After adding to the vertical area, the plane flies BEAUTIFULLY! Mike flew her around the pattern a few times, tested the radome configuration, wrung the plane out with full load, let me try her in the air, and pronounced it good. At that point, I took over as P.I.C. and did some practicing with the plane.

It flies so nicely now - tail follows the nose around, even in 85-degree hard turns. Unloaded, the plane just won't spin - loaded, you have to ask it very nicely to spin, and then if controls are neutralized, it recovers in about 1/4 turn.

The biggest difficulty is the fact that the High-AR wing really floats out on landing - I did break a prop trying to force it down with high alpha flight.

Paul, you're right that a bigger fin will lead to spiral instability, but the time to double on that mode, even with our tremendous vertical, is 92 seconds. That means that if I rolled it to 5 degrees and left it alone, it would be at 10 in a minute and a half - more than half the mission time. That's why, IMO, for these competitions, where the plane only stays steady-state for maybe 10 seconds at a time, the fin should be huge!

ilikeplanes, we are already using a symmetric airfoil (NACA 0009) for both the vertical and the horizontal. No self-respecting aerospace engineer would put plank tails on a plane this big. No reason for it. As to the triple-tail thing, we considered it, but the aspect ratio for each tail remains extremely low, which really kills their sideforce performance. The single tall tail works great, and doesn't really add anything to our assembly time.

Interestingly enough, the plane has "proverse" yaw performance with only about 20% differential. In fact, with elevator input, it hooks hard to the inside, meaning that I have to bank, *then* yank. Roll performance remains excellent even in a stall.

All told, it's a real joy to fly - now if I can just convince it to land where I want it to!

It even drops the payload (anybody figured out where it comes out yet?)