ORIGINAL: Ed_Moorman

Here's the twin tractor and the seaplane.

Designing a new plane takes a lot of engneering and a lot of "cut and try" type effort. I believe you must resign yourself to building a minimum of two planes, probably three would be better. This is especially true of the non-conventional designs, like canards and flying wings.

Take our flying boat canard, the Duck. Carl "Flaps" Laffert is the designer (with my input). Right now, it flies, but needs several changes. It took a lot of weight to get it to balance. The engine needs to be moved forward to alleviate this. Overall, it is heavy and has a fairly small wing so a larger wing is needed to lower the wing loading. In addition, the engine mounted on the fin with its high thrust line, we think is giving us a pitch down moment so I am compensating with up control trim. Then when I throttle back for landing, it tends to raise the nose. I can put in a landing program to have some down control switched in, but I'd rather have some up thrust.

As long as his designs fly, Flaps doesn't want to do too many changes. Generally, he wants to see them fly for 3 or 4 weekends and he is off to something else. I would like to see a new plane, slightly longer, with the engine pylon in the fuselage forward of the wing with more up thrust. Plus I want a much larger wing.