• Welcome aboard HomebuiltAirplanes.com, your destination for connecting with a thriving community of more than 10,000 active members, all passionate about home-built aviation. Dive into our comprehensive repository of knowledge, exchange technical insights, arrange get-togethers, and trade aircrafts/parts with like-minded enthusiasts. Unearth a wide-ranging collection of general and kit plane aviation subjects, enriched with engaging imagery, in-depth technical manuals, and rare archives.

    For a nominal fee of $99.99/year or $12.99/month, you can immerse yourself in this dynamic community and unparalleled treasure-trove of aviation knowledge.

    Embark on your journey now!

    Click Here to Become a Premium Member and Experience Homebuilt Airplanes to the Fullest!

Legality of Glider design with body providing lift, so smaller wings can be used.

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

Bondvagabond

Member
Joined
May 10, 2016
Messages
24
Location
austin
While we have a great glider club here, as I start thinking about what I want my own glider to do, (should I be fortunate enough to complete such a project) I started thinking about how I would use it. Here at my club, I am fortunate enough to get to use some great modern gliders that belong to the club and to the members. If I built my own, I would use it here, at our glider only club, but I would also like to take it with us on my families frequent trips out to the lonely desert places. The launch sites I have in mind have good flat places to launch, but might have a difficult spot requiring high clearance and 4x4 in order to get to them. If I could come up with a glider with a shorter wing, that would make it much easier to trailer to these locations.

In thinking about how to have a decent glide ratio with a shorter wing, I thought, what about using the body as part of the lift, like with the Steve Whittman tailwind. I know some people use the experimental motor glider regulations as a way to fly closer to GA regulations without a medical exam. I don't want to do a lot of work on my short wing design and then not be able to get it signed off on. The guy I read about got a challenger 2 lsa certified as an experimental motor glider with a glide ratio of 9:1, as proof of concept of the "lifting body glider" idea, a whittman tailwind w-8 had a glide ratio of 11.73:1 or 32% better glide ratio than the challenger 2 experimental glider. (here is a link to the 1959 study showing the W-8's glide ratio)
https://www.homebuiltairplanes.com/...38271600-w-10-tailwind-witt-tailwind-1956.pdf

Not that 11.73:1 glide ratio is good enough for me, I only mention it to show the that the idea merits further experimentation. My idea would be to have a lifting body like a tailwind, but with slightly longer wings, no motor, small retractable glider style landing gear, and probably a strutless wing, sort of like a bd4c.

What do you think? Would the faa give me a hard time about experimenting with a short wing glider? Or would the fact that it had no motor, and a better glide ratio than some other registered experimental motor gliders be good enough for them? I am not aware of any wing length to aircraft weight requirement for Experimental gliders, but have heard that they are cracking down on what is used as a loophole by some. I would hate to put all that work into it and have it not be able to be registered as an experimental glider. My next step is to rough out my design a bit and then send off an email to the faa to get a written okay before I start building. Thanks for any advice.
 
Back
Top