Paul Dye's Incredible SubSonex Jet

[Music] hi I'm mark cook from kid Plains magazine we're obviously hit Aakash 20:19 take a look at one of the coolest things I've seen on the flightline it's Paul dies subsonic hey Paul are you man so you got this thing all the way from the Reno area to Oshkosh yep in seven or eight days now I was prone it was they actually would've been about day and a half except I'd wait for weather on the second day right so was eight hops and did five of them one day put me in the middle of South Dakota the second day was the hop into Minnesota and then I waited for weather for about four hours until I could get across Wisconsin so trip so with that many hops it sounds like the airplane I know is pretty fast it obviously doesn't stay aloft very long though that's right each hops about an hour and 20 minutes and then you spent about Oh 20 to 30 minutes on the ground fueling and the like so you don't have to worry about one of the bathroom I mean you're gonna be on the ground very very fast plus looking at the cockpit there's no way to go to the bathroom it seems like a really tight comfortable fit how is it is the airplane fits you like a glove you know you can almost hear yourself click as you said I'll settle them of the seat it just fits that well did you do anything to make it specifically comfortable for you or is this kind of how honest this is really a stock cockpit I was really surprised that that the rudder pedals have a forward and aft and a middle position and I am all the way aft and I'm not a short guy I'm just an average guy ie I think a six two person could easily fly this thing why don't you show me the cockpit I want to see what this is pure stock pretty much for the airplane I've done a few little things we've taken we put a pistol grip on the throttle so we've got a nice throttle quadrant here it's a nice grip for the hand we've got a sidestick controller your typical pitch and roll you'll notice that there isn't a whole lot of travel in roll and then the rudder pedals like all airplanes this is the handbrake so this brakes both wheels at the same time we have nose wheel steering but no differential braking the engine panel efis and just a few switches mostly for lighting so I assume this is a VFR yeah it's a VFR only vehicle so we don't have the electrical power from the engine to power and real IFR avionics like any modern GPS efis equipped airplane if you got stuck on top you could probably figure your way down that's fair now obviously for efficiency sake you want to be as high as you can as often as you can yeah absolutely so we're looking at 17,500 feet eastbound and 16,500 westbound as our basic flight planning parameters now if you're westbound and you got horrendous headwinds you may decide to go lower but you're gonna burn a lot more gas doing that in that way it's a kind of a typical turbine that the fuel consumption varies pretty wildly from high to low that's exactly right I ended up making the final leg here into the Wisconsin area at 3,000 feet which is lower than I've ever flown the jet because I live at 4,500 and it was really impressive watching the fuel flow about how much fuel float that's at that time it was about 25 gallons an hour normal cruise is about 18 and it carries how much fuel 40 gallons not a lot of endurance and not a lot of endurance in two hours your glider with this airplane or well let's let's walk around and take a look at the engine you bet fascinating powerplant comes from the Czech Republic made by elves I'd say it's one of the most beautiful piece of machining I've ever seen take the plugs out here so it's a little 257 257 pounds thrust engine at full throttle it's full fadec which means fully computerized the throttle is basically the only control once you've turned power on you take the throttle out of stop take it to run it starts once it's all run you can do whatever you want and when you're done with the flight pushing the detent button take it to stop is there is there much residual thrust I mean do you have to thrust up a fair bit to taxing the the residual thrust is about 50 pounds so yeah it won't roll away on its own with the residual thrust you get the brakes are off and you go to about 70% rpm and it'll break free and it will start rolling on the ground so this location obviously has chosen to keep though the airplane as simple as possible because it's really really soon that drove the choice of a v-tail as well now what this does that the downside of this is being hot mountain mounted this high you get a lot of pitch reaction with thrust so the more thrust when you when you put add thrust it wants to pitch down when you pull power off it wants to pitch up once you learn that you anticipate it so the rest of the airplane is kind of I won't say garden-variety Sonics but I mean it's it's typical Sonics construction it's actually very typical sonic construction I'm building a xenos motor glider which is also a Sonic's kit this is probably about twice as beefy if you will of thicker skins closer rivet spacing it's a little more solid airplane be given the given the speeds that it's gonna go but but otherwise it's really typical Sonic's now I noticed something right here this obviously is a different kind of what's going on with this panel yeah this panel is a blowout panel for the ballistic recovery chute so this set of screws are actually those are nylon and they will fracture when the rocket fires if you were to pull the handle in the in the in the cockpit a rocket fires drags a parachute out the whole airplane comes down on the shoes and we do that because there's no room in the cockpit for a personal parachute that makes total sense now it's a it's a pretty compact airplane it looks relatively short coupled what does it handle like uh it it's very quick response in pitch it's it's fairly light almost everybody's ends up very close to aft CG just with the configuration so that makes the pitch fairly light roll is a little heavier just because you've got that you don't have any leverage on that side stick right and yaw is typical v-tail yaw it's it's stable if you get a disturbance you get a little bit of tail wag and then it settles down that sounds great for what is a really a small airplane so what's the empty weight what's the gross empty way to this airplane is 550 pounds gross weight max gross is a thousand pounds so with myself and full fuel I'm 5 pounds below max gross and that's that's assuming that that I have just my toothbrush with me you get on a trip you can you can carry your the chargers for your phone and your iPad and a credit card and and the credit card will buy you anything you need in the United States that's true so one last thing this paint job is amazing toe tell me the inspiration and who did this okay so the paint was initially inspired by a paint job that we did on my rv-8 so it has very similar lines and the same colors that was my initial design then I had John Starr who's an outstanding airbrush artist from Eugene Oregon do the the execution and John actually showed up at my shop the airplane was bare aluminum finished ready to fly and we scuffed it and painted it and finished it in seven days that's amazing and equality that work it's a little hard to see on camera it's absolutely stunning yeah it really is stunning the the insignia you see here is the NASA flight director insignia I was a flight director for the human spaceflight program for years and the only ones of us that are allowed to use this or those of us who've been in charge of space mission so you'll see it repeated in several places on the airplane as well as very large on the belly I think we have some shots we could go to that they're probably pretty cool well appreciate the tour around now you built this airplane over what period of time amazingly enough this took about three months so I figure 85 days from opening the boxes to getting ready for the air within a certificate and there was about 10 days in there where we were taking holidays and those were half days so it was about 425 hours of work that's really amazing these kids have come a long way they really have come a long way the the canopy was completely finished and fitted when we were when we when it showed up at my house well we look forward to seeing more of it and in fact we will see more of it because we have an entire build series on this airplane starting at Kipp Plains in the November issue you'll be able to read about it see some fantastic photos and we appreciate your time talking us through Newton tog from arrow Friedrichshafen in Germany and before I go to Oshkosh this year I'm gonna check out a bleb and you should too

Channel: AVweb

Views: 481,198

Rating: 4.7778831 out of 5

Keywords: Avweb, SubSonex jet, Paul Dye, Kitplanes, kit aircraft, AirVenture

Id: IejjPFgvcB4

Length: 8min 55sec (535 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 24 2019