hangar electricity and other rants

[Kent Ashton]

Some thoughts on that Commuter Craft Innovator that crashed:  I am getting way outside my knowledge base but here goes:

They had a prototype #1 that flew (pic below) however they apparently wanted more horsepower and stretched prototype #2  by three feet (pic above).  I imagine that was for weight and balance.  Then they widened the nose A LOT but it appears they made the front canards smaller.  They also moved the horizontal stabilizer out of the clean air above the aircraft and down behind the prop.

Now, I'm thinking that a wide nose at a positive AOA is a pretty good additional lifting surface and the horizontal stab (H.S.) in the prop blast is pretty effective at controlling pitch but what happens if you would get a little negative AOA on that nose?  Does it become a negative lifting surface?  As the AOA changes relative to the nose,  is the wide nose going to amplify the pitch change?  Are the canards powerful enough to counteract a negative pitching moment?  Also, If you had the controls positioned for a steady climb and pulled back the power, would the H.S. lose effectiveness and result in an out-of-trim pitch change?  The H.S. in P.#2 must have been highly affected by prop blast.

It is said, I think, that surface area ahead of the aircraft center of pressure is destabilzing.  They added a whole lot of that in the pitching axis while subtracting area from the front canards that would control pitch.

Then there is the Center of Gravity.  It has to be somewhere in front of the axles to make the aircraft sit firmly on three wheels.  I could not find any good side views of P.#2 that would let us judge the relationship of the CG, wing Center of Lift but the pic above seems to suggest the CG might be at about the fuselage station where the strake leading edge is.  Perhaps the aircraft depended on lift from the nose and an effective H.S. to maintain balance.  If either of those goes away, it might pitch over.  

They flew 1/3rd scale models of their first prototype.  I could find no reference to model-testing of the 2nd prototype.  Perhaps P.#1 flew well enough that they didn't see the need to model P.#2.    Interesting to think about, eh?

 

[Barry]

Ouch, sad ending. Do we call this aircraft design a canard? Maybe I missed it, but is the elevator in front (canard) or at the tail?

[Jon Matcho]

It appears to have had a full-function canard with elevators, and possibly also on the tail (or just trim tabs -- I cannot tell).  

 

[Barry]

Thanks, that picture seems to clear it up. Clearly appears to be elevators on the canard. I don't claim any aeronautical engineering capability, but balancing the canard and tail through all attitudes seems daunting to me.

[Kent Ashton]

One time a buddy and I were rafting down the Rio Grande near Del Rio and we came to a weir.  It looked fairly benign--just a foot or two of smooth water moving over a low dam.  We hauled out and debated whether we could raft across it.  Decided not to try it.  Best decision I (we) ever made.  🙂  In the past few days I've seen several videos of weirs or weir-like situations killing people, like the poor guy in this video.     In the other videos, moped-riders trying to cross a flooded road got swept in the rotor.

How do you learn this stuff?   Youtube, in spite of all the crap, has done us a great service by showing many ways to die.

https://www.liveleak.com/view?t=RyOK_1554971362

[Jon Matcho]

Coincidentally I've recently been watching some aviation YouTube videos from the 'Air Safety Institute' channel:  https://www.youtube.com/user/AirSafetyInstitute

[Kent Ashton]

Saw this accident writeup recently: 300 hour pilot, non-IFR, night IMC, wife + two kids.  http://www.kathrynsreport.com/2019/05/cirrus-sr22-owned-by-linds-plumbing-and.html   No need to say how dumb this was however, the question that interests me is whether the pilot was trying to fly through a gap in the weather he saw on Nexrad, but due to Nexrad broadcast delay--which can be 8-10 minutes, he ended up flying into the green blob that moved north into his flight path?  There is no way to know but that has caused crashes before.  In another crash recently, a chap flew into a line of thunderstorms moving in his direction that he thought he was avoiding on Nexrad.

It is often some small deficit of knowledge or the unwillingness to take decisive action that kills a pilot.   Maybe this pilot did not know about Nexrad delay.  Even so,  had this fellow acknowledged the danger of his situation, climbed straight ahead to a safe sector altitude and relied on the autopilot, his family would likely be alive today.  It should have been an easy decision, actually.   It's a big sky.  All he had to do was to not hit the ground.  He lacked a little voice to say, "This has gone far enough.  Admit you're screwed.  Climb.  Use your autopilot", yet he mucked around with it too long for what?  Pride?  Panic?  Fear of not staying VFR?  Information overload?   Or perhaps, with all the mucking about, he finally met the old killer, vertigo.

 It is hard to develop that judgement with only 150 hrs PIC.  No one goes out thinking "I'm going to be stupid today."  We fly ourselves into precarious situations step-by-step.  Often each step seems reasonable until collectively, they are not.

Edited May 6, 2019 by Kent Ashton

[Barry]

That is a painful read. I was surprised, probably shouldn't have been, that someone with that little time and only recently licensed would put their selves in that position.

[Kent Ashton]

Here are other examples grabbed from a FB page of what seems to be a destabilizing nose forward of the aerodynamic center.  One flying, one under construction.  One of the comments was

Quote

Have you talked to ___ about Purple? He admits its too long and hunts in cruise. He keeps the pods on because it helps it. He is going to try putting the lower winglets back on to help it. He will tell you its too long...

I would think a pointy nose is going to act somewhat like an airfoil with the trailing edge pointed forward.  Any yaw will tend to increase the yaw.  I bet you would see that if you made a simple cone shape and held it out the car window.   I suspect it will also decrease pitch stability for the same reason.  Also it's lot of extra glass in a shape that will be harder to utilize.  Sort of ugly, too, IMHO.

Edited June 20, 2019 by Kent Ashton

[Marc Zeitlin]

4 hours ago, Kent Ashton said:

Here are other examples grabbed from a FB page of what seems to be a destabilizing nose forward of the aerodynamic center. ...

Interesting that you bring this up. I discussed this issue in some depth in my presentation on canard aerodynamics at the Columbia Fly-In a few weeks ago. You can see the presentation here:

http://cozybuilders.org/Oshkosh_Presentations/index.htm

under "Other Presentations", down near the bottom. I also discussed the issue on the COZY mailing list a while back in relation to a Long-EZ I've flown that has a very long and rounded (but not THAT long) nose as well as very small lower winglets, and it has substantially less directional stability at lower speeds, especially.

[Voidhawk9]

Lower winglets should help. Making the pod pylons longer chord-wise probably would too, as it adds even more vertical area aft. It would be interesting to see if wing fences helped noticeably.
It all adds weight and wetted area though. Ultimately the best solution would be cut off the nose and re-do it. Plenty of nice examples out there with nicer than plans shapes without being needle-nosed like this.
Looks like a nice example besides, as far as one can tell from small photos anyway. Clearly a lot of thought has gone into it, even if I don't necessarily agree with all the conclusions arrived at.

[Kent Ashton]

Jon gave me permission to go a little off topic (right Jon?) so I want to talk about the debt, bitcoin, and gold and see if I can say something you might not have thought about.  Pic 1 is from USDebtClock.org.   The national debt is up to $22.4  TRILLION dollars growing over $1T per year.  It is the same all over the world.

Down at the bottom is a block called "unfunded liability per U.S. taxpayer" current running $1,014,000.  I have watched this number often in the past few years as grew from $800K to over a $1million.  It cannot go on.  Can you imagine every married couple coughing up $2,028,000?   "What cannot be paid, will not be paid", they say.  But in fact, it WILL be paid but with inflated, worthless dollars.  We will all get our Social Security, I will get my military retirement but it will be worth less and less.  The official rate of inflation will be jiggered as it was in the '90s to show slower cost-of-living increases.  It is the way every country solves this sort of dilemma.  The currency is allowed and encouraged to become worth less and less until sometimes you carry in it wheelbarrows, then they arbitrarily cut 000's off the currency and a $1000 debt becomes a $1 debt.  (pic 2) Good for the government and people who owe money, bad for the lender who is owed the debt.

To protect yourself from the inevitable, you must own something of lasting value that will go up to offset the declining value of your dollars:  Gold, Silver, land, houses, etc.  We see this trend today:  Rents are going through the roof as a result of inflation.  Corporations and house-flippers are using cheap dollars being loaned at ultra-low interest rates to buy houses to rent.  The house-buyers know they will be able to pay off their loans down the road in worth-less dollars while raising rents.  They are protecting themselves from hyperinflation (somewhat).  I say "somewhat" because hyperinflation is a raging contagion that affects everyone.

What about Bitcoin?  Peter Schiff points out that people buy Bitcoin as a speculation but it has no real use except to drug-dealers.  No one sells Bitcoin if they believe it will go up in value.  (No one sold Dutch tulips when it appeared they would never stop going up in value, either.)  No one is actually paid in Bitcoin.  They may convert a dollar salary into Bitcoin and pay it in Bitcoin but the wage-rate is denominated in dollars.  No employer wants to commit to paying a person two Bitcoins per year (currently 2 BC equals about $20K) when Bitcoin could double.  No employee would want to see his 2 Bitcoins/$20K salary become worth $10K and take a 50% pay cut.  As a store of real value, Bitcoin is vaporware.

Talk of that solid gold/platinum astroid out there beyond Mars has disturbed me but I am sure in my lifetime, we will only have the gold that is mined on Earth.  The value of one ounce of gold is still about what it was in 1913 while a dollar today only buys 3 or 4 cents of what it would buy in 1913.  1913 is significant because it was the date of creating of the Federal Reserve.   For years and years before 1913, a $20 gold coin was worth about $20 in purchasing power.  Today it is worth $1350.  http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/capital21c/xls/RawDataFiles/GoldPrices17922012.pdf   Compare pic 2 to pic 3.   Project that gold price line about four or five times higher than it appears on pic 3.  It could easily happen and I bet it will happen.

I often think how this will end before falling asleep.  Will it come to a head in my lifetime?  Historically, these reckonings happen abruptly: the Tulip bubble, the South Seas bubble, the tech stock bubble of the late 1980s, the housing bubble of 2008.  

[Jon Matcho]

Holy Heck Kent!  I'm a fan of money and even own a few fractions of a Bitcoin, but I didn't imagine our discussion would result in something not at all connected to airplanes.

I just setup the Blog feature for myself (to log my build) and will do the same for you with any completely-off-topic "rants" in the future.  How about that?  Making a blog post here is just like making a forum post (no training required).

Jon

[Kent Ashton]

20 minutes ago, Jon Matcho said:

How about that?  Making a blog post here is just like making a forum post (no training required).

It's OK doc.  I am better now.  Feel free to delete the post

[Jon Matcho]

I'll bring it back... I have heard that if you were to buy a dozen airplane engines in the 1950s, pickle them, and then sell them today you'd be rich.  Point being that some portions of an airplane have stored value.

There, I tried.

[Voidhawk9]

This section of the forum is for rants, and that is a good one.
It is a topic I am watching carefully myself and trying to prepare (somewhat...) accordingly.

One can readily learn from history that all empires fall. Typically they get over-extended and bankrupt themselves. Sounds familiar.

Here in NZ things are not quite as dire financially, but the socialists are in power now and doing their best to tear the place down. Still, it is well known that a number of mega-rich persons have bug-out estates over here. Still planning where I am going to build mine!

[macleodm3]

Our country is bigger than your worries.... we have huge natural resources, best workforce, best government on the planet.  Your worries will only kill you prematurely, so enjoy the best time to be alive in the best place.

[Kent Ashton]

I took this pic of the waiting list for hangars at my airport in Salisbury, NC.  44 people waiting for hangarage, amazing!  And my airport has done a pretty good job of building hangars.  Other airports in my area refuse to build small hangars or let an operator do so at reasonable cost.  My friend at KEQY-Charlotte Monroe still cannot view the airport's waiting list after asking a dozen times to see his position on the list and KEQY is one of those airports with 60 airplanes sitting on the ramp and two small rows of T-hangars (pic 2), as well as acres of vacant land.  

If you look at KEQY's master plan that they have to file with the FAA (pic 3), they show dozens of places identified for hangars but if you would ask to build say, a row of them--you would find all kinds of charges, fees, paving, parking and improvement costs, and finally an ownership reversion clause that gifts them to the city in a few years.    As a result, 60 airplanes sit out in the rain and sun.

In my experience, pilots are passive.  There ought to be 60 aircraft owners with pitchforks banging on the doors at the City of Monroe demanding a change but there is nary a peep and I hear that if you have some political influence, you can get a hangar at Monroe pretty quickly.  The people get the government they deserve.

 

[Kent Ashton]

Below is a conversation copied from a canard FB page.  It is clear that 2/3rds of the respondents do not know what they are talking about or never heard of the Varieze wing-attach corrosion problem.  Out of a dozen replies, Joe Person--an old guy--nails it.  Tom Watkins gets close.  The rest range from ignorance to bad guesses.  No one offers a cogent discussion of the problem or supporting photos.   Thank you Mr. Zuckerberg.  

Quote

I just learned the info below, does anyone know if it is true and/or has it been addressed? 

"The VariEze is subject to a 2.5g positive, 1.5g negative, maximum load factor limit applied after the discovery of problems with some VariEze wings."

 

Quote

  Dave Anderson Following

Find Support or Report CommentMartin Skiby Not heard of this.

Find Support or Report Comment Glenn Sweezey I would think those wings are stronger than a cessena 152

Find Support or Report Comment Bulent K Gurcan That's what I thought but Wiki says they had a problem with wings, I don't know how long ago.

Find Support or Report Comment Joe Person You kids need to go brush up on your Canard Pusher newsletters...

Find Support or Report Comment

Joe Person The g limitation was handed down by Burt, based on forensics of a VEZ wing attach fitting failure (fortunately on the ground). Combination of corrosion, and poor construction contributed. Properly built and protected from corrosion, the VEZ wing attach is quite robust. Do it wrong, it is not (like any other primary structure). Building yourself, with decades of improvements on-hand, is still my recommendation.

Find Support or Report Comment

• Bob MacNicol I seem to remember it having to do with corrosion on the wing bolts.

  Find Support or Report Comment
  • Tom Watkins Bob MacNicol was a dry layup on the spar caps and corrosion in the wing attach plates...

    2

    Find Support or Report Comment
  • Joe Person Bulging of sparcap layup adjacent to wing fitting plates as well. See CP 109 for specific details.

    1

    Find Support or Report Comment

      Bill Allen And here we have a good example of why an Experimental plans type construction aircraft ate perhaps to be considered in conjunction with the person who built it. Many VariEzes are now so old that the original builders are way back in the ownership chai…See More

  • Find Support or Report CommentBulent K Gurcan Bill Allen well said Sir, thank you.
    Find Support or Report Comment
• Steve Franseen I pulled 6Gs with my dad in our VE. 2.5 Sounds like fake news to me. Btw don't fall out of a roll. .... You'll have a bad time.

   

  Find Support or Report Comment
  • Joe Person I’ve pulled to plus-5 Gs, at near-1200 pounds gross weight, BUT, I knew who built the VEZ, and I know how to properly crunch the numbers for the design’s structural allowables...  😉

    Find Support or Report Comment
  •  Dave Anderson Joe Person, whoever built your airplane must be a VERY good looking fella

    Find Support or Report Comment

    Steve Franseen I remember seeing an article about a VE that was very poorly built and 20ish years old. tested to structural failure with sandbags. It failed somewhere around 8 g's. At the canard lift tabs If memory serves me.

• Find Support or Report Comment
• Daniel FuerstRutan tested one that was given to them in Mojave. Canard failed at 7 g’s. I have the long that had the f-ed up lift tabs. Robert at Jetguys figured I had 3-3.5 g’s before I was a smoking hole... good thing im not into aerobatics. fixed now.

  Find Support or Report Comment
• Joseph AriasIt’s a liability thing

  Find Support or Report Comment
  • Bulent K Gurcan I see thank you.

    Find Support or Report Comment

 

So the OP says "Thank you" and goes away thinking what?

 

[Kent Ashton]

Facebook--a repository of dumb advice:  Saw this plaintive on a FB page (pic 1).  It is an honest inquiry.  I guess I was there once myself but building a BD-5, you learn such things as the minimum bend radius for alloys.   I think Nat put these little gremlins in the plans to frustrate builders; the bracket for the fuel control is another one.    The radius of the part is drawn impossibly tight and if bent as drawn 2024-T3 will generally crack.  The answers here range from "make it out of fiberglass", "use a kitchen door handle",  "2024 cannot be formed" (false),  "use aluminum from Lowes"  (soft 3003 alloy), and "practice on scrap".   True, there were some useful answers but out of 17, nobody referred the OP to a document showing the bend radius required for the various alloys or warn the builder that trying to heat 2024 T3 with a torch in order to bend it will ruin the heat-treat of the alloy.

https://www.americanmachinetools.com/bend_radius.htm

I/8" 2024 T-3 requires a _minimum_ bend radius of about .062, in other words, bend it around a .125" or bigger rod.   Having a few of these bending dies around the shop is handy (pic 2).  I make them by welding a suitable steel rod to a piece of flat stock and cut to various lengths.   Weld a bit at a time and let the welds cool in between or you will be asking your FB buddies "Why is my welding curved."   🙂

[Kent Ashton]

Just watching these videos of a Sukhoi airliner crash where about half the passengers died.  Brutal.  I count 10 seconds before the first passenger gets down the slide and observe how many got their bags.  Ya know, we will never stop people from delaying to get their bags until everything has to go in the cargo hold.

https://youtu.be/nuJfy5vCTbM

Here at 2+07 you will see why they crashed:  landed too fast, tried to force it to land. 

https://youtu.be/7NhvqAWJ4TU

 

[Voidhawk9]

You know, it seems like in almost every on-airport accident like this, half or more of the fire appliances spray foam completely ineffectually, often falling short of the aircraft, or onto parts of the aircraft where it will do no good - in this example, foaming the nose when the fire is in the aft section.

[Kent Ashton]

I return to my rant on airports and how they are screwed up:  In my area of Charlotte, the waiting list for hangars is  KIJP 173 names, KJQF 82 names, KRUQ 25 names, KAKH - 40 names and KEQY - ???.    Why is KEQY a mystery?   The airport manager is likely engaged in hanky-panky with hangar assignments-- keeping a hip-pocket list and assigning open hangars to some favored people.  I've have documented this at another airport.

I called this airport manager this week and the conversation went like this:  Me:   "I would like to examine you waiting list."   Him: "We don't have one."  Me:  "Nothing?  You have no sort of record of people who want hangars?"  Him: "Well, we might have something in our computers."  Me:  "But you don't have a public list that people can examine?"  Him: "No."  Me: " But how do you assign a hangar if it becomes available?"  Him:  "Oh well, we never have any hangars come available."  Me:  "But if one did become available, how would you determine who gets it."  Him:  "I would post probably post an ad."  

Yeah, right.  I could have gone on:  Where would you post the ad?  Would it be a legal public notice?  If multiple operators answer the ad, how do you pick one?  I didn't need to go any further.  He was lying to me.  If he did post an ad (ridiculous) he would have first informed his buddy to be the first to respond.   I filed a public records request with the City that owns the airport to see any "waiting list" and examine tenant leases.  We will see who got hangars and when.

Right now, N.C. is cutting expenses and there is no money to build public hangars.  I understand that but I told the NC Aviation Director (a decent guy) that the State needs to demand that its public airports make land available for private hangars.  In theory, such land is available but these airports (and the FAA) want $250,000 structures with 25-year reversion clauses and all of these airport are  trying to save pads for jet hangars.   Meanwhile, our little airplanes bake in the sun and rain (and hail, and tornados).

Pilots are passive.  I have seen it for the past 30 years I've been involved with homebuilts.  They don't complain.  They don't go to city council meeting with pitchforks.  They slink off to grass strips or manage to find a public airport an hour away that has a hangar.  EAA and AOPA are half-hearted.  If they complain too much they will lose the ear of FAA officials.

I say this all this because it is not in the books.  If you are building an airplane and have dreams of  your own hangar where you can turn on the radio and spend a nice afternoon tinkering, this is the sort of stuff you may encounter.  I have read of too many airports that told a homebuilder "We don't allow any work in a hangar".   Happy to advise anyone who meets this sort of resistance.

Edited August 15, 2020 by Kent Ashton

[Jon Matcho]

On 8/15/2020 at 4:48 PM, Kent Ashton said:

I say this all this because it is not in the books.  If you are building an airplane and have dreams of  your own hangar where you can turn on the radio and spend a nice afternoon tinkering, this is the sort of stuff you may encounter.  I have read of too many airports that told a homebuilder "We don't allow any work in a hangar".   Happy to advise anyone who meets this sort of resistance.

This topic was mentioned a week ago in a completely different conversation. It's good to see that you're speaking out. I could imagine being put on another hidden list that would keep you at the end of the hidden waiting list just for asking am airport manager these questions.

[Kent Ashton]

11 hours ago, Jon Matcho said:

This topic was mentioned a week ago in a completely different conversation. It's good to see that you're speaking out.

I am in a good airport situation now but I get a burr under my saddle when I listen to my friend getting the runaround on the waiting list,  public officials lying or ignoring the law, or instituting policies that restrict homebuilding.  The public airport near me does not allow homebuilt testing and says "no construction in hangars".  There is no reason for it.  I do what I can but it is discouraging when aviators just knuckle under.  When the FAA held that I could be evicted because I talked to other tenants on the airport ("non-aeronautical behavior") and complained ("a financial burden on the airport sponsor") I came to realize how corrupt the FAA and the airport system they administer is.

One more point:   Every state law I've studied has a phrase in its aviation code to the effect that "public airports can lease space and improvements, provided in so doing the public is not deprived of its __rightful__,equal, and uniform use thereof."  In N.C., it is G.S. §63-53(3) and (4).  That law gives us the right under law to use the airport and lease public airport hangars fairly.   Waiting list hanky-panky is grounds for a lawsuit under state law.

Also, one of my pet peeves is that when you sign a lease to ramp space or a hangar, the lease will often say "the municipality can cancel your lease for any reason."  The lease below is from the airport that evicted me using exactly that provision.  I did not know it would be employed that way when I signed it but since then I've studied the law quite a bit.  If government can cancel-out or deny you your right to lease a hangar "for any reason", you do not have any right.  Constitutional law says that a right can be terminated but only for good cause and with the exercise of due process, i.e. some sort of hearing before a neutral arbitrator (if you demand one).

Do not agree to this sort of clause.  Write in "for good cause shown and after due process".   If an airport objects, I can point you to the Constitutional caselaw on rights and due process.

Do not waste your time with the FAA.  The FAA told me "we cannot adjudicate constitutional questions" and "we cannot adjudicate a state law".  They will ignore you.  However, if you go to a local district court and present the issue squarely, the court will understand the constitutional issue.  Maybe the municipality will relent and settle.  However, you have to be very careful not to raise FAA Grant Assurances in a state court because there is a long caselaw trail ("preemption") that says state courts cannot determine national aviation questions--that is the sole perrogative of the FAA--i.e., the FAA preempts the field.  But if you stick to state law and present it properly, a local judge can enforce the constitution AND state law.

In any complaint where your public airport right is jeopardized, it is best to see if a state law gives you some right (and they all do) and pursue justice in a state court.