To get back from Tallahassee FL to Lancaster TX, we flew N131JF for a new record time of 4 hours and 45 minutes on Monday. The FlightAware flight track is here.
We took off from Tallahassee with 42 gallons of fuel on board. Once at 6500 feet it became clear that we were heading into a ludicrous headwind - for a while the ground speed was barely breaking 130 knots while running 2550 rpm. After a while it rose to 139-140 knots, but at that rate of progress we were due to run out of fuel around 40 minutes out from Lancaster. I briefly descended to 4500 feet after 1 hour, but the ground speed was no better, and I was right in the middle of the scattered clouds having to dodge them, so that would have slowed us up even more, so I climbed back to 6500 feet. At that altitude, the sun was shining, it was smooth - but it was slow going.
After a couple of hours slogging along at 6500 feet, I descended to 4500 feet because I was getting cold. The outside temperature had dropped to 40 degrees from 50. At that lower altitude, the ground speed rose to 145-148 knots, which improved the fuel situation. For a while, I was weaving in and out of the clouds, then, as the cloudbase lifted over Mississippi, we ended up below the cloud base. There was more turbulence, but the ground speed increased to around 150-153 knots. That speed increase gradually improved the fuel situation, until with 2 hours to go we were actually 10 minutes ahead of fuel exhaustion. This further improved to 20 minutes with a re-calibration of remaining fuel onboard. The JP Instruments fuel flow meter is set to run slightly conservative, it shows more fuel used than actually burned. As you descend into the destination airport, you further improve your fuel situation.
We touched down at Lancaster with 2 gallons in the left tank and half a gallon (I think) in the right tank - right on safety margins. In reality, we were OK on fuel, since I remained at 4500 feet until 15 miles out from Lancaster and we were within gliding distance of 2 nearer airports with fuel (Terrell and Mesquite). We also had the fuel in the common sump (2.5 gallons), which is not counted in the onboard fuel amount.
That was the longest single flight leg I have ever flown in the Long-EZ. I could not have gone much further - my bladder was OK, but my legs were seriously stiff from confinement in the nosebox. I had to walk off the stiffness on the ground.
We parked the plane and will clean it up today (Tuesday). The plane accumulated just under 23 hours of flying time on the trip, and functioned very well, apart from a brief outage of the Navaid wing-leveller into Tampa on the out leg. That appears to be an intermittent contact issue in the wiring connector to the Navaid control unit in the panel. I shall work on that issue in the next few days.