Ugly as hell hehe, but it works! I was hoping for aircraft with a distinct fuselage and body - I know the smallest aircraft in the world (Bumblebee, Bumblee II, etc), but I'm hoping for something normal sized.
The program was canceled because the era of propeller fighters was coming to an end. The prototype was destroyed for the same reason most other dead end projects are. Aside from the fact that it had no other potential customer the US government has a weird law that prohibits a contractor from profiting from publicly financed research except by selling that product back to us
You can have a good L/D, at high speed, with low AR by keeping the wing loading really low but that design philosophy produces big wings. Sink rate can't be good with low AR though because induced drag is relative to span^2/weight. When you get to aspect ratios significantly less than 2 and AoA greater than ~8 degrees you get into vortex lift which can slow down landings as well as flaps but without increasing the pitching moment. That's a good thing because the pitching moment is proportional to the chord and you're not likely to be able to trim it out with a reasonable tail. The early ARUPs ran into this problem with Cm. They used an m-6 reflexed airfoil and no tail. You trimmed the plane for a given speed by moving the trailing edge. They could slow down just fine but when they tried to fly faster than the design speed the Cm suddenly went negative and the plane went straight for the ground:shock:. Definitely a plane in which you have to know how to fly the throttle. This is a problem for plank type flying wings and the last ARUP had a horizontal stabilizer to fix it. A TWITT member started on a low AR plane a few years ago and he finally had to put a tail on it:dis:
I did not know about that, very interesting.
Yep:think: With a single engine in the nose downward visibility is going to be bad unless you put a window in the floor but that would be hard to keep clean. Also the vortex lift starts around 7 or 8 degrees but it isn't really very strong until past the normal stall angle and keeps increasing until something past 30 so there's also no forward view during final approach. The visibility problem was solved in the V-173 as a side benefit of the twin engines. I was thinking that since the nose gear strut has to be so long in this type it might be worth considering puting the engine on that.
I wouldn't say the visibility downward was very good on the V-173, at least not to the sides.
Sorry, I thought I remembered reading about a personal vendetta from one of the higher up political figures that led to a the forced destruction of the ship against the companies wishes.
You probably did. Personal animosity develops easily when somebody is threatening to cut off somebody else's gravy train. Whatever the original motives of both parties in the end there's usually some ill will and words like "vendetta" sell more books than "hurt feelings"
Not all of them. The F-102A could do Mach 1.25 and this was well before fly by wire and artificial stability were available.
The reflex sets trim not stability just like the elevator of a tailed aircraft. In a tailed AC pushing the stick forward will only result in a level flight speed increase up to a point then the plane will dive. Only the trimmed condition has changed not the stability. The plane is now in a stable dive and if you rolled it over it could fly level with the stick pushed even farther forward because the static stability is dependent on the CG and size of the horizontal stabilizer not the angle of the elevator
