On Jun 15, 9:42 pm, Le Chaud Lapin wrote:
On Jun 15, 3:30 pm, wrote:

On Jun 9, 12:36 pm, Le Chaud Lapin wrote:

On Jun 9, 1:19 pm, Gig 601Xl Builder
You never learned of trim until MSFS and you are going to design an
airplane. Fabulous!

Is it really necessary to understand the particular way it was done in
C172 to achieve the same result?

The same thing could be achieved using more electronics, less
mechanics, and the controls might be entirely different.

#1. Learn to fly first.
#2. Study the construction of aircraft, best done by taking an
aircraft maintenance course.

I think the difference here is that I am not looking for something
evolutionary. I think that is a dead-end road. There is so much in
the world to learn, that if a researcher were to take this approach to
every attempt to advance a field, breakthroughs would hardly occur. In
fact, I think it is precisely this mentality that makes the current
process not as fruitful as it could be.

Perhaps the epitome of this type of thinking can be seen on the first
page of this site: http://www.roadabletimes.com/

Question: "How does one make a flying car?"
Answer: "One could start by taking a car and putting wings on it."

This is silly, and it is obvious to everyone now that it is silly, but
to at least one individual, it was not. That man spent countless
hours purusing a dream that would never materialize because his
approach was fundamentally flawed.

Now if one were to take the objectives of CAFE/PAV to make a new type
of vehicle:

http://www.cafefoundation.org/v2/pav_home.php

..and begin by starting with a "reference" design, that person might
share the same fate of he who made the "flying car" of the first link.

Some of you think it is foolish to embark upon a research path without
having a thorough understanding of what has been done. I think not. I
think, in many cases, one can be too familiar with what has been
done. Common knowledge does not necessarily liberate the mind. It
might stifle it. And if it seems arrogant not to follow the path
already tread by great designers, I think it would be even more
arrogant, after having studied what the great designers have done, to
think that one would make extraordinary advancements beyond what those
greats have done, within the same path.

True breakthroughs often require a breach of continuity, and
significant technological advancement occurs when those breaches occur
at semi-regular intervals.

A good example is vacuum tubes versus transistors.

Absolutely zero knowledge of vacuum tubes is required to understand
transistors. There is a bit of ancillary knowledge, like
thermodynamics, band-theory, and electrodynamics that is immediately
transferrable from vacuum tube theory to transitor theory, but
knowlege of vacuum tubes themselves is inessential.

But both act as amplifiers. Both essentially accomplish the same
thing as elements in a larger system.

Now imagine, toward the end of the vacuum tube era, that someone had
proposed to make a new type of amplifier that would be better on
almost every imaginable axes, but that person had no intention of
spending any time studying vacuum tubes. Would it have been necessary
to study vacuum tubes?

This is essentially what you are saying about PAV's. You are saying
that, the best way to proceed is to learn all I can about convential
aircraft. Why is that necessary? It presumes that the method by which
the objective is accomplish is similar to what has already been done
(tractor model, for example).

A better approach might be to make no assumptions at all, but focus on
the end result, then work backward, evaluating extant technologies
(applicable in, say, 2010), keeping a respectible distance from the
prevaling models of aicraft design, just as transitor theorist might
deliberately keep a respectable distance from vacuum tubes.

#3. THEN think about designing an airplane. No worthwhile design that
I'm aware of has ever been put forward by someone who was unfamiliar
with the way things are now and why they are that way, but I have seen
designs built by folks who "knew better" than everyone else. One of
those, built by a local guy who would take no constructive criticism
of his ideas, stalled at circuit altitude and dropped him, hard, on
the surface of the earth. He was such a stubborn guy that he got up
and walked away, but he neither built nor flew any more airplanes.
Needless to say, this design was neither inspected nor approved nor
licensed to any standard whatever.

A good way to win is avoid races where number of entrants is 1. It
would be extremely hard for someone in my opinion to make notable
improvement on existing aircraft design. The world is filled with high
skilled, highly trained, thoroughly experience, professional aircraft
designers who spent their lifetimes aiming for that extra 5%.

Extra 5% is not going to make a PAV, so if there is any chance of
succeeding at all, one should avoid paths where best-case scenario is
a 5% improvement.

Adding electronic controls to something like a trim tab on a
lightplane is one of those "better" ideas that has no basis in
reality. It adds complexity, which adds failure points and cost and
weight, none of which are welcome.

I hear a lot of mechanics say this about cars. I think there should
be a qualification made thos these types of statments:

"It adds complexity, which adds failure points and cost and weight,
none of which are welcome, unless the person integrating the
electronics is an electrical engineer unperturbed by the idea of
adding electronic controls to a mechanical system."

It is no more accurate than manual
trim.

Perhaps not. But a computer will outperform a human 10x to 1x if the
goal is to optimize fuel consumption with automatic trim control.
There is literally countless scenarios where combination of software/
electronics would far exceed capabilities of a pilot to achieve same
objective.

As aviation advances, there will be much more employment of
electronics and software.

I am simply saying, whatever will exist 50 years from now (when many
of us will be dead, heheh)...whatever that thing is...start thinking
about *that* now, not something that was designed in 1950.

-Le Chaud Lapin-

The guys who invented the transistor (Brattain and all)
understood electricity and were engineers who could design and build
electronic devices. That's the equivalent of knowing how to fly and
how to build aircraft. They were not new to electronics, they didn't
stumble across semiconductors by accident. Solid-state selenium diodes
(not to mention crystal diodes) had already been in use by then for
some time, and so they built on the knowledge of other folks.
Numerous flying cars have been built from scratch, not based
on existing automobiles. It's not something new. Molt Taylor's Aerocar
(late '40s or early '50s; Google it) was certified and produced in
small numbers, but the compromises necessary to achieve flight in a
vehicle that also has to fit on the road and operate in traffic mean
it's a poor car and a poor airplane, and didn't sell well enough to
justify continuing with it. Electronics and computers can't fix the
hard limitations of physics. Over the years I've been around aviation
I can't recall how many attempts have been made in my own time to
build such a machine, and none of them are visible today. It seems
that only the naive attempt it, and find out the hard way about
compromises that ruin the whole idea.
But don't let me discourage you. Maybe some other folks will
be spared the grief just be watching you try it.

Dan