LoonyBob

2 seat Thrusters have been fitted with a wide range of tailwheels, over the years (from factory and otherwise!). Larger diameter helps hop over tussocks, pneumatic helps a lot with soft surfaces, getting carried away and reducing the ground angle makes for less pleasant landings (& often faster/longer, too). I only use solid tailwheels if the aircraft needs the ballast...

Fouga would give you a good kicking for that!

I'd love to see the report; I had my gossip (much later) from a couple of members of NSW DCA at the time...

The Certification flight testing used to involve three turns of a developed spin; then it became three rotations after dropping a wing... the DCA started to have arguments with the FAA back in the '60s, according to my sources... I think NZ also had a disagreement on the topic.

Aerobatic manouvres were prohibited in AUF-registered aeroplanes... let us just say that I had to resort to unconventional measures to get out of the rotor and away from the ground!

The Taylorcraft & Austers used Linseed oil (as Kensla said, it's Approved). VH-WRB had no corrosion whatsoever inside it after the bowser incident at Bathurst (I thinkthat was WRB?). but it wa sonly about 33 years old then. Be aware! In Tymes of Olde, Boiled Linseed oil was ordinary linseed oil, brought to the boil & simmered to drive all the moisture off/reconfigure the volatiles; and it dried as a completely impervious film. Bunnings "Boiled Linseed" is linseed oil cut with a thinner, and dries porous. A good artist supplier will sell fair dinkum boiled linseed; pricey, but not compared to the alternatives. Linseed has the advantage of being self-healing. i've used unboiled linseed, both straight and 50/50 with fish oil, in car sills (which are ventilated), and either stops any further rusting for a decade or so.

Gliding in a small thermal, the inner wing nibbles the edge of stall a lot; but one never allows it to develop, for a stall decreases the rate of climb! I have had the fun of flying a T83 into strong rotor (off an adjacent hill) about 500m short of the airstrip threshold, which rolled it against full aileron. I aborted the approach...

The FAA flight test guide rests largely on RAeS/ARL and German data from pre-WW2; again, the FAA FTG is not a comprehensive first-principles study, but a guide for flight testing. It is just this failure to distinguish between an incipient and full spin, that eroded the original Certification requirement to recover from a developed spin. The Empire Air Training Scheme training material on spins and how to feed them, is much more comprehensive, but very hard to find! I repeat, I strongly recommend all RAAus pilots who have not practices deliberate spinning yet, to get the experience from a gliding club with an appropriate aircraft.

I agree that a Mirage, especially fully fueled, would act a good deal more like a gyroscope than does a cruciform aeroplane; but the Mirage gains its lift pretty much exclusively from vortex lift (forget Prandtl for a moment!), and so cannot experience a local separation of flow normal to the leading edge. It's a different beast in many ways. Precession is a reaction to an imposed torque normal to the axis of rotation, and occurs at 90deg to the applied torque, still in the plane of rotation; in an aeroplane, that would mean that the rudder would produce a pitch reaction, and vise versa. This is seen not to happen in cruciform aeroplanes. Non- Mirage flyers, consider a non-delta aeroplane just after pitch-down. The fuselage major axis is closely aligned to what is about to become the axis of rotation; the wing is almost normal to same. The integral of the squares of the distances of the wing elements from the axis of rotation is enormously greater that those of the fuselage; the wing inertia is considerably more critical, and remains so until the spin flattens. In said inclined state, a lift differential from tip to tip will start to drive a rotation, rather than support the aeroplane, because the lift is near normal to gravity. Correct spin recovery control input for test flying involves STARTING by centralising controls, and then - depending upon the results of a study of the physical details of (at least) the control surfaces, lifting and stabiliser surface geometry, location and execution, and the rear fuselage - either maintaining neutral pitch input and applying anti-spin rudder, or maintaining neutral rudder input & moving the stick smoothly to the full nose-down position. If recovery does not initiate, and height allows, cycling the stick is commonly the next step, followed perhaps by applying in-spin aileron, or cycling the rudder, or various combinations of the above. If the spin continues, one normally recentralises the controls, and (in a small aeroplane) moves the seat to the full-fowards position, possibly removing the harness and getting as far forwards as practicable. At some point, one deploys the (anti) spin 'chute, and then flies back to base, trying to figure out wtf can be changed on the aircraft to make it behave. I understand that when John Thorp (of NSW Region DCA, not the designer bloke) was investigating the unrecovering Chipmunk mystery, he followed very much this routine (I don't know if he had a spin chute fitted, but he didn't deploy one); after spinning the first Chippie, he flew to base and reported that the aircraft was unrecoverable by normal means, and that the fleet was (would remain?) grounded until he had cleared each aircraft. He went on to spin every Chippie on the Australian register, and cleared each and every one with the new stick grip removed and the old one returned to service. Apparently, the conformal grip reduced the stick foward travel by a few mm, which was enough to make the difference.

I was of the same view, until I gained the shotfirer's licence; by that time, I had acquired a wide base of knowledge on backyard preparation of a range of explosives and detonators, from publicly available sources. A shotfirer is responsible for maintaining the safety of the public w.r.t. explosives; and it was shown that keeping quiet about the nuts & bolts was of great import, because the record shows that terrorists, even more than criminals, don't use homemade explosives in IED, in the vast majority of cases. The fact that terrorists have not yet used any of the methodologies that I dreamed up after 11/9, does not support your position. Remember, Baader/Meihoff were journalism students; science was beyond them...

The load (forces) on VGs are very small; ~2gm at 80kt for those pictured. Double sided tape is certainly the go for short/medium term experimental attachment, which is where most of my experience lies. I wouldn't be too touchy about the exact orientation; Vortex Generators are little wingtips, which generate a tip vortex, best with an AoA of ~30 degrees to the local flow. Square or delta, they all work pretty much the same. When they are fitted as opposing pairs, the vortii(??) are meant to pump air on to the surface between/"behind" the VGs. The spacing is actually more important than the AoA. VGs on the HS to increase its Clmax are old news. Since VGs on the underside do nothing to help stall/spin recovery, a bigger HS (or restricted CG range) is normally preferred. The Savannah's rear fuselage provides both a bit of stall recovery and a bit of spin damping, i wouldn't get too excited.

Create your own market, BRILLIANT!!!

Okay, "powervalves" have become a thing; but their purpose is to allow engines with porting for huge power at high revs, to not stumble in the midrange. And yes, this does reduce the blowthrough (and emissions) under those conditions; but they don't change the fundamentals, unfortunately. I'm a big fan of 2-strokes that do NOT use crankcase compression, but I'm going to have to build my own!

I think stronger emission laws are eating the profitability of 2-strokes... I'd love to know how they get that power! Maybe it's more peaky than a Rotax?

Call me reactionary, but - it is inherently unstable, and requires fly-by-wire. Any failure that involves both assymetric lift and some fault in the artificial stability system will tend to be catastrophic. There's some good footage of the occupants of an F4 ejecting when the ASS failed on takeoff... what's the maintenance overhead on military aircraft with ASS fly by wire? ICAO targets a once per million flying hours possibility of a catastrophic (causing death or serious injury) failure in an SRE aeroplane; in a good year, we achieve ~1 in 850,000 for structural & systems failures not caused by human errors in operation/maintenance. We all know DO 160 does not garauntee perfect avionics... Given the failure modes and effects spread of that thing, I do not as yet see a probability of failure that I'd put my neck on.