DeviousDave

The RG14 is a sailplane airfoil, developed to fly at model speeds with chord widths that models use. It's a very friendly airfoil until you give it stooooopid wingloadings like they have in F5D. A friend turned me on to it when he got into Sp400 racing and started making kits. I took over for a few years and most of my airplanes since have used this airfoil. The properties scale well too, My last airplane to use it is a TD .010 powered composite racer with about 70 sq. in. and it flies great.

The AMA Sp400 pylon record was set by one of my airplanes. I never got better than 2nd at the NATs (not saying much given the lack of competition some years), but one year I took a really good pilot (friend's uncle) with me who flies Q500 and Q40 at a national level. He did 75 seconds on the 1/2A course and the airframe weighed about 12.5oz and had 165sq. in. I like the way they fly at about 15 oz. and can't seem to notice a difference in landing speed, though there may be some measurable penalty turning at that weight-I never noticed it-the 2nd place airframe weighed 14.5oz, same airframe as the record holder.

The best way to describe this airfoil would be to say that it is a clean one with a high lift coefficient and a very mild stall characteristic. The main reason we used it was just that it turned so well-some of the other planes of the time had airfoils that were 'faster' when you dove them, but it never translated to being first to finish-especially when they were smaller and had snaproll problems when tuning to keep up in turns. The friendly handling of the RG-14 was jut icing on the cake. It has since fallen out of fashion with the sailplane guys and pylon crowd what with everything being all-molded in CNC machines, but when you compare them to what's hot, they don't deviate a lot from what the RG14 is. The F5D world record airframes from Russia (Avioniks) use the RK-40, which is a thinned RG14.