah, best “component” in the plane!
My first trip in the Cavalon was and still is, the longest I’ve made… from Maryland to Texas. That trip was in winter, this one is in summer, so the environment I’m flying through for this trip is surprisingly different. And I’m not just talking about temperature. Summer is full of roiling air while winter air is (usually) calmer. Summer storms can spin themselves up quickly. Winter storms are usually just associated with a known air mass, or front, and usually with a lot of advanced notice. Given all the differences it seems easy to say that winter flying is better, but none of the aircraft I’ve owned prior to this one were enclosed or had cabin heat. I have done some cross-country flights in open cockpits when air temps were in the 50’s, and it wasn’t fun. Ultimately though, one generally likes to just fly and will put up with a fair amount to do it and summer is one of those things you just put up with.
Anticipating the summer heat, I took the doors off the Cavalon and it certainly does make it less hot when on the ground. When the doors are on, I typically leave the doors open until just before I take off, and, when landing, open them as soon as I’ve landed and am taxiing. When flying above about 2,000 feet, the air gets cooler and cooler so having the doors on and closed wouldn’t be too bad, but I do like to fly low, to be able to see things and take pictures. (No doors means better photography, too.) And the time from “doors closed” to 2,000 feet can be several minutes, depending on what’s going on at the airport, so that period of time could be quite hot inside the cockpit. This flight to Rockwall will be the first time we’ve spent long periods without the doors so I was a little concerned about being wind-whipped.
I’d love to say that my concern was misplaced but I can’t. We were, indeed, buffeted constantly by the wind. It’s actually quite similar to being in a car, driving down a west Texas highway at 75 mph with the windows open versus the windows closed. It’s somewhat louder and, just as in the car with the wind blasting through the windows, you get a little worn out after a while. Even above 2,000 feet where it was a very nice temperature we still suffered from the small but constant battering. Describing it this way may make it seem bad but it wasn’t that bad. Just a little more tiring. I can easily say that compared to an open gyroplane or one of the fixed-wing ultralights I used to fly, this was still so much nicer. I may yet experiment a bit more with the doors on during the summer.
One advantage I leave behind with the doors off is being able to go much higher. Temps drop about 3-4 degrees Fahrenheit per 1,000 feet. A sweltering 96°F on the taxiway is only a warm but pleasant 88°F at 2,000 feet. (Humidity is usually lower, too, and with some wind coming inside there’s a wind chill factor as well.) If I wanted to go to 9,500 feet — something I could have done on Sunday to reduce headwinds considerably — I’d be dealing with 58°F temps… or even lower, really, because of the wind chill factor. I know, it’s surprising, but being June we didn’t bring winter coats with us. If we had had the doors on we could have gone to 9,500 feet, fired up the cabin heat and been very comfortable at 75°F. My conclusion after this flight is that anything over 2 hours may require some serious consideration of keeping the doors on.
Besides the occasional buffeting it was a pretty nice day to fly. The clouds didn’t go as high as they usually do and there was a bit of haze, but it was generally very pleasant.
The slight tailwind was nice, too, inasmuch as it allowed us to get to Rockwall Airport in a reasonable period of time… 3 hours and 18 minutes. My plan was for us to average 70 knots, getting there in 3 hours, but when the plane is fully loaded, it seems to prefer slower speeds. Honestly, after takeoff and achieving my cruising altitude, I just tend to fly the plane faster and faster up to the point where I start to feel a bit uncomfortable. There are small cues that occur at faster speeds: primarily the sound of the rotor and the shaking of the cabin. I am 100% confident the aircraft can easily withstand this increased speed, but I prefer not to.
When in smooth air I’ve gone up to the red-line of the aircraft, 85 knots, and felt comfortable. But I’ve only done that when I don’t receive those cues. I am able to go fast quite frequently when flying in winter but it’s more rare in the summer when the air is bubbly. I can’t quite put an exact number on any of it but I know when I’ve reached that point. Despite what the aircraft can handle, I simply prefer to enjoy my flight and try to feel comfortable, even if it takes me a bit longer to get to my destination. So my average speed going to Rockwall was somewhere just above 65 knots (76 mph).
Even on the best of days the Cavalon is not a fast aircraft and is not intended for only flying from Point A to Point B quickly. It excels in local flying for fun and being close to the ground to see things.
For example:
Obviously, a trip from Houston to Dallas is not trivial so the Cavalon can be used for cross-countries… it is arguably one of the best gyroplanes for cross-countries, in fact, being quite comfortable and, with doors on, isolates the occupants from the wind and can keep them warm in the winter. It also has a large fuel tank, allowing flights of 3-4 hours without stopping. And it can fly at altitudes beyond 10,000 feet, making it very versatile for short or long distances.
For this trip to Rockwall, with the doors off, the Cavalon was comfortable despite having the doors off and having to deal with occasional gusty winds. About 3 hours 18 minutes after we left Anahuac, we are in the pattern at Rockwall.
This was only the second time I had used the ‘travel cover,’ the other time on my way back from Maryland. But I had the doors on the plane, then. With the doors 
off, the travel cover doesn’t quite close off the open doors. Hmmmm. If it rained, I could easily see some water finding its way into the interior. This is something I hadn’t thought of. A quick weather check and it seemed like there was only a tiny chance of rain overnight, so I decided it was good for now. I checked with the FBO and they did have a hangar (just a covered, open-air spot, commonly called a T-cover) I could rent for the night but I decided I’d wait until Saturday night to do that.
After dinner and a fun evening with my nephew, his wife and two young sons, we got some much needed rest for the next day.
Everyone showed up at the airport around 10:30 am and the elder of the two sons got to sit in the plane while millions of pixels got altered in everyone’s cameras.
Soon enough the cloud base was high enough for some local flying so I started by taking my nephew, then my niece, then the two (much older) sons of another nephew, and then my brother. Mostly we flew to the east of the airport, out in the rural areas. Somewhere in there Brian’s wife was talked into just a quick flight around the pattern and I think she’s glad she did it… she had a smile on her face the entire 4 minutes!
I tried to record each flight so they’d have a kind of keepsake…. here is the track when my niece had her flight, heading east but then circling back around and over the lake:
At one point, we started to see some raindrops on the windshield, so after landing I quickly put the plane under its T-cover and waited a while. But that was short-lived and soon we were again flying around the area. The last flight was with my brother who had a mission for me. There were a couple of churches in Plano he wanted some aerial photos of, so I marked them in my navigation software and off we went, this time to the west.
After over-flying the two churches I realized that my nephew’s house was close by so we diverted south-southwest, took a few shots of the house as we turned, then headed back. Here is that track:
At the end of the sixth flight I rolled the Cavalon into its T-cover space for the night, chocked it and covered it, then again went to my nephew’s house. Whew. It was fun to let them enjoy the flight of a gyroplane but it’s also a bit tiring.
The next day, Sunday, the weather looked like it was going to cooperate with us, but I did note that the wind was going to be directly against us. It may be as much as a 20-knot headwind! Based on weather maps, the only altitude that may provide some relief was at 9,500 feet but, with the doors off and lack of winter clothing, that was out of the question. We knew we were going to be in for a long, slow return home.
We left around 10:30 am… again, to let some of the low clouds rise up or burn off and, in general, the air column was less hazy than the prior two days but the cloud base was still only around 3,000 feet.
Our return track was virtually identical to the one we flew on Friday. I did offset the track by a mile or two to the west just so we’d see slightly different things. But the big things like lakes were the same.
Flying into wind, objectively, wasn’t much different than flying with a tailwind. We were still subject to buffeting and gusts but, generally, we were quite comfortable and at 2,000 feet the air temperature was pleasant. But subjectively, we could look down and see the very slow progress we were making. Shadows of clouds were rushing by us, heading north, while we crawled south against a 15- to 20-knot headwind.
There were times when our ground speed was only 40-knots! Ugh. I managed to keep it up around 50-knots (ground speed) most of the time. We had to do some recalculations on fuel, of course, due to the slower ground speed (which means a longer time in the air). Ultimately we decided that we probably wouldn’t have enough fuel to make it home (and still have a normal safety margin) and did a precautionary landing at Livingston Airport where I added about 7 gallons of fuel. With the fuel already in the tank plus the added 7 gallons, we had 2 hours of flight time available to us and needed a little more than 1 hour to get home, with no diversions.
Here is the Cavalon parked at Livingston:
We also took advantage of (what we think was the) FBO’s tiny air-conditioned office, available to pilots, to gulp down our lunch and take a much needed break. Soon enough we were back in the air, with a bit more than an hour to home. Though we were anxious to get there, wishing for it didn’t do any good and our ground speed did not improve. Still, there were more interesting things to see as we looked around:
Just minutes from our home airport the clouds started to look darker, more threatening. Many of them had very dark bases and a few drops fell on us here and there. I even decided to fly around one particularly dark and low cloud as I didn’t want to be the recipient of a sudden downpour.
Based on frequent radio calls on the Anahuac CTAF there didn’t seem to be anyone in the pattern so I made a direct descent to runway 17, landed at 3:12 pm and taxied to the hangar. It had been a very long return trip. From Rockwall to Livingston we had been in the air for almost exactly 3 hours. That means a ground speed of about 52 knots! Ugh. From Livingston to Anahuac it took 1 hour and 13 minutes for an even slower ground speed of 48 knots. No wonder we were tired. Altogether that’s 4 hours and 14 minutes in the air or almost a full hour longer than our flight to Rockwall. If we had had the doors on and climbed to 9,500 feet, we likely would have avoided most of the headwind. This has caused me to have second thoughts about leaving the doors off, in summer, for long cross-country flights.
The other significant variation was that, flying near MTOW, my fuel consumption was much worse than my flight from Maryland when I was lighter and flying in the cold, dense air of January. I managed 4.4 gallons-per-hour for the 1,335 mile flight from Maryland, but this weekend’s 500 mile trip I only managed about 5.6 gallons-per-hour. The increased fuel consumption becomes more of an issue when fighting a headwind! My range is definitely affected.
Overall I was very happy with the flight and performance of the Cavalon. With no special clothing or helmets required, able to eat or drink as needed (and, if we had wanted, we could have listened to some music), we were about as comfortable as driving down Highway 67 from Marfa to Presidio with the windows open… but we were a lot cooler, most of the time, and had a better view. It was great to see my family and show them the fun I’m having with my gyroplane and I loved the quality time I spent in the air with my wife. Can’t imagine a nicer weekend!
To see the full track and where the photos were taken, check out my Ramblr page for this flight: http://rblr.co/gLLD
I made a short video showing my family members’ smiles as they fly with me (no music, so, you might want to mute it):
Statistics:
Anahuac to Rockwall:
. Distance: 217.86nm (250.7 sm)
. Time: 3:18 (3.31) hrs
. Average speed: 65.82 nm/hr avg speed (75.74 mph)
. Fuel used: 18.5 gallons
. Fuel consumption rate: 5.59 gph
Rockwall to Livingston:
. Distance: 155.92nm (179.43 sm)
. Time: 3.01 hrs
. Average speed: 51.8 nm/hr avg speed (59.61 mph)
. Fuel used: 16.9 gallons
. Fuel consumption rate: 5.61 gph
Livingston to Anahuac:
. Distance: 58.86nm (67.73 sm)
. Time: 1:13 (1.22) hrs
. Average speed: 48.25 nm/hr avg speed (55.51 mph)
. Fuel used: 6.9 gal
. Fuel consumption rate: 5.65 gph
Entire trip:
. Distance: 432.64 nm (497.87 sm)
. Time: 7.54 hrs
. Average speed: 55.29 nm/hr avg speed (66.03 mph)
. Fuel used: 42.3 gallons
. Fuel consumption rate: 5.61 gph (considerably worse than my 4.4 gph from Maryland to Texas, but for that trip I was lighter and it was in the winter)
Also, I spent almost 2 hours in the air, combined, with my Dallas-based family members.
My average altitude overall was at 1,971 feet.
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