Your favorite medium-long range cruise altitude
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After 9 months and 240 legs into a 285 leg Starship world tour, touching down in virtually every country with an airport and totalling almost 90,000 nm so far, I've kind of settled on FL175 as the best of most worlds. While the fuel burn is higher than above FL300, I find you get a better view of the scenery, and you can easily get to a TAS of 315 with 93% torque and just under 800 degrees ITT. Other than the fuel burn, this feels like the sweet spot.
What are others doing in medium-long range cruise?
(PS I use no GNSS, just VOR hopping or VLF/Omega only)
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And I was thinking my 100 hours in the Starship are impressive
Lately I'm almost always checking the winds at altitude with simbrief for the route. Can gain as much as 25% time/fuel savings by avoiding flight levels with strong headwinds. It's not like with the Learjet that cruises with 500 kts GS, here every 50kts of headwind takes a sizable % chunk out of the GS
When selecting the altitude I'm less interested in the views as I find there isn't much difference above 15.000 AGL for me. And besides, for views I have my world tour in the Baron that I'm mostly doing like 4k AGL and then the views are really great.
