John Harper wrote:
: I love my turbo. It is of course a waste of time/money/etc at lowish
: altitudes, say below 8000'. But the freedom to climb at keep on climbing,
: not to mention high-performance take-off without having to worry
: about density altitude (well, not so much anyway) is enormous.
: I can climb to FL200 at a steady 500 fpm - the plane would probably
: go quite a lot higher although it is not certificated to do so and I haven't
: tried it. On long journeys going up high is a real bonus, especially over
: unfriendly terrain.

A non-turbo Comanche-260 will pretty much hold 500 fpm up to
higher than you can fly without oxygen. Unless you go full-tilt into high
altitude with O2, etc, a Comanche-260 seems to outperform a turbo Arrow in
just about every respect. It also doesn't have the drawback of the
extremely abused TIO-360 Continental in the mid 70's Turbo Arrow. My
mechanic just bought one of those, and all I can say is that he's
comfortable with the twitchiness of that engine. Something to be said for
simplicity... either normally-aspirated, big-bore, or at most a
turbo-normalized engine.

YMMV...

-Cory


--
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* The prime directive of Linux: *
* - learn what you don't know, *
* - teach what you do. *
* (Just my 20 USm$) *
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