You are visitor number... since January 1996, but I received only... well more and more now, that's fine !

Your mails are coming from: US, Argentina, Philippines, Spain, France...

This is the 18th plane I have made and I called "the starfield":

The plans and design are personal. Its main use will be acrobatic flight, so it has been designed to fullfill hard requirements on robustness and power/weight ratio.

Its spans 1.60m and weights 2.5 Kg. The maximum length of the airfoil is 28 cm. It is powered by a 6.5 cm3 Glow Plug engine (OS 40). There are 4 channels which controls:

• Ailerons
• Rudder
• Throttle
• Stabilizer

The gear is fixed and made in composite material (mainly carbon).

Its main originality remains in wings design which are made of a sandwich of Roofmate + Glass Fiber. There is no longeron, which is quite an original challenge, anyway it seems to respect initial robustness requirements !

I found lots of the composite materials used here, in Polyplan Composite.

Well, this one has been made very quickly, around 2 months compared to the 1 year of Starfield. I call it "the Styrene".

It is an electric powered glider with 2 meters span and around 1.4kG ready to fly. 800g of this weight is due to battery, engine, servos, etc..Three channels only for this beginner glider. The wing is designed with the well known S7012 airfoil with 12% of relative thickness.

The engine is a Speed600 powered by a 8.4v battery. I use either 900mAH or 1700mAH battery. It is controlled by an on/off electronic switch. The propeller folds when the motor stops as it is usual for electrics gliders.

As for the 18th, I tried to experiment a new method for building the wings. They are entirely made in polystyren and finally covered with solarfilm. The details of this new (as far as I know...) method are given in August publication of "Fly International" (French only!).

Fortunately yes ! As you can see below, the picture has been taken while the motor was running, and the plane was passing just over the photograph. In fact, the shape of the wing gives very moderated performance compared to pure classical gliders. The stability in banking situation is low. Nevertheless, it has been doing around 20 flies until today (26/04/96) without any crash, which is a quite satisfying results (compared to my usual poor scores...).

The longest fly I have been doing has lasted 30 minutes (with 5 minutes of powered fly) in the Alps mountain (Switzerland). I also dared 2 loopings, with or without engine. This experience reminded me about the risk of dynamic stalls (which I did not avoid !).

• A part of the fuselage (including the propeller!)
• The horizon (tilted because the plane was turning to the right)
• Several trees (yes, on the left of the screen)

Well, this was a big piece of work: 2.80 m, 2.6 kG, 6 servos, a Samarium-Cobalt Robbe Sport Engine, a 10 Elts accu, another 4 elts accu, a speed controller enabling the reversal of propeller rotation...

I chose to use RcCad, to have a first "virtual" glance to this model, before I actually made it. You can see below the differences between the virtual project and the final result :)