Games & Entertainment

Huge Aircraft
Are the ranges posted on aircraft sites like cessna and mooney with passengers inside?

I would like to know because I am a huge fan of planes but always had that question? I don’t have my license yet but I will someday; I just love flying along for now.

The published numbers on most light airplanes are given based on max gross weight. Cessna tends to publish most of its performance figures based on max gross weight, without giving any information on how a lower weight would affect performance. Skimming through a 182RG POH (pilot operating handbook), the figures for stall speed, rate of climb, time fuel distance to climb, cruise performance, range, and endurance are all based on max gross weight. And the only one that even looks at the center of gravity limits is stall speed. On a single engine piston weight and balance doesn’t have a huge effect on performance. A climb at gross max weight and one at nearly empty weight will be different, but 9 out of 10 flights the weights will be close enough to max gross that the performance figures won’t change by any noticeable amount. Same is true for cruise performance with a fore or aft CG.

I don’t know what Mooney does for their POH, but in general, single engine piston airplanes have very basic POH’s. Its not until you get into the mid size twins and turboprops that you start seeing performance charts that give a lot more detail. Once you start looking at jets, even light jets, you start seeing performance charts that take nearly every variable into consideration. A single engine poh has about 10 pages on performance charts. I have performance charts for a citation 650, that book is about the size of the entire POH for a 152.

*EDIT*
That graph on the cessna website is interesting, but NOT accurate. First of all, their numbers are slightly different than what is published in a 172S poh. The poh says at 55% power and 12,000 feet on a standard day you have 604nm range, the chart shows 610. Not a big deal but a difference none the less. Secondly, the range does not drop off like that. If I have a 700 pound payload I have 0 range? The max published payload is 932 pounds; would I get negative distance If I loaded it up that way? That is a bad graph. OK for selling airplanes and making for easy comparison between two airplanes, but it is not accurate.

Within their website look at the Excel graph (http://www.cessna.com/citation/citation-xls/citation-xls-specifications.html) that is much more realistic of how the graph should look. A vertical line, becoming a horizontal line as you go from empty weight to max gross weight.