FYI,
Taken From Popular Science Mag. at
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/aviation/article/0,12543,592736,00.html
I think it's a hopped up Dragonfly. Looks like a yellow banana.
Cory Bird, an engineer at Burt Rutan's remarkable aviation design shop, builds
a composite-fiber airplane of Swiss-watch precision.
by Stephan Wilkinson
When a yellow two-seater called Symmetry flew for the first time in California
last April, a machine that is very likely the most finely crafted handmade
artifact of its type took to the air. Certainly I'd wager that Symmetry comes
closer to perfection than any other homebuilt airplane in the world, and it
deserves equal measures of admiration and incredulity. Admiration for the
precision of the machine, incredulity for the obsession that produced it. This
is technology as aviation art, from the hands of one man.
I've seen a lot of homebuilts and made one myself -- an Italian-designed Falco
that some people, stroking my ego, said was a pretty obsessively constructed
beauty. Parked next to Symmetry, however, my spruce speedster would have looked
like a sorry piece of plywood trash. And my "obsessiveness" would have seemed
like slapdash carpentry compared to builder Cory Bird's pursuit of perfection.
Quite simply, Symmetry is not only symmetrical but dead-nuts flawless. The
airplane's fuselage is as lithe and sinuous as a tango dancer's outthrust leg.
Its wings are literally as straight and true as a draftsman's steel rule. Next
to its nine coats of hand-rubbed acrylic urethane (seven pigmented, two clear),
the $60,000 paint jobs on many a concours-winning collector car would look like
Earl Scheib re-sprays. Under harsh fluorescent hangar lights that would make
even a brand-new Mercedes appear to have been painted with a broom, Symmetry
reveals nary ripple nor flaw.
When I first saw Symmetry, in its hangar at Mojave Airport in California's high
desert, I peered into the uncowled engine compartment and marveled at the
amount of extra machinery that extended back into the space between the
four-cylinder, 200- horsepower Lycoming engine and what I assumed was the front
of the cockpit -- hoses, tubing, pumps, wires, an extra pair of magnetos . . .
260 MPH.
Wait a minute, extra magnetos? I realized that Symmetry's stainless-steel
firewall had been polished to an absolute mirror finish and was simply
reflecting the back of the engine, fooling my eye into seeing space where in
fact there was hard steel.
KRron
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: Ronald R. Eason Sr..vcf
Type: text/x-vcard
Size: 531 bytes
Desc: not available
Url :
http://mylist.net/private/krnet/attachments/20040220/9967237f/RonaldR.EasonSr..vcf
