Quote Originally Posted by Eric Witherspoon View Post
Here are the summary results & recommendations.
One recommendation that wouldn't cost anything that I could see EASILY being of benefit is the recommendation to allow a second person aboard during Phase I for a multitude of purposes - to fly the airplane while you collect the data; to help with keeping your flight tests on track (what's the next point to hit, what's next in the plan); to help with recording data; to watch for traffic, etc. Perhaps this could be implemented after some ballast testing was done to show the aircraft is controllable at the increased weight.
My $0.02 on this:

There is no need to risk a second person test flying a single pilot aircraft. You can buy a $20 spy-cam off of e-bay that'll record an hour or more of video from the panel. You'll have engine data, airspeed, altitude, etc., it'll be perfectly recorded and a second person won't be at risk. Download it to your computer after each flight and you'll have the data forever.

Having test flown my airplane and carried out a pretty thorough flight test regime, I found that it broke down into two phases, neither of which was overwhelming. The initial phase was ~10 hours of making sure the aircraft had good basic flight characteristics, breaking in the engine, and making sure the systems worked properly. I collected minimal performance data during that period. The remainder of my flight test period was spent establishing hard data for the airplane - fuel burn, climb rates, speeds at various altitudes and power settings, validating the CG and W/B envelope, aerobatics, maximum performance takeoffs and landings, etc. Again, keeping up with things was no trouble, and certainly didn't require a second person.