PA-32 Weight and Balance

Orval Fairbairn wrote:

It is easy to build sample gross weight scenarios and loadings expected
on typical trips.


I did the same for our Sundowner. You can also put several versions of
the sheet on one page to display calculations for different seatings,
takeoff, landing, etc... side by side.

If you add the POH data on it's own tab, VLOOKUP or HLOOKUP can read the
charts. Conditional formatting is nice to alert the user to out of
limits results.

John Doe wrote:

"john smith" wrote in message
...
In article NrYag.44229$iF3.30882@dukeread01,
"John Doe" wrote:

Has anyone ever been able to put 6 adults in a Saratoga without exceeding
the aft CG?
So far, every time I run the numbers with two adults in the aft two
seats, I
exceed the aft CG.

It depends on just how big your adults are.
If you are talking about overweight males, the answer is no. You will
probably get five, but be sure to calculate a landing CG to assure that
the CG has not gone aft of limits for landing. If you are taking
baggage, you can play with who sits in the center row of seats and
baggage in the nose compartment to shift things forward.

Does anyone have an electronic weight and balance for PA-32 ?

CoPilot flight planner for the Palm PDA has a customizable W&B you can
apply to any A/C.

The graphical display will show ramp, take off, landing, and no fuel for
a flight.

--
Jim Pennino

Remove .spam.sux to reply.

In article _y9bg.44290$iF3.6732@dukeread01,
John Doe wrote:

Does anyone have an electronic weight and balance for PA-32 ?

Saratoga FG: http://www.wvfc.org/craft/83763.html

Saratoga RG: http://www.wvfc.org/craft/432lt.html

I played around with the numbers, and the Saratoga FG is pretty
easy to get outside the aft limit. On the RG, even with just an
FAA standard 170 lbs pilot, no baggage, and 450 lbs in the rear
seats, it is just within the aft CG.

YMMV,

John
--
John Clear - http://www.clear-prop.org/

"John Doe" wrote in
news:_y9bg.44290$iF3.6732@dukeread01:

Does anyone have an electronic weight and balance for PA-32 ?

I downloaded a free program, AvInfo written by Karl Medcalf, that
calculates and graphically displays your weight and balance. It runs
on Windows and has several features I like: Weights can be named
(i.e., Pax names), Graph can show your specified maximum landing
weight, several aircraft data can be kept by registration number. It
does require a bit of setup but the associated documentation is clear
enough to get you through it.

See: http://users3.ev1.net/~medcalf/avinfo.html

--

John Doe wrote:
Has anyone ever been able to put 6 adults in a Saratoga without exceeding
the aft CG?

So far, every time I run the numbers with two adults in the aft two seats, I
exceed the aft CG.


Depends also on the model year. You have to work at it to get my '65
PA32-260 out of the CG envelope. Two 240 lb people in the back seats, a
180 lb pilot and no luggage is still within the envelope, although just
barely as long as there is at least 39 gallons of fuel on board. The
front CG limit on mine is even harder to hit: with the maximum 100 lbs
in the front baggage, and two 250 lb people in the front seats, it is
still within the front CG limit.

I believe the rear seats got moved a few inches aft in later model
years, and that the tapered wing has a smaller CG envelope than the
hershey bar wing.