Practavia Sprite Part 2
Headset review
Sprite gets airborne… Tony Barber looks at the Practavia Sprite, part two – the problem with gravity…
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eight and balance turned out to be ‘interesting’ with this aircraft and, in hindsight, we should have weighed it before it was dismantled and resprayed… but we didn’t! The weight and balance schedule from 1991 was rather tight for a two-seat aircraft – probably two super light people could take off and land with about one hour of flight – but when we came to the weighing after the rebuild, odd looks were exchanged.
Unexpectedly heavy
We weighed ‘VF with empty tanks and the results were unexpected and more than a little disappointing; she had gained 72lb (32kg), that’s equivalent to the weight of 45 litres of fuel. We were expecting the replacement 46 | LIGHT AVIATION | November 2021
Above Tony says landing at the Rally with his son, was a great experience. Photo: Nigel Hitchman
Continental O300-D to burn around 33 litres an hour, so that’s about 1.5 hours of flying gone. The newer O300-D engine was supposedly 11lb heavier than the C125, plus around 4lb for the addition of the vacuum pump. We had replaced a lot of DIY hardware (nuts and bolts) with aviation grade which may have accounted for a couple of pounds in weight. We had removed three layers of paint and added an undercoat and two-pack topcoat, theoretically not adding any weight. The prop should have been very similar and the prop extender slightly lighter. A new radio was, if anything, lighter than the very old one we removed and other than that, there were no differences, so the jump in weight was something of a mystery. We concluded that apart from the old weights being erroneous, she had added a few pounds over the years.
