On Jul 4, 10:06*pm, Nine Bravo Ground wrote:


Overall, you need to set your cruise based on McCready for your
expected ACTUAL climb rate, including centering time and other
considerations such as changes in climb rate at the top or bottom of
the climb (Cochrane explains this pretty well in his papers) -
different pilots estimate this in different ways, some computers give
bottom-to-top averages as well. *The net effect is slower climb rates
than you might otherwise estimate based on staring at you 30-second
averager.


9B

Just a quick note on this point. I've been informally checking with
pilots for several years after flights on our local DIY contest here
to calibrate the actual conditions against my weather forecasts.
Often times, I'll hear that it was a "great day - I was hitting
5-6kts". Post flight analysis of several traces reveal that achieved
climbs were more like 3-4kts at best. It's very clear that we don't
do a great job of accounting for our centering losses and hanging in
for too long once the lift tails off. By the way, in the good old
days before flight recorders, it seems that lift was a lot stronger.
Maybe it's weight of the FRs that's slowing things down :-)