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Design Exercise: Design of a flight sim aircraft

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futurethink

Well-Known Member
Joined
Aug 4, 2012
Messages
65
Location
Sri Lanka
At the moment I am doing my simulator 'flying' in Cessna 172. It's a really nice plane, but it lacks speed and rate of climb, the Piper PA-24-250 is a much more capable machine with its speed and climb. It's a very old design. The flight sim is Flight Gear. Flight Gear is a free and open source flight simulator program of very high quality. You can read about it here.


I wanted, with my interest in designing aircraft I could come up with a design for a virtual aircraft in the simulator a 4 place design similar to that mentione in the article referred to below. The design could be used as a basis for a homebuilt and maybe a production aircraft later.

In any case, it will be a learning experience.


I have read throught the following article on homebuilders about low cost homebuilt aircraft.


https://www.homebuiltairplanes.com/forums/showthread.php?t=10768


The author states the following:


"
The aforementioned proposal resulted in four generic concept aircraft suitable for development in two and four seat configurations. The following listing shows a generalized summary of the performance capabilities of the two place concepts.


Maximum sea level speed 205 m.p.h. (178 knots)
Cruise speed 175 m.p.h. (152 knots)
Stall speed 54 m.p.h. (46 knots)
Rate of climb 1,100 fpm
Power 160 hp
Ceiling 25,000 ft. "


"The low end aviation market needs new, innovative, low cost, two and/or four place trainer and cross-country utility aircraft suitable for production in kit and certified form. In order to be successful the new plane(s) would have to significantly surpass the standard configurations’ performance, be easy to assemble (500 hours or less), inexpensive to maintain, and of course have a low purchase price - in the neighborhood of $70,000 for the assembled aircraft and around $20,000 for the kit. Why not? Look at what you can buy in a car for that kind of money, and an airplane is a tinker toy compared to the complexity of most of today’s production automobiles."

What about the use of aluminium instead of composites for a kit built aircraft, panels could be shipped and assembled easier.
Not that the material makes any difference to a flight sim, but from the design point of view, it does.
 
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