Cessna Cardinal 177RG full review | 1000 mile flight | Performance and Comparison

[Music] after seeing 50 000 views on my cardinal fixed gear video in a short time and thank you to all who watched it today we have for you a three in one video one it is the most detailed review of the cardinal rg out there two it shows upgrades to an older plane that makes it better than even a modern plane and for a fraction of the cost and three you'll fly along with us for a thousand mile cross country trip to see the performance and economy of the rg now it is a longer video so we've tried our best to make it informative and enjoyable throughout victor connect rockford approach on one two one point zero one two one point zero seven eight nine to five victory good day okay comfort approach cardinal seven eight nine or five victor six thousand five hundred for the protel timers uh two nine or eight four radar contact seat encore [Music] in this video we're going to talk about the history of the cardinal rg take a look at the exterior the engine the interior and the panel which on this particular plane has actually been upgraded to a full garmin glass panel we're also going to take a look at that funny looking landing gear and take a look at how that works and then we're going to discuss some specifications performance and some interesting modifications and of course we're going to do a comparison between the cardinal fixed gear model and the retractable gear model which is something i've wanted to do for a long time and we're going to go in and we're going to compare it to two other popular model of retractable gear airplanes the piper arrow 200 and the mooney m20c of course we're also going to include our signature flight video from the startup taxi takeoff climb to the cruise on a cross-country flight at 10 000 feet all the way down into our descent and landing now let me ask you can a cardinal rg fly around 180 knots with the same 200 horsepower engine that this one has and could it fly up to 20 000 feet while burning only 10.8 gallons of fuel well you know a normal cardinal rg can't do that but there is one out there that's called the cardinal cruiser and that one can actually give that impressive performance i'm going to have a discussion about that a little bit later in the modification section the cardinal was cessna's plane of the 70s it was actually intended to keep all of the skyhawks good attributes while overcoming some of its disadvantages things like the updated cabin space and also having those round wheel struts that could absorb the shock in all directions at that time there was an obvious need also for a retractable gear fast airplane to compete with the piper arrow and the mooney models during the eight year life span of the cardinal there were 1367 rg's built in the usa there were also 176 built in france that were called the reims f-177 rg this plane is for sale you'll find the details in the description below most people agree that the cessna cardinal is probably one of the nicest looking planes that are out there and one of the reasons it's got this full cantilever wing this wing design was started on the cessna centurions the 210s back in 1967. the dihedral on this wing is actually 1.5 degrees so the initial fuel system on the cardinal rg was a bit unusual designed for cessna they had just the on and the off switch position and that would occasionally cause some problems in flight being that sometimes one tank will drain a little bit faster than the other so in the 1973 they actually went in and they installed a left both right and off positions for the selector and then at the same time when they did that they upgraded the tanks to the 61 gallon size when the previously they were only 51 gallons the flaps on cessna's are some of the largest in the industry this has 30 degree electrically operated flaps so one of the nice things i like about it if we take a look at it here it's got notched connections so that's 10 degrees that's 20 degrees and that's 30 degrees you're easily able to set the flaps in flight especially on landing without even looking at the controls so the cessna cardinal doors they open 90 degrees one of the things with that is that if it is a windy day like it is today you can have an issue with it becoming like a sail and putting stress on the hinges here so this actually has the store steward upgrade installed which helps prevent that keeping the door nice and steady the rudder on the cardinal is eight feet seven inches tall the stabilator is actually 12 feet wide and it's balanced out by having these slotted tabs up front and the anti-servo tab in the back so the stabilizer is slotted here that has to ward off that airflow that separation when you have a high angle of attack on here and it actually has a lot of elevator authority with this large stabilizer especially during your landings you really shouldn't make large control inputs with your pitch changes if you take a look at it here just how much of a pitch change there is this entire surface is moving so you got to be really careful on your landings not to overdo it one of the mistakes that pilots actually can make when they're coming in from a 172 is handling the pitch like a 172 especially during your landing it's not really the plane's fault because each plane is different and you just need to be flown the way that they're designed to fly so if you're new to cardinal and it bounces initially on landing the best option is just to go around and not try to force it down up front here in the calling we've got upgraded led landing and taxi lights these are very beneficial because they have a very low current draw so you can keep them on all the time if you want in flight helps with updated visibility for other aircraft to see you and especially when landing and taxiing around on the ground at night gives you a lot more visibility as well so let's take a look at just how bright they are the fixed gear of the cardinal was first introduced in 1967 while the first rg model was built in 1971 and throughout the eight years that the rg was in production there's four different landing gear systems that they developed finally setting in 1974 with the most improvement on this landing gear now one of the things is is that it's typically pretty difficult to engineer a fuselage mounted landing gear system and the competitors to the cardinal rg are usually low wings where they've got the gear that just folds up and into the wing it's a pretty simple design so what they did is this system was actually initially developed for the cessna 210 centurion this tubular design makes it compact enough and easy to be able to fold up and into the fuselage so they were able to just make that design into it and then add the little hump in the baggage compartment where the wheels go and these wheels are actually a smaller design than the fixed gear they're 15x6 it's low profile design in order to fit up into the wheel wells better the cardinal has an electric over hydraulic power pack that produces about 1500 psi for the gear operation the emergency extension handle is in between the front seats so both pilot and co-pilot can reach it easily from either seat and you need to need to have about 40 pumps on that handle if the electric power pack were to fail the landing gear retraction on this model takes about 12 seconds the 1978 model they upgraded to a 28 volt system which in an improved power pack which actually gave it a faster gear retraction of only about six seconds but with the design the way that it is the wheels will drop down first and then fold up and back so what i always like to do is make sure that i have a nice positive rate of climb and climb and i am completely out of usable runway before i retract the gear just because of that system one of the pre-flights that you check on here is this switch right here which is actually called a squat switch and what this does is it prevents gear retraction on the ground so make sure that is clear before you take off this is a steerable nose wheel and when this retracts you can see it's got a big cover here that folds back with it and then two doors here that fold up so the nose wheel is completely covered once it's retracted another one of those really nice updates that's available on this is these gear mirrors so you can see that it's mounted just in one of the inspection plates and there's one on either side what i really love about this is that when you're in the left pilot seat from this mirror you can see both the main gear and the nose gear and then you look over to the other side and you can see the other main gear so obviously looking out you can just see the main gear but this allows you to see the nose gear in flight and it's a very useful upgrade it just gives you that added peace of mind to know that your gear is down and locked when you're in flight interesting story i was actually flying a different plane and we had the gear warning light come on in flight so i called up atc explained the situation they got a hold of a local tower i was able to do a low altitude flyby they had two different people up there in the tower with binoculars checking to see if the gear looked down obviously they can't verify it's locked for me but the gear was down ended up being a safe and happy landing it ended up just being the warning switch that had faulted out during the flight but with this type of setup you don't have to worry about that it's just a really nice piece of mind knowing that your gear is down by being able to look at it the engine on the cessna cardinal rg is a 200 horsepower lycoming io 360 a1b6d it's a four cylinder horizontally opposed engine the lycoming o360 and io 360 series are very reliable engines and always if they're well maintained you can usually run them while beyond tbo there's a few things specific about this particular engine i want to point out to you before going into some of the generals if we take a look at this particular engine we can see that it has these nicer covers on the rockers now i'm not sure they do anything except for it look a little bit nicer but they are there you can see here it has the gammy fuel injectors on here and this is very important for a couple of reasons one is it balances out the fuel system and the reason that that's important is because of the temperature by having a balanced system you can obviously run it a little bit leaner and keeps the temperatures cooler another thing about keeping it cooler is by taking a look at these baffling you can see just how clean of condition these are they're very tight no leaks anywhere in there that also helps with the cooling system quite a bit another point on the cooling system if we take a look right here is that the oil cooler actually has its own intake position intake port to help cool the oil down much better than just having it sitting on a firewall along with the oil system if we take a look back here you can see that it actually does have the oil filter adapter installed which is very good for keeping particles out of the engine better than just a screen system and along in the back here some of the other things you can see the vacuum pump is a newer pump just underneath that we've got the prop governor and that is a little bit newer as well and overall very clean it's got quite a bit of sensors throughout here and the reason for those most of them is actually the jpi that's installed is a primary engine monitoring system and we'll show that when we get to the panel but if you see the space back here there's two parts to that space one is that when you're getting work done on it it's much easier for the mechanic to work which also reduces your labor cost involved in them having to work on the back panel pieces as well as keeping it a little bit further away from the firewall helping with the noise when you're in flight one of the other points about the cooling is when the cowling is on you'll see that there's very large openings here to let in a very high quantity of air to help with the cooling process this particular engine never runs hot even in the climb considering all of the components that have been installed in the way that they've been installed we've done oil analysis on this engine consecutively consecutively since we've gotten it and they've don't show any type of wear patterns or trends or anything like that compressions on this we're actually 74 74 76 and 74. so really good compressions on all of the cylinders this plane has a two blade macaulay propeller on it and there is a three blade version that can be installed on here but considering the cost of doing that versus the performance output of it it's not something that i would really consider installing on this next we're going to take a look at the panel on the cardinal rg if we take a look at it you can see that it's been fully upgraded to a glass panel layout it's a very expensive upgrade it was a collaboration between garmin and sarasota avionics so everything was done to a high quality standard it's actually with all of the upgrades that are in here right now it is qualified as a taa or technically advanced aircraft starting over here we've got our garmin g500 which is our pfd or primary flight display on the left hand side here we've got all of our gauges which include wind direction and speed true air speed and ground speed along with all of your primary gauges and then on the right hand side you've got your moving map and this also will display the traffic and the weather this information is actually fed off of your primary gps over here which is your garmin gtm 650 touch screen gps and the only version up of this is the 750 on top of that we've got a garmin 345 adsb in and out transponder which drives your traffic and gives you your weather data and then our secondary garmin navcom is available here to round out the center stack we've got our garmin gma 350 audio panel which has also got bluetooth capability on here and then up here you can see that this is actually your primary engine monitor it's a digital um edm 900 series engine monitor it's got all four cylinder head temperatures exhaust gas temperatures your manifold pressure rpm oil temp oil pressure fuel pressure fuel flow your fuel quantity indicators both left and right there's a lot of features to this one it gives you your percentage horsepower in flight you can run it very precisely on your fuel flow when you set it on here it's just a very very handy tool to have and it's even got a plug-in so that you can actually take it in and the mechanic can pull data off of that if you need to from anything that anomalies that popped up in flight so this is extremely beneficial to have in the plane over here on the right hand side you can see that we've got the display set up over here as kind of a secondary synthetic vision setup for the copilot to be able to fly from the right-hand seat it's very handy to have an electronic display like this available in the plane you can keep your databases up to date on this and be able to use this as a nice layout to display your approach charts and everything like that using an app like for flight or other weather apps or anything like that and that is connected into your 345 as well to display traffic and weather on here at the same time other standard stuff obviously includes the flap settings over here and all of your selectors and everything with your gear selector here your trim options your trim wheels and then all of your switches for your lights and then of course over here we've got an aztec 50 autopilot this is a two axis autopilot with altitude hold it was recently refurbished with s-tec directly so everything is set up on here we've got gpss roll steering for a nice smooth transition it's got your heading option your nav vor everything is all set up on here it is connected into the gps so it'll fly your headings and it's got the approach buttons and everything on there as well so really nice to have that feature on the plane and then over here we do have some backup gauges now obviously you can see that all of your lights are set up here for all of your electronic gauges but what's really nice about this is that you actually have lights underneath here we do have it set down so you can see it's got a nice bright setting for when you need to be able to see a little bit better you can adjust the brightness from here as well as flip it over to blue light for when you're in flight that's a lot less strain on your eyes you can switch it down to a lower setting as well so it's got some nice little features like that built into it that you wouldn't normally notice the panel of this particular plane is highly upgraded this photo i found shows what the panel looked like before the upgrade the cardinal has a very large panel area you can see the nicely organized six-pack that's right in front of the pilot seat and just to the right of that are the vor cdi indicators i really like that the important gauges like the rpm and the manifold pressure are right in front of the pilot and easy to see the center stack has a lot of space for all the avionics and they put the gear lever and indicators in a very noticeable position overall this is a very thoughtful clean design that helps reduce the pilot workload now let's go ahead and take a look at the interior the cardinal rg one of the very first things we have to point out is obviously the cessna cardinals and the space to them if you take a look there is no other plane in the ga market that has the ease of access that this one does door opens 90 degrees means that you have direct access the wheel is back in the back so you can come right up and climb straight in once you're in you've got plenty of options for where your seat is going to fit you can go all the way forward for controls sit a little bit back if you're taller and then once the seat is forward just take a look at how much space is back here for the leg room for your passengers again super easy to get in and lots of leg room for the passengers back here lots of shoulder room talking about the space in this we're not talking just about how easy it is to get in but also about your head space as well as the space you have shoulder to shoulder so a couple of the measurements if we take a look here shoulder to shoulder if we use this particular spot here we're at 39 inches and that is really close to what a 210 will give you and then you've also got here your space to get around the gear emergency gear here it's actually you can't see it over there but it is actually at 45 inches for your space to give you enough space on your head and the fact is that both of these seats have the adjustment feature so that when you're sitting in it you can adjust the seats up and down so if you're a little bit taller drop the seat down a little bit you've got a lot more head space that way if you're a little bit shorter lift the seats back up and that is for both the pilot and the co-pilot we take a look at the space in the back seat here if i pull this forward for you let's see if you can take a look and see this shoulder space again if we go here shoulder to shoulder for the back passengers we're actually at 42 inches shoulder to shoulder so you've got tons of space back here for your back passengers and then your height if you don't consider the gear hump that's in there you're actually sitting at probably about 41 inches or so for your height for your head space so again lots of space lots of room for your passengers and for you as a pilot and take a look at the rest of the overall interior you can see the nice gray leather seats these are in really nice condition overall there's no real rips or anything like that on it it's got three point harness system for the two front seats you've got a four place intercom system the carpet in here is brand new if you take a look it was specially form-fitted for the rg model with the hump here for the gear and it's a really nice dark gray complement to the rest of the interior i'm just looking at all of the paneling and stuff when they did the leather paneling on the seats they also did on the paneling so you can take a look everything is leather paneled out and then the plastics are in pretty nice shape as well overall you've got your airline vent styles back here for your rear passengers and then also the headliner is a nice fabric kind of a little bit more of a noise muffling option on there so that's kind of a nice feature to have as well take a look at the baggage area first thing we're going to notice is that it's got a much wider door than you find in the fixed gear cardinals it's got a little rod to hold it up and open you can see that it's kind of split into a couple different areas with this permanent suitcase that's attached here and actually that's where the gear folds it up and in in the fuselage so they have that hump built into there for that but it gives you a separated area for your baggage so you've got here 120 pounds that you can put in here you've got a little baggage shelf that they use like a hot shelf that can put about 12 pounds and then up front here between the seat and the permanent suitcase is an additional area to keep some more stuff and you've got tons of space between the base and up to the top so you can put a lot of things height wise as well as front to back so it gives you lots of different options for carrying luggage and other things in this plane let's take a look at the performance of the 1976 cessna 177 rg the cardinal rg has a useful load of about 1170 pounds since most rg's are upgraded you're more likely to see a range of between 900 and 1000 pounds the fuel capacity is 61 gallons it burns about 10 gallons per hour at 75 percent power and the cardinal rg has a very short takeoff run and landing roll so you can operate on any short runway the service ceiling is 17 100 feet which is a very good ceiling for a larger cabin 200 horsepower single in economy settings the cardinal rg can fly about 900 nautical miles and actually over a thousand miles non-stop if it's pulled back to six or seven gallons per hour let's compare the cardinal rg to similar complex airplanes the mooney m20f and the piper arrow 200. i've highlighted in green which airplane leads each category the mooney can climb and fly faster with a higher ceiling the cardinal rg has very close performance numbers to the moonie f the cardinal can carry a higher payload for a longer range and has a lower stall speed it also has the best cabin space and the lightest controls as you can see all three are very good airplanes there are many important factors considered beyond the performance numbers of a plane when you're looking i've also made a detailed video comparing the cardinal rg to the fixed gear you can find that video on our youtube channel if you're interested the cardinal cruiser is an upgrade of the cardinal rg that gives some impressive performance and high altitude capabilities to the plane there are many upgrades to the engine including a turbo automatic waste gate and an intercooler turning it into a turbo normalized plane what that does is keep sea level power up to very high altitudes since the engine is not over boosting like a turbocharged engine it actually keeps a low fuel burn and the longevity of the engine as well i've never flown one but based on the specs the climb rate is actually 750 feet a minute even at 20 000 feet and at 17 500 feet it should fly about 179 knots lean of peak it's a very interesting plane so on this cross-country trip we're going to be flying to cambridge minnesota and then on to fergus falls minnesota before coming back the total distance is around 1200 miles the flight time is going to take just over 7 hours and 30 minutes and it'll take about 72 gallons of fuel if you leave in the morning you'd be able to get back in the afternoon the actual time and fuel burn would be a little less because we'll be able to file different altitudes for favorable winds for each leg let's go ahead and get the cardinal rg started up now so first thing we want to do we want to make sure our fuel is on both open up our cobble flaps our mixture is going to be out prop needs to be in the throttle just to about a quarter here we've got our lights set up so we're going to flip our master on and then we're waiting for our jpi to activate here so that we can watch our fuel flow and fuel pressure so once this gets up and running we're going to put our fuel pump switch on we're watching here pushing in the mixture [Music] we've got an active fuel flow you have about three to five seconds pull that back out grab the key for our longer trips we like to make an early departure we usually find some better weather and it gives us plenty of time to complete the trip in the day these very bright led lights definitely help a lot for those early departures the cardinal only needs a short distance to take off with 10 degrees of flaps and i usually wait until the end of the runway to retract the gear some planes have a faster gear operating time so you can retract them right after you get a positive rate of climb the flaps are very effective on most cessnas so retracting the flaps changes the climb and the speed so i usually wait to retract the flaps until about 700 to 1000 feet agl now here's an outside view of the takeoff during the daytime so that you can see it a little bit better the climb rate of a cardinal rg is just about a thousand feet per minute when at sea level and full growth you can see unique views like this during early morning flights the miss settling in on the waterways and lakes looks like snow the cardinal has the best uninterrupted views if you enjoy looking at scenery and flight i cannot think of another plane that has better views the large windows with no strut gives you uninterrupted views all the way around flying a full glass panel is like flying a modern plane xirus g2 avadyne full glass cockpit doesn't even have the features this plane has one great advantage of the garmin g500 is that it actually has real time winds aloft you can fly faster and save fuel by knowing the wind direction and adjusting your altitude once you climb up to your cruise altitude it's very easy to fly we often fly without autopilot because once you trim it you can fly pretty much hands-free it's a very stable and predictable platform and that's what makes all cardinals great ifr platforms the cardinal rg doesn't have main gear doors that creates some drag especially in the climb with a higher angle attack the main gear doors are complex and somewhat troublesome so cessna had decided to remove them even though it came with a slight speed penalty because the early cessna 210s did have gear doors but they removed them in the later models and the cardinal rg never had the gear doors to begin with the cardinal rg probably would have been just slightly faster airplane with gear doors five pictures on one two one point zero one two one point zero seven eight nine to five victory good day [Applause] flying across four states you get to see some great views and watch the landscape and sky change right around you my daughter always loves to help out during flights and she's not quite tall enough yet to look over the panels so she tends to fly on the instruments and she's very precise when flying on instruments and claims that she's actually a better ifr pilot it's just amazing what young people can do when you put them on the right path autopilot is connected up to our navigator which is our garmin gtm 650 wasp gps and now it's going to be flying the magenta track and we've actually got a 35 knot wind coming in from 245 degrees so you can see on the end traffic is there between you and burlington raider service terminator clock vfr frequency change of proof you can see on the indicator here it's actually crabbed into the wind but it's flying straight it's going to stay on that magenta line by grabbing it that direction and the autopilot does all those corrections and then on top of that you load an approach on the 650 it'll actually help you fly your approach it has gpss roll steering so that it's going to make your turns ahead of time so that you don't overshoot your turns and then help you with your approaches and all you have to do is disconnect the altitude and follow the altitude down into your approach approaching cambridge is actually sometimes a little bit tricky because of the tree line all the way around the field it actually can create some small waves on final if the wind is strong enough although we've got enough fuel for the next leg we did fill the tanks because the fuel price is a little bit better here let's take off from cambridge and head out on the next leg of our journey the cardinal rg has a ceiling of 17 100 feet so it can fly high although very few pilots do fly that high in their cardinals normally aspirated airplanes like this usually like to fly somewhere between 8 and 12 000 feet although sometimes terrain or weather means that you've got to fly higher and that's when we carry portable oxygen in the plane the cardinal rg is a well-balanced plane so the controls are very light it has a large cabin that also helps when you have top of the line avionics like this plane does it makes the flight even easier it has very good performance for a 200 horsepower single-engine airplane i personally like the fuel economy over 1 000 mile trip you only need about 75 gallons of fuel and if you were to run it on economy settings lean of peak it would take even less fuel but obviously take a little more time flying a thousand mile cross country trip in a 177 rg can be done in a day during daylight hours it may not be as comfortable as a cabin class pressurized plane but honestly it is fairly comfortable you can put the gear down anywhere below 125 knots which will help you reduce your air speed so anytime you need to slow down the plane or even enough heavy turbulence you just put the gear down it'll help slow the plane you can start adding flaps as necessary below 130 knots for the first notch and then 95 knots for the other two when you use full 30 degree flaps on the plane you can land very slow touchdown speeds and use very short runways here you can see a full flap landing on the cardinal i did forget to use the proper nd filter in the camera so no it doesn't have a reverse propeller even though it looks like it in the video [Music] thank you for watching our video we'd appreciate if you take the time to like our video subscribe to our channel for notification on future videos and of course any questions or comments feel free to leave them in the section below we'll do our best to answer them [Music] you

Channel: AeroLife

Views: 22,072

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Id: FWzuROPHCIs

Length: 34min 50sec (2090 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 08 2022