Checked out to fly the Alarus CH2000
While visiting with the parents for Thanksgiving I decided to go to the local airport to get checked out in a plane I haven't been in before: an Alarus CH2000.
This is a minimalist IFR trainer that has a nice set of avionics on board. It is a small plane, with 2 seats, that, I believe, shares the same engine as a C-152. My first impression of it while preflighting was that it was flimsy feeling. The doors are very thin and light, and the overall design of the airplane seems pretty bare bones. But once I hopped in it felt just fine.
My checkout instructor, Nate, walked me through the systems before we took off to the south for a little airwork. We did some slow flight and found that when we pointed the nose right into the wind we could get our ground speed down as low at 15 kts (using the onboard Garmin 430 for the groundspeed readout). The airspeed indicator was reading 20 kts when it would finally stall in a landing configuration.
In general, the slow speeds of the airplane took some getting used to. Climb speed is around 65 kts, and I kept subconsciously wanting to climb at a faster rate since 65 would be way to slow in the airplanes I normally fly. This airplane cruises around 95 kts so it is no speed demon.
We did power on and off stalls and I quickly learned that the CH2000 has tons or rudder authority. This came in handy when we practiced a forced approach. Nate pulled us to idle and told me to "deal with it" so after going through the restart attempt procedure I picked a field to land in. Since I had no idea how well the CH2000 would glide, I picked a fairly close field. We were quite high so I started a forward slip. We still weren't coming down as much as we needed so Nate told me to go all in with the rudder in the slip. This had us literally flying at a 45 degree angle off the nose - a massive slip. This drops us quite nicely and we went around at about 30 AGL, below the surrounding tree tops. That was the lowest forced approach I've ever done. :)
We returned to shoot a few landings, the first of which I bounced with because I had too much speed. The POH has you on final at 60 kts, but that leaves a lot of airpseed to bleed off in the flare when you've got flaps deployed. Took a little getting used to.
I enjoyed flying the airplane, though it was a little squirrelly on climb out. Nate mentioned that it is tough teaching primary students on the airplane and I could imagine it would be. But it is a capable airplane and I would think it would make a nice little IFR trainer.
Oh, here's a video of me preflighting the airplane. Yeah, I know, I'm not all that interesting on camera. :)
This is a minimalist IFR trainer that has a nice set of avionics on board. It is a small plane, with 2 seats, that, I believe, shares the same engine as a C-152. My first impression of it while preflighting was that it was flimsy feeling. The doors are very thin and light, and the overall design of the airplane seems pretty bare bones. But once I hopped in it felt just fine.
My checkout instructor, Nate, walked me through the systems before we took off to the south for a little airwork. We did some slow flight and found that when we pointed the nose right into the wind we could get our ground speed down as low at 15 kts (using the onboard Garmin 430 for the groundspeed readout). The airspeed indicator was reading 20 kts when it would finally stall in a landing configuration.
In general, the slow speeds of the airplane took some getting used to. Climb speed is around 65 kts, and I kept subconsciously wanting to climb at a faster rate since 65 would be way to slow in the airplanes I normally fly. This airplane cruises around 95 kts so it is no speed demon.
We did power on and off stalls and I quickly learned that the CH2000 has tons or rudder authority. This came in handy when we practiced a forced approach. Nate pulled us to idle and told me to "deal with it" so after going through the restart attempt procedure I picked a field to land in. Since I had no idea how well the CH2000 would glide, I picked a fairly close field. We were quite high so I started a forward slip. We still weren't coming down as much as we needed so Nate told me to go all in with the rudder in the slip. This had us literally flying at a 45 degree angle off the nose - a massive slip. This drops us quite nicely and we went around at about 30 AGL, below the surrounding tree tops. That was the lowest forced approach I've ever done. :)
We returned to shoot a few landings, the first of which I bounced with because I had too much speed. The POH has you on final at 60 kts, but that leaves a lot of airpseed to bleed off in the flare when you've got flaps deployed. Took a little getting used to.
I enjoyed flying the airplane, though it was a little squirrelly on climb out. Nate mentioned that it is tough teaching primary students on the airplane and I could imagine it would be. But it is a capable airplane and I would think it would make a nice little IFR trainer.
Oh, here's a video of me preflighting the airplane. Yeah, I know, I'm not all that interesting on camera. :)
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