Sling Pilots Forum

Greetings Fellow AV8Rs;

Steve Schmidt
Retired military pilot (F15) and reitred FlightSafety instructor (Gulfstreams)
Rincon, GA
Have a gorgeous RV8 built by someone else
Building a Sling TSI at 3J1 in SC
QB fuselage/wings arrived 2 days ago.
Empennage kit arrived 4 days ago.
Need a 4-seater for grandkids and travel.
Very impressed by the QB and Empennage kit quality.
Will need everyone's help to pull this off.
Glad to be a member of the forum.

Welcome to the group

Congrats! If you don't mind a question, what made you pick the TSI? Being an RV guy did you consider the RV-10?

I chose the TSI because of the engine. FADEC. Auto-gas. No issues with no-lead.

Love my RV8's Lycoming but it might be a dinosaur when Biden's EPA finally kills 100LL. Was at Oshkosh for the big announcement about no-lead STCs. Hope it works out.

Understood, I fly a CTLSi for those reasons, plus the parachute for the one in a million airframe issue.

One other question: Best I can tell is that the TSI cruises at 150 knots and the RV10 at 170. How did that play into your choice?(or did it)

Thanks

I get 170 kts from my RV8 and it certainly makes traveling nice; however, I think 150 kts with the wife & grandkids on-board will work for most trips when compared to the alternative of taking a car. IMHO, the Sling's competition is the 4-cylinder folks in C-172s and PA-28s, not the 6-cylinder group in Bonanzas, RV10s, and SR22s. Plus, I like 8 gph way better than 15 gph. Finally, I permanently satisfied a lot of go-fast issues when I flew F15s for 20 years.

Lol, fair enough. I have a CTLSi and flew to Colorado two weekends ago and really like the idea of a turbocharger. Headwind was brisk and ended up with a 100 knot ground speed most of the way. That's what got me thinking about having the extra speed. Everything is a trade off.
Thanks for the info.

Also keep in mind that with the turbo on the 915 you will be developing full HP all the way up to at least 15k' whereas with an RV10 it starts to fall off because it's not turbo. Based on the numbers I've been looking at, the Tsi should be faster at altitude than the RV10. So to equate the Tsi to a 172/PA-28 isn't really a fair comparison.

Brian, if I remember your previous post correctly the break point was at about 10K where the TSi began to outperform the RV-10.
I usually don't fly that high but this last trip to Colorado had me at 10.5K and really would have been best at 12.5K.
That's got me wanting a turbo travel plane now for sure. I've already got Inogen O2 concentrators and it would be nice to take advantage of those.

Yup - things start to converge above 10k. I do admit the RV10 should be a little faster based on just the turbo component, but my math mojo isn't strong enough to figure out if the 600lb difference in aircraft weight is going to slow the RV10 down more.

Regardless, being an RV10 or a 172, everything at this altitude is going to be impacted by the thinner air. I'm based out of KBJC and we routinely see warm days where DA is greater than 8,000 MSL on the field. Of course the proof will be in the pudding. There's a TSI coming online here in CO right now (it's in the 40hr fly-off), so we should start seeing some good high altitude real-world numbers beyond the math here soon.

For right now - I know my neighbors appreciate the fact I'm building a pulled rivet aircraft vs. a buck rivet...