ANR headset experience

This is actually a humerous anecdote, or at least I thought it was.

Had an opportunity to fly in a V tail Bonanza Monday during the one
day of sunshine we get per week or two up here in Northern NE these
days. The plan was to fly from KLEB (Lebanon NH) to Highgate Vt. at
the northeastern tip of Vermont. The sky had some scattered clouds,
mostly over the mountainous parts of the state, which were at around
6,000 feet.

The airplane is new to the owner and since it's fast and complex, he
feels he REALLY needs to concentrate on staying ahead of it,
especially as he approaches to land.

He had two Bose headsets to use and I've never flown with an ANR
headset so I was really looking forward to the flight.

As he advanced power for the takeoff, I was very impressed with the
acceleration, but also with the noise. It was REALLY noisy.

I wasn't even thinking about the headsets at the time as I was
concentrating on what it took to fly the airplane and working the nav
instruments. The owner had a Garmin 295 which sat on top of the
instrument panel (and which it was my job to hold it in place during
the takeoff and climb) and a Northstar Loran C. He'd never gotten the
Loran C to work and considered me his IC consultant so it was my job
to see if I could figure out with the manual, how to operate it.

That turned out to be ludicrously easy and I soon had it reading out
course, track, speed and ETA.

In the meantime, we seemed to just thunder along. We were indicating
184mph GS into the southern wind, which was really impressing me.
This was under the clouds, in turbulence and sucking down 14 gph. I
thought that was doing pretty good.

We were under the clouds at about 4500 feet, and the turbulence was
bothersome. The Bonanza fishtailed a LOT and aggressively while we
jolted throught he bumps.

As we passed Mt Mansfield, keeping it to our left so as to stay away
from Burlington's class C space, we began letting down. The owner at
this point asked me what I thought of the Bose headset. I responded
that it didn't seem to be doing much, seemed just like my Sigtronic's
non ANR set. He looks down at his switch and swears, and says: "I've
forgotten to turn mine on, is yours turned on?" I looked down at the
battery pack dangling out of the instrument panel and realised that I
had not turned the thing on either! Since I'd never used one, I
didn't have the habit of turning them on once the engine fired up.

I reached over and pushed the button, the green light turned on and
suddenly things got very quiet. I felt like I could hear myself
breathing. Sheesh, those things really work, but you have to turn
them on!

We landed at Highgate, the owner met with the paint shop owner there,
we had lunch and then launched for Lebanon. I thought that since I'd
turned the headsets on on the way up that they'd be on for the trip
home. Wrong. I'm so used to hearing the drumming of the engine and
prop that I just didn't notice anything different until I grabbed the
battery pack and noticed that the green light wasn't on, so I pushed
the button and presto, silence. Very very nice.

I convinced the owner to climb above the clouds for the trip back and
once we got above them (at about 7,500 feet), things smoothed out
dramatically. Silky smooth air. The owner almost never gets that
high normally and was surprised to see that he was limited for
manifold pressure. I explained that the engine was now producing
under 70% power, possibly 65%, and that he could advance the throttle
right to the firewall if he wanted to. He chose not to, he's very
conservative and still needs to fly the airplane some more before he's
comfortable doing a "John Deakin".

At that height and directon we were making more than 200 mph GS, and
while descending, managed to record a fuel burn of 12 gph.

Nice airplane.

Corky Scott