A little help needed folks. What adverse characteristics do you see when flying without wheel pants? Any difference?
Sometime they are a major pain on rough grass fields I fly on or if the grass needs cutting. What would I expect to see different when I take them off for practice and re-install them for contest?
Dave Burton.

Just a little bit more drag (2 to 3% overall)...

And you measured that HOW?
.
.

Well; I'm aeronautical engineer and took the typical value from the general design tabs... it's a thumb-rule that is normally used during the first stages of a design work.
Regards
Guille

Dave,

For what you are doing, I don't know that you will notice a major change. There might be a slight trim adjustment due to the difference in drag that far below the fuse, but I have flown some planes with the pants on and pants off and it didn't make a major difference.

Arch

It won't make any difference but the looks, I broke mine on tall grass on a practice field, took only one (the broken one) out and kept flying for that day and did not changed anything.

Regards

Arch, whether you flew with pants on or off had little effect on the plane. duh

but the spectators were horrified!

G

we don't like stinking pants, If your plane does not have them they won't fall of at the nats...


gary

However, it will have effect on the judges that are behind you. Je, je ... je

Vicente "Vince" Bortone

that was a smart ass crack vincent... haha..

Too bad Arch has become the butt of this joke. hahahaha...

We should stop so we dont em_bare_ass him hahahaha...

a veteran flyer at our club took off in a saito 1.50 powered plane with his big lead shot restraining bag hanging over 1 wheel. he landed as smoothly as ever.

Don't laugh at this, my previous club had some old guy in his seventies as a member and he used to fly naked whenever he was alone. You would make sure that when you arrived at the gate to the field, you'd drive in real slow and give him time to land and put on some pants...

He also used to wear really short shorts and no underwear and on occasion there'd be all sorts of dangling bit being sucked towards the prop when he was starting and tuning his engines.

Each to their own......

Hey I know how that feels. I still put them on though..just every now and then I tighten them ( Pants on the Airplane)

With pants or without pants I wish you all a happy 4th of July.

Vicente "Vince" Bortone

Chuck, you're on a roll man!!! You've got me ROFL!

Keith

Wow,

I definitely walked right into this one. Shame I was too busy flying to see this earlier And yes, I had pants on me, and the plane had wheel pants as well.

Arch

The Brits call'em spats. I prefer that name

As far as taking off from grass with spats on, that's simple.....glue them onto the undercarriage. This way they serve to ski off the grass. At least mine do and if you saw how deep the grass at my field is, you would understand

At the 87 Nats. my dad and me were behind on the clock and finally got the thing started. Well he runs out to the flight line so we can get the thing in the air and guess what: someone lost their pants! I won't say who but you can probably figure it out. No major scars though on my old man!

Greg Grigsby