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Cheap aircraft are simply impossible? :(

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Inverted Vantage

Formerly Unknown Target
Joined
Jun 19, 2008
Messages
1,116
"If it was easy, someone else would've done it..."

Another one of these threads. I just ran through the gamut with an aeronautics grad student friend of mine - we spent a good 8 hours discussing and researching a myriad of ideas - and everything we did turned up short.

We tried all plastic structures; but no luck, nothing had a good enough strength to weight ratio.

We tried all plastic structures with aluminum spars; no luck, same problem, and it was just too heavy overall.

We tried thermoformed plastic with carbon fibre or fiberglass insets as strengtheners; the labor costs required in piecing it all together and trimming/fitting those composite strips would make the other labor savings negligible.

We tried a hershey bar wing that was literally just an extruded aluminum shape; this was OK, but we found a lot of difficulties attaching the wing to anything else. This was probably our best option though - but still expensive.

Fiberglass has it's obvious limitations, as does welded/rivited aluminum.

I'm really beginning to think that a manufactured airplane below $50,000 really is just a pipe dream for people who don't really know the nitty gritty of aircraft design. The more I learn, the more I realize just why this hasn't been done before.

How about you guys? Any ideas? :(
 
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