American Airlines Virtual

To; all AAV Pilots

Subject; Rates of Climb and Descent

The following data from the FAA is a partial list of aircraft and the climb and descent rates.

The training department has a set of criteria we use for grading each checkride.

http://www.aavirtual.com/forum/viewtopi ... 23&t=17504

There is a section about vertical climb speed in our grading criterea. Although the chart shown does show that certain aircraft can climb faster than what we use as our grading criteria, we believe that the limit we grade on is a fair average of all the rates shown.

Many factors were used in figuring out our grading system. We believe that anything above 3 - 3.5 K f/pm is stretching the envelope for the aircraft, but the main cause from this action is bleeding your airspeed. You want to keep your airspeed around 240 KIAS below 10,000', raising the nose a bit to slow down or lower the nose to speed up, not touching the throttle to chase your airspeed. This concept seems to be almost alien, to the human brain, but it is the correct procedure.

By following our grading criteria will not only help you in the checkrides, it could help you become a better virtual pilot and be able to control your aircraft much more skillfully.

Thank you,

WLP

Our standard climb profiles at SkyWest are:

CRJ200 - 250KIAS to 10,000, 290KIAS transition at .70 Mach to filed altitude
CRJ700/900 - 250KIAS to 10,000, 290KIAS transition at .74 mach to filed altitude

Standard descent at .77 mach transition to 300KIAS.

In almost ALL cases we are maintaining speeds, just as Wayne pointed out and accepting the vertical rate the current conditions offer.

Cheers

Heyyy


In american eagle on the ATR-72 we use performance speed cards .

After acceleration altitude (800ft) we roll the speed to 170 for

climb. In the CRJ its 200 kts. 170kts will give you 1800-2000 fpm aprx.

Christopher Dahlquist wrote:Hey Greg,

Pretty cool concept maintaining speed and varying rate of climb.

Is there a benefit from this in the form of economy or performance somehow?

Chris it's mainly performance based which in most cases optimizes economic efficiency. The basic physics behind this is that a wing has a sweet spot (angle of attack) where it's creating its maximum lift and minimum drag. The weight of the aircraft does effect this to a certain degree but the speeds we climb at are good rules of thumb for the CRJ and work well with it's specific wing design. Interesting detail about the CRJ700/900 is that in most all cases when flying these speeds the pitch angle is always 2.5 degs give or take a half a deg. Again it's the way the wing was engineered and each plane has it's sweet spot if that makes sense. The speeds I listed previously are our standard (default) speeds but over the past year we began a new ACARS based program and when we are climbing out of 10,000 ft we get a specific climb speed sent to us that is based on our takeoff weight, ISA temp (look that one up ), wind, humidity, etc to get our best rate of climb based off actual conditions. The goal in most all cases is to get to our filed altitude as quickly as possible to minimize fuel burn.

Another benefit of flying speeds vs. vertical rate is stall protection. This does not eliminate the possibility of stalling an aircraft as it climbs into the upper flight levels but it does add safety.

Cheers

Greg

This has been a great conversation. I love to hear from RW pilots and the procedures they follow. Thanks for the info Greg and Sean.