jtrain609
Antisocial Monster
Ok, so if you're climbing out above the trees, and there's nothing that your immediately worried about hitting, why wouldn't you want some of that extra speed? I mean hell, if you could sustain V2 + 50 in a good climb that satisfies the climb gradient, why wouldn't you want it?
Sorry, didn't want to derail Matt's thread so I made this one down here where it's a much better place to discuss this stuff.
Why not maintain V2 + 50? Because you have no way of determining that you're meeting your climb gradient restrictions. With the way our profile is setup, and I'm sure most are the same, you want to get to acceleration height as soon as possible, which means climbing at V2. Now does V2 plus a few knots (maybe up to 10 I've heard folks say) matter? No, it probably doesn't. But if you start to let that speed get away from you, you're going to end up in a situation where you're not at acceleration height at the proper location, and you may be bumping up against terrain problems.
V2 + 50 in my aircraft is something like 220-230 knots, and at those speeds you're not climbing, you're accelerating. Now don't get me wrong, there's a place for that; acceleration height. After that, climbing at Vfs is what you want to do in order to put distance between you and anything below you that you need to climb above, so you'll take that speed to any MVA or MEA that you want to be at before you start trying to really get down to the business of fixing the aircraft.
An argument against this might be that you could do a VMC climb and accelerate lower while maintaining obstacle clearance. That may be true, but I'm assuming you're in the soup at 100' and you can't see anything. More importantly, sticking to the company profile is important because the numbers you're using for your single engine departure were predicated and you following that profile and not making your own up.