What a poetic beauty, this delicate, elegant plane! Together with your comments in a pleasant voice and the carefully selected music, this portrait of your aircraft is a piece of art. Thank you.
Fantastic! I love how you can see the development of the concept in real time in the video, and the thrust-vectoring setup is both creative and uncomplicated.
Hehe yep, I was just messing around with that rudder thingy and figured I was long overdue to showcase a silly failure (too many successful maiden flights recently🤣). Glad you liked it. :)
Yeah i agree. The floppy wings were intended to achieve dihedral angle without the need for rigid dihedral bracing. The lack of rigid wing structure is a big reason for the light weight and slow flight.
Hah! That front enlarged rudder ended up looking like a duck head! LOL! I'd think that a front rudder would have to be scaled huge to counter the stabilizing effect of the rear vertical stab. Your normal rear stab has that long arm of leverage from the CG so the front would have to be able to overpower that inherent stability. And the front had such a short leverage from the CG so it would have had to be many square inches larger to be able to have any effect at all. Maybe that is (one of the many reasons) why we don't see front rudder planes. I'd think that another reason is that once deflected, the force of the air would try to deflect the rudder even more, causing a total jackknife of the plane or making the rudder try to "dig in". Sort of like opening your cars hood at 60mph. ALL control surfaces are hinged at the leading edge for that very good reason. Nice try though, without experiments, we won't learn.
These are all good points, and I was aware of all of this when experimenting. But it's somehow still interesting to see things work out in real life, no matter how concrete they seem to be in theory. I might try to put the front rudder out on a bit of a lever arm. I could attach the lever arm to the motor. That way when the motor angles left or right, the rudder out on the end of the arm is actually sweeping over an arc. Then we would see some pretty drastic control. I think the only reason it might be feasible is because of how very slowly this things flies. Any sort of airspeed and exactly what you're saying would happen; it would yank the rudder all the way to one side or the other.
Yes, at that plane's ultra low speeds you most likely can keep some semblance of control of your front "Crudder". But it will still want to flip flop though, depending on the strength of your materials, servo and inherent slop in the system fighting the air pressure at speed. The Crudder will always naturally flop slightly left or right of center while in flight as a result. The experiment is interesting though, and as viewers we can all learn right along side you while you have some fun. :-) Keep up the good work!
That's the fighting spirit! Go get 'em Tiger! Plenty before you have made things happen against all naysayers. My best advice, try to centralize the Crudder instead of having it mostly above center.
Man, I though I had a tiny field lol. Also wouldn’t having the rudder in front of the CG have the opposite intended effect or am I just having a hard time visualizing it in my head.
@@zacapelt1234 Well explained. That is part of the reason why soaring birds fly so efficiently. They have no vertical stabilizer, and they simply fly with such precision that their inherent yaw instability can be overcome. This eliminates any excess drag and essentially makes the bird one contiguous lifting body. One day I want to advance my skills and knowledge of aerodynamics and flight control to the point where I can copy those birds. Vertical stabilizers seem in some ways a very crude solution to our inability to cope with a little instability.
@@AeroCraftAviation Birds are not that efficient. In order to gain yaw stability, besides a rudder, you either need individually controllable tail feathers, wing sweep or a wing with a bell-shaped lift distribution. The first one brakes, the second one reduces effective wingspan and lift and the third one results in a wing with less lift than possible. Birds have an advantage though: they have control over their wings.
@@xnoreq Aerodynamically, birds are what manmade flight would deem ‘inefficient’, simply because, with our methods of achieving stable flight, the bird configuration would in fact be inefficient. We could not imagine stabilizing a rudderless aircraft without inducing lots of drag from constant corrections coming from spoilers or other wing-mounted devices. Birds, however, find that quite easy. Their brains are insanely fine-tuned for stabilizing themselves in flight. They can use their steering feathers (located at their wrist joint) to make teeny adjustments to yaw angle, barely inducing any excess drag at all, and yet eliminating the need for a draggy vertical stabilizer. And yes, they also do have individually controllable tail feathers to an extent, but they seldom separate the feathers’ edges, minimizing the tip and edge vortex production and keeping their tail one contiguous surface. If you watch birds of prey fly you will notice this. They are very efficient about how they adjust their tail feathers. They intuitively understand how, in every possible aerodynamic situation, to most efficiently transition to any other. And they can do this with what are essentially thousands of minuscule control surfaces. All of their feathers, with some exceptions depending upon species, are controllable, and not arbitrarily, but quite practically and usefully. Man, they are light years ahead of us. The level of precision which machine learning and CFD simulation/aerodynamic optimization would have to reach to match the abilities of birds is still many decades down the line.
@@AeroCraftAviation Yes and no. The few birds that can actually glide seem to have a quite low lift-drag ratio (based on wind-tunnel measurements with trained birds). The reason they can stay up in the air a long time is by constantly feeling and using even small thermals and upwinds. We also can design flying wings with inherent yaw stability but their L/D also suffers compared to well-designed sailplanes. Evolution did not result in plane-like birds because of inefficiency but because of biological limitations. Planes can be far more efficient.
Just looked like the cg was off - a bit tail heavy. So it'd porpoise, giving you speed you didn't want. I think if it was balanced, would have flown great, beautifully on that first run. Am I missing something? (Awesome just same. Inspired me to build a graceful winged glider just like it.) What a great vid! PS. You can leave em tail-heavy and just slow fly them at an angle if you want. Sort of like the Night Vapor, but a glider. ;)
Yeah I was hesitant to move the CG forward because I wanted the extra yaw sensitivity from the tail-heavy CG, to help maneuver in the small space. As you see the tail-heaviness kinda allows for semi 'stall-turns', which help me cut sharp corners and stay in the little yard. More forward CG would've gotten it flying more smoothly though, for sure. Nice to hear you built a similar glider of your own. Posted a video of it?
@@AeroCraftAviation - Ah, sweet method to the madness! But of course. I shall beg your pardon, sir. Silly of me to have doubted...:) I haven't built one like it, am inspired to. That wing, the way it bows? Beautiful. And I'm a sucker for slow flight. Did you attempt a slow fly at the angle the heavier tail gave you? Similar sort of flight to your Vapor? (I have a Night Vapor - love it.) Maybe half-throttle?
If the rudder was pointing backwards instead of forward it might not have been sucked into the prop. Also, it will only work with sufficient airflow over the control surface, so unless you have some airspeed, you won't get much control. It was still a neat idea. You'll need a very calm day and a larger area to really test this in. 50% of the solution is often "how" you fly it, not "what" you are flying, assuming you haven't violated any aerodynamic rules :) I like how the wings warp in flight - reminiscent of the Solar Impulse.
Right right, but then it would be practically right on the CG and would have little to no yaw effect. I guess the idea would be to get the rudder out on some sort of moment arm, which is normally achieved by the tail boom. But in the case of our nose rudder, I'm imagining some sort of boom sticking out from the front of the aircraft, with the steerable rudder on the end of it; so pretty much a reverse tail boom. I think it would be inherently unstable, for similar reasons to why taildraggers are unstable on the ground, but I guess it'd work alright. Might have to try it... Yeah the flexible wings were intended to achieve dihedral angle without the need for a heavy dihedral brace or any rigid structure. I think some full scale sailplanes (duo discus, ETA, ASG 29) use similar flexible wings to achieve their dihedral, which saves a ton on weight because it would take a lot of structure to hold rigid dihedral in such long wings.
@@AeroCraftAviation with a second pushrod in the same control horn it should be possible to have a rudder on the same servo as the vectored thrust (the rudder control rod will have to cross in front of the vertical stabilizer however, because you need the rudder turning opposite the motor). But make sure you use a folding prop or else you will be causing a lot of drag when the prop isn't turning and that will probably throw you off as much as the rudder will be helping. They will practically cancel each other out.
@@altbob Yeah that's a good idea. I may do that if rudder experiments with this aircraft continue. I don't think a folding prop would be necessary though. The yaw effect from the motor angling back and forth is very small. Small enough that, from some altitude, I can glide down with the motor defected all the way left or right, and it still glides just straight.
Thanks! Yeah well, I forgot we were filming so I was making some silly commentary which I decided to cover up with the music. In the future I'll try to keep the volume high in-flight.
What a poetic beauty, this delicate, elegant plane! Together with your comments in a pleasant voice and the carefully selected music, this portrait of your aircraft is a piece of art. Thank you.
Oh thank you so much! I am really glad you enjoyed it. Thank you for watching and for your kind words. :)
Fantastic! I love how you can see the development of the concept in real time in the video, and the thrust-vectoring setup is both creative and uncomplicated.
Hehe yep, I was just messing around with that rudder thingy and figured I was long overdue to showcase a silly failure (too many successful maiden flights recently🤣). Glad you liked it. :)
Sometimes it is good to just have some unstructured fun.
That's for sure!
Very interesting design, those floppy wings make it look natural / organic in the air, it is very elegant.
Thanks for Sharing
Yeah i agree. The floppy wings were intended to achieve dihedral angle without the need for rigid dihedral bracing. The lack of rigid wing structure is a big reason for the light weight and slow flight.
OK, that was a really neat diversion from HLGs!
Yeah! I had a good bit of fun messing around with this odd contraption. :)
Not everything needs to be big & heavy, such a gracious little plane.
Yeah, well said. These little ultralight planes are great fun sometimes.
Certainly an interesting experiment. Great to see you try it and a great result 👍👍
Yep, that it was. Glad you liked it. :)
Very cool..i have a idea..
Like you say use a rudder but connected to the vector servo..
Very fine wire to a rear rudder!
Maybe?
Yeah that's actually what i intend to try next. Good thinking.
@@AeroCraftAviation get on it then 😉😉
Slick idea!
Thanks!
Hah! That front enlarged rudder ended up looking like a duck head! LOL! I'd think that a front rudder would have to be scaled huge to counter the stabilizing effect of the rear vertical stab. Your normal rear stab has that long arm of leverage from the CG so the front would have to be able to overpower that inherent stability. And the front had such a short leverage from the CG so it would have had to be many square inches larger to be able to have any effect at all. Maybe that is (one of the many reasons) why we don't see front rudder planes. I'd think that another reason is that once deflected, the force of the air would try to deflect the rudder even more, causing a total jackknife of the plane or making the rudder try to "dig in". Sort of like opening your cars hood at 60mph. ALL control surfaces are hinged at the leading edge for that very good reason. Nice try though, without experiments, we won't learn.
These are all good points, and I was aware of all of this when experimenting. But it's somehow still interesting to see things work out in real life, no matter how concrete they seem to be in theory. I might try to put the front rudder out on a bit of a lever arm. I could attach the lever arm to the motor. That way when the motor angles left or right, the rudder out on the end of the arm is actually sweeping over an arc. Then we would see some pretty drastic control. I think the only reason it might be feasible is because of how very slowly this things flies. Any sort of airspeed and exactly what you're saying would happen; it would yank the rudder all the way to one side or the other.
Yes, at that plane's ultra low speeds you most likely can keep some semblance of control of your front "Crudder". But it will still want to flip flop though, depending on the strength of your materials, servo and inherent slop in the system fighting the air pressure at speed. The Crudder will always naturally flop slightly left or right of center while in flight as a result. The experiment is interesting though, and as viewers we can all learn right along side you while you have some fun. :-) Keep up the good work!
@@somethingelse2740 Good point. Essentially the Crudder has all odds against it. ...So of course I've gotta keep trying to get it to work. 🤣
That's the fighting spirit! Go get 'em Tiger! Plenty before you have made things happen against all naysayers. My best advice, try to centralize the Crudder instead of having it mostly above center.
I once made a free flight motor glider that used 100mAh and 614 coreless motor. It ran for 30 secs but glided for more than 3 minutes
Man, I though I had a tiny field lol. Also wouldn’t having the rudder in front of the CG have the opposite intended effect or am I just having a hard time visualizing it in my head.
@@zacapelt1234 Well explained. That is part of the reason why soaring birds fly so efficiently. They have no vertical stabilizer, and they simply fly with such precision that their inherent yaw instability can be overcome. This eliminates any excess drag and essentially makes the bird one contiguous lifting body. One day I want to advance my skills and knowledge of aerodynamics and flight control to the point where I can copy those birds. Vertical stabilizers seem in some ways a very crude solution to our inability to cope with a little instability.
@@AeroCraftAviation Birds are not that efficient. In order to gain yaw stability, besides a rudder, you either need individually controllable tail feathers, wing sweep or a wing with a bell-shaped lift distribution. The first one brakes, the second one reduces effective wingspan and lift and the third one results in a wing with less lift than possible.
Birds have an advantage though: they have control over their wings.
@@xnoreq Aerodynamically, birds are what manmade flight would deem ‘inefficient’, simply because, with our methods of achieving stable flight, the bird configuration would in fact be inefficient. We could not imagine stabilizing a rudderless aircraft without inducing lots of drag from constant corrections coming from spoilers or other wing-mounted devices. Birds, however, find that quite easy. Their brains are insanely fine-tuned for stabilizing themselves in flight. They can use their steering feathers (located at their wrist joint) to make teeny adjustments to yaw angle, barely inducing any excess drag at all, and yet eliminating the need for a draggy vertical stabilizer. And yes, they also do have individually controllable tail feathers to an extent, but they seldom separate the feathers’ edges, minimizing the tip and edge vortex production and keeping their tail one contiguous surface. If you watch birds of prey fly you will notice this. They are very efficient about how they adjust their tail feathers. They intuitively understand how, in every possible aerodynamic situation, to most efficiently transition to any other. And they can do this with what are essentially thousands of minuscule control surfaces. All of their feathers, with some exceptions depending upon species, are controllable, and not arbitrarily, but quite practically and usefully. Man, they are light years ahead of us. The level of precision which machine learning and CFD simulation/aerodynamic optimization would have to reach to match the abilities of birds is still many decades down the line.
@@AeroCraftAviation Yes and no. The few birds that can actually glide seem to have a quite low lift-drag ratio (based on wind-tunnel measurements with trained birds). The reason they can stay up in the air a long time is by constantly feeling and using even small thermals and upwinds.
We also can design flying wings with inherent yaw stability but their L/D also suffers compared to well-designed sailplanes.
Evolution did not result in plane-like birds because of inefficiency but because of biological limitations. Planes can be far more efficient.
Your videos are cool and lit.
Haha cool thanks!
Just looked like the cg was off - a bit tail heavy. So it'd porpoise, giving you speed you didn't want. I think if it was balanced, would have flown great, beautifully on that first run. Am I missing something?
(Awesome just same. Inspired me to build a graceful winged glider just like it.)
What a great vid!
PS. You can leave em tail-heavy and just slow fly them at an angle if you want. Sort of like the Night Vapor, but a glider. ;)
Yeah I was hesitant to move the CG forward because I wanted the extra yaw sensitivity from the tail-heavy CG, to help maneuver in the small space. As you see the tail-heaviness kinda allows for semi 'stall-turns', which help me cut sharp corners and stay in the little yard. More forward CG would've gotten it flying more smoothly though, for sure. Nice to hear you built a similar glider of your own. Posted a video of it?
@@AeroCraftAviation - Ah, sweet method to the madness! But of course. I shall beg your pardon, sir. Silly of me to have doubted...:)
I haven't built one like it, am inspired to. That wing, the way it bows? Beautiful.
And I'm a sucker for slow flight.
Did you attempt a slow fly at the angle the heavier tail gave you? Similar sort of flight to your Vapor? (I have a Night Vapor - love it.) Maybe half-throttle?
If the rudder was pointing backwards instead of forward it might not have been sucked into the prop. Also, it will only work with sufficient airflow over the control surface, so unless you have some airspeed, you won't get much control. It was still a neat idea. You'll need a very calm day and a larger area to really test this in. 50% of the solution is often "how" you fly it, not "what" you are flying, assuming you haven't violated any aerodynamic rules :) I like how the wings warp in flight - reminiscent of the Solar Impulse.
Right right, but then it would be practically right on the CG and would have little to no yaw effect. I guess the idea would be to get the rudder out on some sort of moment arm, which is normally achieved by the tail boom. But in the case of our nose rudder, I'm imagining some sort of boom sticking out from the front of the aircraft, with the steerable rudder on the end of it; so pretty much a reverse tail boom. I think it would be inherently unstable, for similar reasons to why taildraggers are unstable on the ground, but I guess it'd work alright. Might have to try it...
Yeah the flexible wings were intended to achieve dihedral angle without the need for a heavy dihedral brace or any rigid structure. I think some full scale sailplanes (duo discus, ETA, ASG 29) use similar flexible wings to achieve their dihedral, which saves a ton on weight because it would take a lot of structure to hold rigid dihedral in such long wings.
@@AeroCraftAviation with a second pushrod in the same control horn it should be possible to have a rudder on the same servo as the vectored thrust (the rudder control rod will have to cross in front of the vertical stabilizer however, because you need the rudder turning opposite the motor). But make sure you use a folding prop or else you will be causing a lot of drag when the prop isn't turning and that will probably throw you off as much as the rudder will be helping. They will practically cancel each other out.
@@altbob Yeah that's a good idea. I may do that if rudder experiments with this aircraft continue. I don't think a folding prop would be necessary though. The yaw effect from the motor angling back and forth is very small. Small enough that, from some altitude, I can glide down with the motor defected all the way left or right, and it still glides just straight.
@@AeroCraftAviation OK. A folding prop is still a good idea if you catch a thermal and plan to soar. Drag is a drag!
Brilliant !!! I wish you didn't add the piano at the end because it distracted from your flying technique.
Thanks! Yeah well, I forgot we were filming so I was making some silly commentary which I decided to cover up with the music. In the future I'll try to keep the volume high in-flight.
Nice one. Keep trying you may be on to something.
Thanks. Yeah thrust-vectoring is interesting. Might have to have a few more goes at it with other airframes.
Rudders belong in the rear of planes my friend. No leverage in front. The Thrust Vectoring usage is interesting.
Not much, but there could be leverage if we put a moment arm there. Hehe, I'm always game for crazy ideas. Agreed, definitely was a neat experiment.
What type of lipo did you use? is it a ~3g?
Yep. Good guess. It's a 120 mAh LiPo which weighs around 3.5 grams.