DangerZone
Well-Known Member
A friend and I talked about the affordable flying boats that are available on the market. Many of them are weight shifting boats that were initially designed as flying trikes, and the most popular on the Adriatic Sea are the Polaris FIB and the Ramphos. The foldability of wings usually takes some thirty minutes and needs complete dismantling so I was wondering if there is any new technology or wing design which might enable faster folding of wings or leaving them in one piece?
Ideally, the wings should be solid or fast foldable like on most aircraft that need a couple of actions to fold or unfoled the wings in five minutes. The wings usually mounted on flying boats are of the trike kind yet these have no efficient airfoil and produce a lot of drag. A wing of the type like the Avid/Catalina might be a better option if it could be bought at an affordable price. I notice that our friends across the pond in USA/Canada/Americas have some other options and designs, the following might show an introspective about what is available.
www.scottstrikecenter.com
The Seair and the Cygnet seem more popular over there, yet they also use a trike configuration kind of airfoil. A nice homebuilt engine (150HP Yamaha R1 with a PSRU) Cygnet kind of aircraft was on sale on Barnstormers for some $29k. The engine is sold and the owner seems to be asking $19k for the amphibian without it, meaning he valued it at around $10k. This is what it looked like:
So I was thinking, has anyone installed some new design wings on such aircraft/flying boats? Something straight and rectangular like those of the Lockwood Drifter?
Any design is worth discussing, as long as it allows more efficiency, faster folding/unfolding and better affordability. The goals is to see all options that could be mounted on a flying boat or a finished design which would be cheaper than building a homebuilt version. What kind of pre-finished wings are there which could be used to save some time?
Ideally, the wings should be solid or fast foldable like on most aircraft that need a couple of actions to fold or unfoled the wings in five minutes. The wings usually mounted on flying boats are of the trike kind yet these have no efficient airfoil and produce a lot of drag. A wing of the type like the Avid/Catalina might be a better option if it could be bought at an affordable price. I notice that our friends across the pond in USA/Canada/Americas have some other options and designs, the following might show an introspective about what is available.
www.scottstrikecenter.com
The Seair and the Cygnet seem more popular over there, yet they also use a trike configuration kind of airfoil. A nice homebuilt engine (150HP Yamaha R1 with a PSRU) Cygnet kind of aircraft was on sale on Barnstormers for some $29k. The engine is sold and the owner seems to be asking $19k for the amphibian without it, meaning he valued it at around $10k. This is what it looked like:
So I was thinking, has anyone installed some new design wings on such aircraft/flying boats? Something straight and rectangular like those of the Lockwood Drifter?
Any design is worth discussing, as long as it allows more efficiency, faster folding/unfolding and better affordability. The goals is to see all options that could be mounted on a flying boat or a finished design which would be cheaper than building a homebuilt version. What kind of pre-finished wings are there which could be used to save some time?
