BigBen

Sorry to hear your health is restricting your big airplane building but look forward to hearing test results on your models. I plan to use full span Junker elevons along with some anhedrel which hopefully will give reasonable roll control but was not sure about the elevator power at high angles of attack due to the CG swinging forward under those conditions.

Thanks again Tom. I appreciate your generosity. Do you have an idea of the stability impact of having a low CG from placing the "wing" above the cockpit?

Thanks for the feedback guys. I do know about the induced drag issue due to high span loading and plan to keep the wing loading low and thus a lower Cl squared. Wainfan does opine that a smoothmobile should reduce profile drag by about 20% and my proposed construction method will allow smooth airfoil shapes as easily as faceted so I am experimenting more along those lines.

Thanks for the input Bexrbetter. I have followed GTEX09 development with great interest and respect for his accomplishments. His wing is however a faceted airfoil and I am interested in the potential drag improvement of a smoothmobile type of airfoil which Tom appears to be proposing in the sketch above. Also I would like to develop a smaller aircraft than GTEX09's with an enclosed cockpit (also for drag reduction) and his aircraft appears to be about the smallest that would allow complete enclosure within the wing. Tom's proposal would allow me to accomplish both the drag reduction and enclosed pilot in a smaller aircraft. My aircraft will hopefully be US Part 103 compliant. The smaller size is to keep the empty weight down and again keep the drag lower resulting in a smaller engine requirement keeping weight and fuel consumption down, a virtuous cycle. It is surprising how much wing area is possible with the Zimmerman low aspect ratio concepts. I would like to see your concepts posted when you have them available.

Tom, In the above design you appear to be applying a "smoothmobile" type of nonfaceted airfoil with a sharp leading edge instead of the faceted airfoils your lifting bodies and Wainfan utilized. Have you developed a foil cross section for this aircraft? If so, I would appreciate your sharing the coordinates and any aerodynamic data if they have been modeled. Also I like the high wing solution for both vision and access improvements. Do you see any problems from having the CG located enough below the wing to introduce a pendulum effect that negates a lot of the benefit of the very long chord or do you think there is still plenty of elevator power available? Thanks and have a great New Year.

Rotax618. Your model appears to be a half ellipse in planform. Have you calculated the location and length of the MAC for this planform?

Gimballock, do you know if Mr. Rowe has an email address? I would very much like to converse with him about the design details and flight characteristics of the UFO and telephone discussions would get very costly. Thanks

Hello to my fellow aviators down under. My name is Ben and I'm a retired engineer living in Sebring, Florida. I'm an ASEL pilot , a sport gyroplane builder and pilot, and my next project is a flying wing part 103 ultralight. I look forward to picking your collective brains for info about several of the unique flying wing aircraft you guys have built.