As the title suggests, I am challenging hb.commers to sketch the world's smallest airplane.
We have been discussing this over on www.secretprojects.com.
Rau Stitts and Robert H. Starr had cooperated on a couple of previous tiny record-holders, but Starr believed that he could do even better, so he built an even-smaller Bumble Bee (I) biplane.
The current record was set by Robert H. Starr's Bumble Bee II biplane with a wing-span of 5 feet 6 inches (1.68 meters), length of 8' 10" (2.7 m) and height of 3' 11" (1.2 m), gross take off weight 574 pounds (260 kilograms) and stall speed of 75 knots (139 kph). Starr first flew his world record airplane on 2 April 1988. A crash - a few months later - grounded the airplane and saw it donated to the Pima Air Museum.
In 1963, Terrence O'neill built a tiny Pea Pod canard with a prone pilot, but never flew it.
A modern contender should be able to fly from a 2,000 foot (650 meters), hard-surfaced runway but only has to accommodate a 5th percentile female pilot 108 pounds and 59.6 inches tall (151.5 cm and 49 kg).
For practical purposes, let's keep height less than 8 feet, to allow us to store ... er ... hide our embarrassment ... in an ISO 20 shipping container.
Hah!
Hah!
My bias would be towards some sort of delta with winglets to "cheat" on wingspan. Most of our (www.homebuiltairplanes.com) discussions on low-aspect ratio - aka. low wing span - airplanes point towards a nose-mounted propeller and landing gear pre-welded at the perfect pitch angle for take-off and landing (see: Dyke Delta, Ver Hees Delta and Wainfain Facetmobile).
Would a biplane delta help reduce wing-loading and stall speed?
Would a delta biplane look like "the box the Dyke arrived in?"
Hah!
Hah!
What are your thoughts?????
We have been discussing this over on www.secretprojects.com.
Rau Stitts and Robert H. Starr had cooperated on a couple of previous tiny record-holders, but Starr believed that he could do even better, so he built an even-smaller Bumble Bee (I) biplane.
The current record was set by Robert H. Starr's Bumble Bee II biplane with a wing-span of 5 feet 6 inches (1.68 meters), length of 8' 10" (2.7 m) and height of 3' 11" (1.2 m), gross take off weight 574 pounds (260 kilograms) and stall speed of 75 knots (139 kph). Starr first flew his world record airplane on 2 April 1988. A crash - a few months later - grounded the airplane and saw it donated to the Pima Air Museum.
In 1963, Terrence O'neill built a tiny Pea Pod canard with a prone pilot, but never flew it.
A modern contender should be able to fly from a 2,000 foot (650 meters), hard-surfaced runway but only has to accommodate a 5th percentile female pilot 108 pounds and 59.6 inches tall (151.5 cm and 49 kg).
For practical purposes, let's keep height less than 8 feet, to allow us to store ... er ... hide our embarrassment ... in an ISO 20 shipping container.
Hah!
Hah!
My bias would be towards some sort of delta with winglets to "cheat" on wingspan. Most of our (www.homebuiltairplanes.com) discussions on low-aspect ratio - aka. low wing span - airplanes point towards a nose-mounted propeller and landing gear pre-welded at the perfect pitch angle for take-off and landing (see: Dyke Delta, Ver Hees Delta and Wainfain Facetmobile).
Would a biplane delta help reduce wing-loading and stall speed?
Would a delta biplane look like "the box the Dyke arrived in?"
Hah!
Hah!
What are your thoughts?????
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