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Thoughts on folding or removable wings for keeping a plane at home

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cluttonfred

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The folding or removable wing option to keep your plane on a trailer at home sounds attractive until you start missing opportunities to fly because you only have a limited window and the trailering and folding/unfolding keep you out of the air. Want to go for a quick flight after work or church or what have you? Well, first you have to go home and hook up the trailer, drive to the airport, unload it, park the trailer, assemble it, then start your preflight and leave enough time to do it all again afterwards, instead of just heading straight for the airport. If you have a family and commitments and limited windows of opportunity to fly, you may not fly much.

It comes down to how much you fly, how far away the airport is in relation to home and work, etc. The reality seems much like owning a good-sized boat on a trailer. If you only use it a few times a year, then trailering to the boat ramp to launch the boat is something you can live with, but if you use the boat a lot then you really want to have a slip in a marina so you can just get in the boat and go. Similarly, I think that there are quite a few Kitfoxes and Avids and Onexes (sp?) and the rest that are kept in hangars and rarely folded as their owners have gone the marina route. Even in Europe, where hangars can be so expensive, amateur- and factory-built Jodels and other European designs with one-piece wings, tip-to-tip, are still quite popular.

I say this not from personal experience as an owner of a plane with folding wings (I owned one for about a year, never touched it, long story) but after running a web site for almost a decade about a little plane famous for its quick-folding wings and removable tail for easy trailering. I have interacted with dozens of Clutton FRED owners and builders over the years and very, very few keep actively flying planes at home unless they have their own airstrip. Even Eric Clutton himself kept the original FRED at the Tullahoma airport in a hangar next to his Luscombe for the last decade or more that he flew it.

In my own design sketches I have settled on fuselage-mounted landing gear, easily removable wings in panels no more than 5.5m/18' long and usually much less, ditto the overall length of the fuselage from spinner to tail (sometimes with the rudder disconnected and folded 90 degrees on its hinges), and a tail span of about 2.25m (7' 5") if not removable. All those dimensions are based on the door opening and interior size of a 20' ISO shipping container, so actually more stringent than what is required for trailering, but I don't have to worry about the wear and tear of trailering a plane, especially on its own gear.

Personally, I think the focus should not be on trailering as such but on storage in a modest space like a shipping container or the corner of a larger hangar.
 
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