rgmwa

I flew from Warrnambool to Melbourne in one in the mid 1960's. Ansett, I think. It was an experience walking uphill to my seat and being able to see right into the cockpit and watch the pilots at work. Lots of noise.

Sounds like a good choice for engineering support judging by her website.

Where do you live? Just want to make sure I don’t take a wrong turn by mistake.

Wrong again Skippy. No prior expectations and no bias reinforcement. I knew he was on his way back from Rottnest because he was talking to ATC and asking for traffic info around Fremantle which I was approaching in a 172, I saw his lights in the far distance and assumed they were attached to his aircraft which was much less easy to see until he got a fair bit closer. Anyway, have it your way. I'm getting a bit tired of this pot-stirring back and forth and I suspect others are too. People can make up their own mind about lights. I happen to think they can be useful at times. Even without that little episode, I would have put them on my plane anyway just because I like them. The extra switches on the panel look nice too.

Skippy i think anyone reading this thread will understand perfectly well that lights may help in certain circumstances but they are not required for day VFR, and should not be relied on to keep you safe. The example I gave was a one-off case where lights made a difference to visibility. That’s all. As you have already pointed out good radio communication and a good lookout are a lot more important.

Please yourself about your position. My rationale works for me. You seem to want to fit lights mainly because they look nice. I suppose that’s a good reason. To answer your question, we were both VFR. Last light about 6:30. Some cloud around to the west.

Sure, I agree. I knew roughly where to look, but how many times do you hear pilots say ‘looking for traffic’ when ATC or another pilot tells them where to look. Looking and seeing are two different things. I saw him because he had his wingtip strobes on and he was against a fairly dark land/sea background at around 5:00 pm. I have no doubt I would have seen him sooner or later without the strobes but he would have been a lot closer. He was also approaching more or less at right angles so not much relative movement against the background that would have made him easier to spot. It showed me the value of lights in certain circumstances. Good enough for me.

I was flying back to Jandakot south along the coast in the late afternoon some years ago and knew from his radio calls that a Mooney was approaching from my right at the same height on his was back from Rottnest Island. I saw his strobes much more quickly than I would have been able to see him otherwise at that time of day with the sun getting lower in the sky. I was easily able to avoid him but decided then that if I ever built a plane, I was going to have lights on it. I agree that most of the time you don't need them but if it prevents an accident or a near miss just once in your flying career, I'd say it's money well spent.

None of the above are required for VH day VFR, but they are a nice-to-have and anything that makes you more visible is good, particularly in the circuit.

Jet A1 isn't available at most airfields where you might want to operate that type of aircraft, so that could limit sales even if you could afford to buy one.

Don’t worry. Vans say you can build an RV-12 in about 900 hrs. It took me nearly twice that but who cares!

FWIW the RV-12 has 127 sq ft with a constant chord wing and MTOW 600 kg. Sling 2 also has 127 sq ft but with a tapered wing, although I'm sure you already know that as it's one of the aircraft you mentioned previously. Agree that retracts are not worth it in this class of aircraft. As has been mentioned, none of the RV's have them and they perform very well.

Good idea carrying the rudder all the way down. Should help spin recovery.

OK thanks. It’s quite an undertaking. Sounds like it might be an idea to have an experienced aeronautical engineer do a detailed design review and provide some technical guidance. It might save a lot of expensive prototype development and testing. Looking at the streamlined shape and weight, 120 kt cruise seems realistic as does 45 kt stall. The devil will be in the detail and effort required to turn a computer model into a functioning aircraft with all the fuel systems, flight controls, electrical and avionics components, engine installation, etc designed, documented and flight tested. Good luck with it.

I'm not familiar with Fusion 360 other than reading Autodesk's description of what it can do. I know it can do stress analysis for example, but how are you determining the flight loads to feed into the stress analysis. Having the software work out stresses once you've entered the loads is one thing, but how are you then deciding what are acceptable stress/deflection limits etc. What about flutter analysis? What sort of performance do you expect the aircraft to have? I'm asking because I'm curious, not because I want to come across as critical. You've spent a lot of time and effort to get the external shape looking great, but I'm just wondering about the engineering design behind it.