Hare, Meet Turtle; Turtle, Meet Hare
Not that you’d call a 250-knot airplane a turtle and they weren’t exactly racing, but the Lycoming-powered Lancair Evolution turned in a remarkable performance against its turbine-powered stablemate on a flight into Oshkosh this week. In an AVweb podcast, Lancair chief operating officer Tom Bowen told AVweb that both airplanes left Redmond, Wash., within 10 minutes of each other, with the piston engine out front.
Not that you'd call a 250-knot airplane a turtle and they weren't exactly racing, but the Lycoming-powered Lancair Evolution turned in a remarkable performance against its turbine-powered stablemate on a flight into Oshkosh this week. In an AVweb podcast Lancair chief operating officer Tom Bowen told AVweb that both airplanes left Redmond, Wash., within 10 minutes of each other, with the piston engine out front.
The turbine landed in Rapid City, S.D., for fuel and to keep the two as a pair; so did Bowen in the IE2-powered piston version. But he still had 90 gallons of gas aboard, more than enough to continue on nonstop to Oshkosh. Bowen told us had he done so, the trip would have ended in a near dead heat. At 250 knots true, Bowen saw ground speeds of up to 330 knots.
