Another Bite of the Elephant

Yesterday we managed to finish the changes we were making to the model to perform a second round of high speed taxi testing. We have now adjusted the attitude of the fuselage to lower the nose as we do not want the main wing to get airborne before the fore plane. We also increased the angle of attack on the fore plane and adjusted the weight and balance. These settings we basically put back to how I originally had them. We also went back through all the aerodynamic calculations and did them from scratch to make sure we had not made any mistakes. The large diameter of the fuselage is still a bit of an unknown as most, if not all, formulas don’t take that into account. So even though you think it should all ‘fly’ there is still an X factor in the calculations that you will only determine by actually flying it.

For now we kept the smaller fore plane as the calculations showed it should work fine provided that the angle of attack was increased. We may still have to enlarge it at some point after further testing.

After checking the coefficient of lift on the wing and fore plane for the angle of attack we would be using and determining when each would overcome their portion of the weight of the aircraft we were fairly confident that the aircraft should rotate around 35 mph and lift off soon after that. But, like sending your kid off to school for the first time, there is still a nervousness. Will everything work as it should?

Here is a video update for the rest of the story. Enjoy.