How many Litres per Hour.

[planebuild]

How many Litres per hour does a Piper Tomahawk use , also what do you mean by changing the wings after every 10,000 hours , do you have to buy a new set of wings or do you repair the wings.

www.freewebs.com/tomahawkweb

[Av8trxx]

As I understand it, after that many hours the Tomahawk is no longer flyable in the US as it has an airworthiness life span. It's useful life, as determined by the FAA, has been met. The service life of the wing and associated structure has been established as 11,000 hours time-in-service (TIS) in the USA. My guess is after that time they export them as they can't be flown without an expensive spar modification, which would explain why you seldom see them here anymore.

From the specs, usable fuel is 30 gallons (114 litres) and cruise burn is between six and seven gallons per hour. That translates to 22.7 to 26.5 litres.

Read these articles about the Tomahawk:
http://flighttraining.aopa.org/learn...icles/0107.cfm
http://www.aopa.org/asf/asfarticles/sp9702.html

Airliners.net forum: "Tomahawk. Why does it have a bad safety record?"
http://www.airliners.net/discussions....main?id=88977

These other enthusiast sites may provide some good info-
http://pipertomahawk.com
http://www.pa38.com/

Interesting web blurb:
"When Piper was designing the Tomahawk, they were looking for any advantage they could gain over the Cessna 150 while using the same engine. One of the things they did was to use the "new" [airfoil design] to try to get slightly better performance. This worked out reasonably well on the prototype, which was used to do the certification. Unfortunately, in a story repeated far too often in history, the production engineers thought they were smarter than the design engineers and built the production aircraft with about half as many ribs as the wing originally had...Sounds good: less weight, lower parts count, right? Wrong! The end result was that the skins were not stiff enough and would "oil can" under air loads, disrupting the airfoil shape. Wing bending under aero loads would also distort the airfoil. The biggest problem was with the stall characteristics. In the prototype, they were acceptable. On the production birds, the stall was unpredictable and would change from time to time. I did my flight training in a Tomahawk, and have most of my logged time in one (this was before I learned about the wing problem). Stalls in a Tomahawk are not a nice, gentle g-break like a Cessna 150. Instead they were characterized by a fairly sharp (violent?) wing drop, which seemed like at least 45° of bank and was unpredictable in direction. I'm not sure about FAR 23, but I'm pretty sure that the stall characteristics would fail the appropriate Mil Specs. My flight instructor tried to convince me that it was designed that way to "improve training," but I don't buy that anymore. I certainly wouldn't want that sort of "training" low to the ground during a botched turn to final, whereas a g-break would probably be recoverable. The clearest indicator to me was that I was sufficiently scared of the stall characteristics that I refused to practice any stalls in the airplane after I received my certificate. On the other hand, stalls in other aircraft, such as Cessnas or even the Piper Cherokee series are non-events. I recently read that the NTSB is calling for a re-certification of the Tomahawk stall and spin characteristics. The stories I have read correlate well with what I remember. I may have close to 100 hours in the Tomahawk, but based on what I know now, I really have no desire to ever fly in one again." ~http://www.eaa1000.av.org/desingrp/bearhawk.htm