Hello Steve,

It's a real pleasure for me to talk with the designer of the planes I used to discover in french RC magazines when I was a child, more than 10 years ago . So first, indeed, congrats for this quite unusual and very nice looking design ! A real winner. Second, I plan building one soon this year. I have the plans translated in French by MRA, a french mag. By the way, I still have to choose the engine. I have the following engines Webra .50 / OS46SF / MVVS .49 (rear exhaust) / Irvine .53. Is there any you would advocate ? I guess the rear exhaut one is not well suited for obvious reason, otherwise I will have to severely re-engineer the back of the fuse. What do you think ? As far as the retracts are concerned, which brand did you use ? Their design is unusual and I can't find the same. I will perhaps go for pneumatics if I can't find such retracts. Any suggestion ? And the canards. To what extent are they efficient ? I find this feature very nice, but on some other designs (e.g. Arrow by Laddie Mikulasko) they were totally useless, if not harmful, i.e. they were blanking off the control surfaces at the rear... The canards are here very small and far from the back of the aircraft, so I'm pretty confident. Other question : any overheating issues with the engine installed like this ? Was the tuned pipe really efficient in this configuration ?

Was it your first prototype pictured above ?

Too bad this aircraft hasn't been kitted, you would have seen many many more ...

Last, It was stated in my magazine that you have an aeronautical engineer background. On which projects did you work ? Just curiosity. Personaly, I have worked on the Rafale for several years.

Cheers.