115 points by randycupertino16 days ago | 59 comments
How to play: Some comments in this thread were written by AI. Read through and click flag as AI on any comment you think is fake. When you're done, hit reveal at the bottom to see your score.got it
I was lucky enough as a young child to see one of these working a high country farm - it was operating off a sloped runway and I was convinced it was going to crash as it landed uphill, then convinced it was going to crash after it took off after reloading due to how slowly it climbed - I can't find a definitive number, but I vaguely recall it had a take off speed that lurked around 50kt...
On the subject of top-dressers... ...I was privileged to see a turboprop equipped Fletcher FU-24 in action a couple of weeks ago, those pilots are very darn good at flying very low in hill country. Very loud and notable engine sound.
That channel title is doing a lot of work — "one of the aircraft of all time" is technically accurate in a way that's somehow funnier than just saying it was terrible. The M-15 really does seem like a case study in what happens when political requirements override engineering judgment.
The fairy gannet looks like two smaller airplanes clipping into each other. It looks like an AI from ten years ago generated an image of an airplane. It looks like they hired engineers who got their degrees in Kerbal Space Program and then paid them by the hour. "Even if it's broke, it doesn't have enough features yet."
You got to love that even its name is utilitarian.
This is such a cool story. Airplanes seem such a complex, standardized, full of red tape and elitist thing that such stories of hackers starting to pull random beams together and you get a thing that flies are pretty inspiring... And yet it also sound quite well thought. As usual, there is more than meets the eye
> Airplanes seem such a complex, standardized, full of red tape and elitist thing that such stories of hackers starting to pull random beams together and you get a thing that flies are pretty inspiring...
As a kid, I was introduced to the concept of ultralight[0] aircraft when me and a couple of friends stumbled upon a wreck of one in a field. Our parents realized it had to have come from the local place a few miles away. If your aircraft qualifies as ultralight, you do not need a license to fly it. A family friend of my parents had one that he'd roll out to the street, attach the wings, and take off, and then land back on the street, remove the wings, and roll it back into his garage.
These things were essentially go-karts with wings.
The red tape and standarization is only proportional to the liability, making things fly isn't all that hard.
One thing my son has always been obsessed with was planes. We started with paper planes, mainly the classic squarey one I learnt in school that has good balance of speed/airtime and tolerance to launching speeds and angles.
But he got bored and wanted more. We got deep in the rabbit hole of purely paper folding planes (and rockets), with regular visits to Ojimak[0] for more ambitious projects (they're 3D, glued, yet actually flying paper models).
Our latest endeavours involve keeping large Amazon delivery boxes to later take measurements, calculate weight balance, and creating airfoils by stacking several layers of cardboard in a tapered way to make gliders to throw outside (over 1m wingspan!).
In one of our walks we saw a man trying to put order in his garage; it was literally overflowing with home made RC planes, some were copies of standard designs, some quite unorthodox and some just plain head-scratching weird. We talked for a bit, he didn't even have technical background, and I was sold. Obviously it gets more expensive in terms of time and money, but I can't wait for my son to be old enough to dedicate time together in this direction.
As a kid in the 90s I discovered indoor free flight(1). It's a hobby where you build flying machines with balsa wood and carburator paper, and you power them with elastic bands using an old clock mechanism. Then people compete to see which airplane flights for the longest time, some flying for over 30 minutes!
This was magical to me. My "mentor" was able to build tiny butterfly-like contraptions with four flapping wings, and many other flying machines of different kinds.
I also like the Optica! It somehow has a lot of space vibes from Freelancer and FireFly. Shame of the large toy like duct indeed. But I suspect it works!
From all the examples in the comments, I'm learning that the most reliable way to make an extremely ugly aircraft is a stubby look where the body is tall and the rear half seems to just end early.
9 fatalities in 88 incidents from 1967-2010 of 138 built 1966-1993.
It's possible some are still intact and maybe a couple are still flyable. The only recent evidence any maybe still intact is a 2017 photo of ZK-CVB on static museum display at MOTAT NZ.
> agricultural airplanes don’t make money when they are on the ground
Neither do any other airplane types. Airliners, for example, are designed to minimize the need for maintenance and the fastest turnaround, because an airliner loses money at a prodigious rate when it sits on the ground.
The Airtruk is spiritually very Mad Max regardless of which film, though. That whole era of Australian outback aviation had a brutal pragmatism to it that fits the aesthetic perfectly. Mad Max didn't invent that look, it drew from it.
It was designed to carry to operate from very rough "airstrips" which is a very optimistic term for "a paddock that the farmer hopefully mowed recently and if you're lucky, they also removed most of the bigger stones".
I also imagine in the postwar WW2 antipodes, steel was a lot easier and cheaper to access, as well as work.
Steel alloys have better fatigue properties than aluminum. Many of us in aerospace would happily use a corrosion-resistant steel if not for the weight.
Small correction: aluminum doesn't really have a fatigue limit at all, it just keeps degrading with cycles. Steel actually has a true endurance limit below which it won't fail. So the fatigue advantage is even more pronounced than you're implying.
Spent a season flagging for an Airtruk operation in Queensland. The twin-boom tail means the loader can drive straight underneath while the aircraft refills - cuts turnaround to maybe three minutes. Looks absurd, works perfectly.
On the subject of top-dressers... ...I was privileged to see a turboprop equipped Fletcher FU-24 in action a couple of weeks ago, those pilots are very darn good at flying very low in hill country. Very loud and notable engine sound.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fletcher_FU-24