In article ,
wrote:

Didn't Will Scheumann do this in the 70s? I remember a soaring cover photo
with a weird sort of mortocycle grip on the stick. As I remember, the basic
idea was that the pilot pretty much flew by flaps, changing flap setting to
induce changes in CL, with the tail functioning as trimmer.

Now if the windward guys really want to get fancy... you can in principle
extract a lot of energy from the air by dynamic soaring the small bits of
positive and negative g we run in to all the time. Humans are too slow, and
we don't have the feedback we need, which is knowing when the lift vector has
a component in the direction of motion to pull, and a component in the
opposite direction when you push. This could be automated, lots of little
fast pitch motions. Purists laugh, but if you get 60:1 glides out of 15 meter
with high speed automated pitch motions, they'll laugh all the way to the
back of the scoresheet. Or, I guess, to the annual rules poll to get it
banned...

John Cochrane


Kinda makes me queasy to think about "...lots of little fast pitch
motions."!

The mind boggles at what could be done with continually variable span,
sweep and airfoil with appropriate air data (including remote sensing of
air movement) and enough computing power/software to make sense of it.

I seem to remember a scifi story about a plane that could extract thrust
and lift from all the small scale motion of the air. The engine was shut
down in cruise and the airplane just flew along leaving the air slightly
cooler behind it.

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