Watching 44VS try to climb. Doesn't look like a ton of reserve lift? Slowly making its way up at ~200 fpm.

741CC seemed to be climbing at 500-600 fpm before leveling at 36,000. Seemed like it could have gone higher if they were flying the same profile.

Edit: temps over KBOS were showing ISA+10 in the mid FL300 range and ISA+6 at FL420

So can someone summarize the conclusion? The winglets don't provide enough juice for the squeeze?

The plane at FL 360 is in slightly higher winds. Winds aloft are 20-30 knots higher in the mid 30s vs low 40s. They're also 50-100 miles apart and heading slightly different directions.

If they were truly trying to make PBI, I'd imagine they would be step climbing as soon as practical to get into lower headwinds and less fuel burn.


Interesting race.

Would be funny if the winglet plane had to divert.

Currently looks like the flight time of the CJ with winglets is going to be 10 minutes MORE than the flight time for the CJ without winglets.


The CJ with winglets looks like it'll fly 4 hours 38 minutes. That's way too long to sit in a CJ. And I suspect they're going to be landing with fumes.

I'd say that this "experiment" is a flop. I am not in a position to buy a CJ, but I can say that if I was, I would be less inclined to equip with winglets after seeing this today. My partner that does own a CJ has decided that winglets aren't for him after today.

4 hrs and 38 mins is a long time in a CJ!! Add in the fact that they are going to get an early descent into PBI and the pucker factor must be off the charts. There groundspeed has been really slow the entire flight so they must be in LRC but still....

I don't think this test tells anything about the real performance of the winglets, good or bad. With no common parameters between the two flight plans they might as well have just picked two random flights on Flightaware.

Concur.

If I was running this face off, I would have picked a flight that the non-winglet a/c could barely do, and had the winglet aircraft do the same flight. Then at the end of the flight, compare time & fuel burn. Those would be valuable numbers, but perhaps not as impressive of a case as Tamarack wished to make.

I worked for an OEM for 30 years and retired and started my own consulting firm. When I was at the OEM, we did a bunch of record attempts, but we never announced them beforehand, nor did we tell the crew. The position of the company was that if the crew knew we were trying to do a record attempt, they may "push" it more than they normally would. This is where Tamarack has failed, in my opinion. They're pushing the winglet equipped airplane to do something that they'd normally maybe not do (get-there-itis)

Too bad Tamarack went about this how they did. They could have used today to do something productive for their product.

I was waiting for them to join the approach at FL400. What a joke, absolutely no practicality to this whole thing.

This ends any thought I might have had about adding Tamarack winglets to my 195.

Jg

They said the flat wing had to level at 360 because it was "climb limited"

So if I have winglets...

I can take off with 3320 lbs (tanks overfilled by 100lbs)
use 2,710 lbs
and have 730 lbs remaining.

I gotta get me some o' them winglets! They're magic fuelmakers!

It's worth nothing that if they'd taken off with factory standard fuel (3220 lbs), they would have landed with less than a safe reserve. This was pushed to the limit for marketing purposes.

This whole event confirms Mike C’s misgivings about the marketing of this active winglet. It is an insult to any owner/operator who has the ability to fly/buy this class of aircraft.

Looks like they over fueled it by 200lbs, which is permissable but not to be used for planning. My typical conserve fuel low altitude power settings are 400/side.

There are times I can beat a long flight into headwinds with a fuel stop by staying lower rather than milking lrc. Total fuel is more, but flight time and total time is less.

Where did Alex go?