Enlarging the tailplane..
 

If you take a well balanced,plane - say, an Ugly STIK and you intentionally enlarge the tailplane double the size as follows:

1. Making it wider - i.e. longer parallel with the main wing, re-balance it- how will it fly? (take offs, stalls, landings, rolls etc.?)

2. Using the same plane, but this time keeping the width as it originally was, but making the tailplane longer in respect to the fuselage and re-balanceit- how will it fly? (take offs, stalls, landings, rolls etc.?)

Anybody tried it?


Cheers


Bundu

RE: Enlarging the tailplane..
 

If you considerably increase the area of the horizontal stab and elevator, you will have to move the CG back quite a bit, since the horizontal tail will carry more of the airplane's weight. Otherwise, the airplane will be nose heavy, and require a lot of additional elevator travel to perform maneuvers and to flair for landings.

Doubling the area of a typical horizontal tail would probably require moving the CG back from something like 33 percent of the wing chord to something approaching 50 percent, which will lower the effective wing loading and reduce stall speed significantly, and quite possibly, considerably improve tracking in maneuvers, although it might look a bit odd.

Many competition aerobatic models have horizontal tails with about 30 percent of the area of the wing, along with rather long tail moments, while the average sport model normally uses a horizontal tail of under 20 percent of the wing area. Elevator servo torque requirement will tend to increase somewhat, particularly if the elevators are given a rather wide chord.

Increasing both the span and chord would result in a more effective tail than would simply doubling its chord. Simply doubling the chord would result in a tail with a rather low aspect ratio with a poorer lift/drag ratio than that of a normal tail.

RE: Enlarging the tailplane..
 

Very informative post

Karol

RE: Enlarging the tailplane..
 

In addition to the above trimming changes, you'd notice a plane with a much greater tendency to want to keep flying straight into the airflow. It would nose into the wind a lot more and resist turning a lot more. It would also be more draggy overall, especially losing speed in turns.