I was very pleased to be able to get 6 minutes in dead air time. Thought I was doing well. Launch could only safely produce a moderate zoom though. Conditions several nights in a row. Dead air, never a twitch. To get the six minutes I still had to turn with trims only otherwise I would only get five minutes.
Interesting to note I frequently did better this way than nights with the little bits of lift I have read of the attempt to produce planes like this but decided that I lived only in sink. I have seen Dennis Phelan and one of his friends though produce launches that looked to be double the height with their F3B models . At those heights I would not be suprised at the times Mike records Very interesting. Rick Date: Fri, 4 Jan 2002 08:01:06 -0800 (PST) From: tony estep <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: How long is yours? Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Re still-air times: Suppose that you can launch to 600 feet (pretty good for still air with a 600 foot line). If your plane's loading is 9 oz/sq ft, at a CL of 0.9 it will fly 23 ft/sec. Therefore if the L/D at that speed is 23 the sink rate will be 1 ft/sec. That's 10:00 from 600 feet. BUT -- there are a lot of moving parts in this "test." It's hard to get consistent flights with the same launch height and to keep the plane flying at minimum sink throughout the flight. And of course it doesn't take much air movement to change the results dramatically. If the air is rising at even 10 ft/min, you'll stay up 12 minutes instead of 10! This sort of air movement is easily possible even after dark. So it's mighty hard to be sure you're drawing the right conclusions about a plane's performance from "still-air" testing. RCSE-List facilities provided by Model Airplane News. Send "subscribe" and "unsubscribe" requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
