I am not sure if it is wise to answer this here.Chris wrote: This makes me wonder how much overweight you were when maxed out with fuel.
Chris, have in mind that I have fixed pitch prop DA40 which makes it a lot harder to take off with full weight.Chris wrote:In our XL, putting two passengers and >100 gallons of fuel on board would put us more than 150 lbs over the max takeoff weight.
150 lbs over max takeoff weight in your case is a piece of cake. Cessna allows up to 30% for ferry flights, Diamond engineers would allow only 10%. Flying with 500 lbs overweight isn't a problem in a DA40. The problem is taking off (and landing, but this is a less probable cause as you want to have most of the fuel burnt when landing). Take off has to be done with extreme caution in order not to stress the frame, landing gear and tires. I have heard of burst tires while taxiing...
Now looking at the DiamondReports I see average cruise speeds of 105-110 kts, so I didn't do too bad in my overloaded FP with needs to stay under 7 g/h.
A lot. Take off took me around 3000 ft and it doesn't feel very safe to taxi so I taxied very, very slow. Especially curves and little bumps on the taxi ways are scary. Rotation speed was at 65 kts, if I remember well and I kept hovering over the runway to the very end in a short-runway takeoff to gain speed before climbing.Chris wrote:While I'm not planning to try to exceed the max specs, I'm interested to hear how badly take-off performance and handling suffered in this configuration. I guess I'm wondering just how much margin is built in to the specs.
Interestingly we still had climb rates of 500 ft at very hot outside temperatures and eventually managed to climb to FL150.