cessnapilot

My Feedback: (10)

I have been up and down this forum and cant find what I am looking for.

I am looking for a program that will allow me to design a plane and print a set of plans from it. I have done this in CAD in the past but I am looking for something that might let you test the flight characteristic and best possible design.

Is there such a beast out there some where?

Mike James

At the top of this very page, there is a "sticky" on "Modeling software".

You can design a plane and even render it in 3D with a variety of software. The issue of printing typical RC-style plans will narrow your search to just a few choices. Probably AutoCad and just a few others.

Flight testing in an inexpensive CAD program? Nope. However, some of the flight sim software can get in the general neighborhood of predicting results. I use "X-Plane" for this. ( http://www.x-plane.com ) As an example of some recent testing I did, see
http://homepage.mac.com/mikejames/ne...t_x-plane.html

BMatthews

One of the flight simulator programs is supposed to model real life performance quite closely. It may be X plane or it may be some other simulator. Sorry I can't be more certain than that but I have no direct experience with it. But it only accepts basic 3D solid forms with no internal structure. You can enter in the shape and test it to the ability of the program in flight but then you need to put the 3D solid form into CAD and trace over it to develop some plans. There is no one step flight simulator to plans for building options.

Well, actually there probably is but mere mortals not involved with the aerospace industry probably can't afford it without mortgaging the house.