ORIGINAL: hyrumflyer84
While I understand the desire to load the crap out of the wing to see if it will break ,, I have to say I have one of these Tomcats and I understand that it is what it is. A heavy replica of a heavy warbird. Its not a 3D machine or even a pattern ship. If you are looking for an every day flyer this aint it! I am gonna stick to a very scale flying style , I dont think alot of yanking and banking is gonna do this bird any good . Save the high Gs for a flash or a bandit. In my personal opinion and from building this bad boy if you treat the plane respectfully and sympathetic to the airframe you shouldnt have a problem.
I visited with Shulman after he flew one at the best of the west last year and he basically said it was not the easiest to fly plane. But HOLY COW it was cool!
I am not making my following statements in regards to FEJ's, I am making it in regards to structural failures, model designs, and in response to this quoted statement.
1. This is an F14, not a freaking J3 cub! Even if you are flying SMOOTHLY with an F14 you are going to hit fairly high G loads.
2. The best pilots in the world will run into a situation from time to time that requires a harder pull on the elevator, do you really want a jet that is stressed just enough for smooth flying?
3. Scale flying with a Tomcat isn't just simple circuits, it's rolling reversals, split S's, loops, etc, all maneuvers that will pull higher G's than a basic landing circuit.
When your jet goes through a turn, it accelerates the whole time.
The amount of Acceleration is equal to the velocity of the aircraft squared divided by the radius of the turn.
So if your jet is flying at say 200mph, (293.334 feet per second) and your turn is a 400 foot radius (which is pretty realistic), acceleration is 215.11fps2
The acceleration due to gravity is 32fps2, so 215.11fps2 / 32fps2 = 6.72G's!!!!!
Loading a wing to 8G's should not be unreasonable at all, and at 8G's, it should still hold without any creaking, groaning, *****ing or moaning. 8G's should be it's safe zone with a good buffer outside of that.
As for statements like this airplane is not an everyday flier, why shouldn't it be? From a stress point of view to the pilot it may not be, but every aircraft we build should be built like it's an everyday flier and be able to take the loads of flight over and over and over. Even if you don't expect it to be an everyday flier, I'd still be expecting any airplane to be able to take the loads needed during any flight for a full scale aerobatic schedule which with any fighter jet is going to include some fairly high G loads. Further to that, what happens when you are coming out of your split S and realize that you should have started 100 feet higher? Do you say to yourself, "I'd pull harder on the elevator, but my wings will fold?" Do you say "I guess I'll just fly it into the ground since the wings will break anyways" Human nature is going to make you yank the elevator to try to save your model, I'd like to know that if I hit 10G's or more in that situation I have a chance of the airframe holding together to save itself.
Again, I'm not posting this as a shot at FEJ's, this is a very complicated model and I'm sure these very reasons are why Skymaster and Fei Bao STILL haven't released their Tomcats after such a long time. Any manufacture producing a complicated jet like this will face these problems, but in this instance, with such a small structural area, I do think overbuilding is the order of the day.
Just my opinion.