Vesaero Maiden

The first Maiden flight went somewhat bad I realized too late that the prop I was using is too big for the motor and the plane come down with a lot of smoke.

However if you want to check out the brief flight video I have it here.

Early impressions are the plane flies rather well it does some really hard banking turns it definitely follows the “super maneuverability” design of the initial concept.

With enough power these hard banks won’t be a problem the plane does exhibit some pitch up tendencies at higher speeds which will need to be examined.

Vesaero Plans

Some of you have expressed interest in these plans. I am planning on open sourcing these plans. Standard Creative Commons license applies.

I haven’t planned initially to open source the project so these plans will come up slowly as I have time to digitize and plan out how to best present them to you for building.

first up is the primary wing. Measurements are in CM. My plane is scaled up with a factor of 4.7. That means that to obtain the full scale wingspan you take 15cm as listed in the diagram and multiply by 4.7 to obtain 70.5cm (15 x 4.7 = 70.5cm).

To get the angled wings you will need to use the wing scaffolds during build while gluing to obtain the correct angle on each wing. Cut each bend leaving a tiny bit of material then fold back to expose a gap. Use the scaffolds to obtain the correct angle of the gap then fill the gap with hot glue.

The vertical stabilizers (v-tail) I created ad-hoc but I’ll try and digitize a version here as well.

Vesaero Post Flight Test 1 Modifications

Lol I had a duh moment. The Vesaero is designed to look like a jet I should’ve clued in that that means it will also fly like a jet. First flights have shown that the Vesaero has an average cruise speed of 50 km/h. This is a tad high for a beginner with zero flight experience.

There are also some minor flight issues as well. For one the plane has a nasty habit of stalling once you get down to 10 km/h speeds. Flaps alone don’t seem to provide enough lift.

The dihedral which doesn’t look like a lot ended up being a very obvious flight characteristic the plane loves to self-right itself in flight. although this is great for the beginner I can see how more advanced pilots would struggle to keep a plane like this on knife edge. The intension however was never to build the plane for knife-edge moves so this wasn’t a bit surprise.

The position of the v-tails also puts the v-tail at risk of deep-stalling. A condition that is common to planes with controls surfaces that could be blocked by the wing during high angles of attack.

The Final design oversight has to do with super maneuverability. Saying Vesaero is agile is an understatement. Vasaero’s wing design and CG is modeled after an 3D helicopter. It’s CG balance point is located exactly where the cord of the wing is the thickest. Designing the plane this way makes the plane very easy to pitch, as well as roll.

The plane is super maneuverable in that too much pitch input from the pilot will cause the plane to “over-G” and over AoA quickly rapidly bleeding off airspeed without warning until stall is achieved. In this respect Vesaero handles very much like a Su-37 when they do the mid-air flips.

The key difference is the Su-37 and all other modern jets have a thrust to weight ratio of over 1.06:1 the best I can estimate my jet is only producing a power to weight of around 0.6:1 which puts it in line with jets of yester-year like the F-4 phantom.

All most of this means is that the plane is more capable than the pilot can currently handle so I’m putting in some modifications to make it behave more like a glider and less like a jet.

In order to slow down the jet I realized that I needed to decrease wing loading in order to increase “float”. I’ve tapped on removable wing extensions for this purpose. The wing extensions serve to double the length of the wing adding to the lifting surface. Care has been taken to maintain the proper CG even with the extension. The new body to wing ratio is now ~0.5:1 (almost double wingspan to body length).

Also after the first few test flights I noticed that just foam on the control horns was starting to wear out so these have also been improved to be much more rigid by adding plastic reinforcement members.

The new servo arrangement has RC helicopter like levels of rigidity and should help control the plane a lot snappier.

One minor consideration that needs to be tested in this new setup is the trainer wings add a lot of wing-span but fail to move the aileron controls out more this could lead to decreased control in roll.

In terms of damage resistance the airframe is very resistant to damages the V-tails clear the ground making hitting them during a crash near impossible. The nose cone is double reinforced and designed to deform a very severe crash had the plane drop nose first 3 stories straight into the ground the nose was easily repaired after. The modular design of the nose cone has also seen very nice crash repair characteristics. Often time only 1 or 2 panels need to be re-cut from foam for the repair but not all of them.

Overall I’m pretty happy with the design the one thing that needs to be improved is the power plant it feels somewhat underpowered to be able to call itself a jet. I also definitely need a much wider space to test it in the future as this plane likes to go fast.

Vesaero build log 3

More work on Vesaero 2 days ago I managed to finish building the nose cone.

Originally I decided to go with a 2D profile design but with more thought I decided this wasn’t going to be cool enough for a “Vortex” build.

So I popped into Google Sketch-up and came up with this nose design:

 

 

The original Google sketchup work file can be found here if you want to take a closer look.

So with a lot of careful cutting of each of the triangles and a lot of gluing the finished Vesaero build looks as follows:

Build Log 2

Well today I finally got off my lazy ass and started to build the full sized version of VESAREO RC foam plane.

You can see from the pictures that it’s a manageable size when it’s fully built I’m not there yet right now I’m having issues figuring out how to mount the motor onto the main foamie frame.

The whole plane so far is built using hot melt glue which would come apart if I use it to attach the motor. Ideally I would like some form of firewall or motor mount so I can easily remove the motor. Something like a box the motor can fit in and screw onto the box itself as long as it doesn’t transfer heat would be hot melt glued to the plane.

So far in the interim here’s what it looks like.

 

Vesaero foamie comes alive

Today I started a new project I decided after much procrastinating that I was finally going to make an effort into bringing Vesaero foamie to life.

I started off a few weeks ago with nothing but a sketch.

Here I determined what was going to be  the overall look of the plane and how the mechanics might work. Also had many mental discussions with myself trying to figure out how I would work out weight issues and balance. No to mention where the control servos go.

Finally I decided what would make more sense is to just go for a profile build and work from there.

Because this is my first build and this is not an easy plane geometry wise I decided I needed to build a scale model in order for me to understand how the pieces will go together for the profile plane.

So now with the prototype scale model in place the serious planning on the first full scale build can begin… Damn this is exciting I love the look of the mini model too.