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TMann, I read the exact opposite. Scott Baker, on the Velocity builder's forum, said: Uli Christen and a friend were invovled. They were attending an EAA Pancake Breakfast at an airpark near Titusville. Uli and his passenger survived the crash - how, I don't know by looking at the photos of the aircraft engulfted in flames. As of last evening, both Uli and his passenger were in an ICU burn center in Orlando. Scott Swing learned that Uli was no burned badly, but that the passenger has burns covering 80% - not good. Details are sketchy - we all know how accurate news reports are on this sort of thing. Scott and Amy hope to visit Uli in the hospital today. Perhaps we will learn more details later. That was posted at 7am today.

I don't know that what they do in an RX-8 is a good indicator. People modding RX-8s are, I would think, likely racing. Racing is a good way to blow out any engine.

I've found stuff on the web (including youtube) showing how to make and use molds for fibreglass parts... But everything I've seen has NOT had the foam sandwich layer thing. How are molded parts made with foam and fibreglass, like the velocity fuselage? Are they using some kind of spray-on foam? Or maybe injection molded foam? ( I keep imagining them trying to use the foam insulation in a can...)

Is there any reason why you are not tracking the plane's designation? In the extreme ideal case, you'd have several thousand canards in this spreadsheet. I would think that without some description per line of "which plane" you'll loose track.

I use gmail, with messages forwarded to my blackberry. I seem to get emails within about 5 minutes on my BB. Occasionally it takes a bit longer, but never more than 10 minutes in my experience.

I should make a comment too. I'm in Toronto, but flying out of YKF, and planning to start building a velocity SE-FG in the next year.

I'm having a hard time finding the *GOOD* conversations on it, but there are several conversation on this forum about the fuel selector. The arguments in favour of a both setting seem to boil down to reduced pilot load. The arguments in opposition are basically that bad fuel from one tank cannot contaminate the other, and if one tank is draining in flight, you won't drain both tanks. (there is a posting on this forum somewhere in which this happened to an Aerocanard, IIRC. The pilot had forgotten to put back on the fuel cap of one tank, and both tanks bled dry as a result) Further, any attempts to address these issues just lead to increased complexity, etc. ok, I've spent two hours looking, and I can't find anything other than: http://www.canardzone.com/forum/showthread.php?t=3496 But I'm sure there are better threads on the subject.

I dunno about that. DH has been flying a DH-powered Velocity for some time now (I think its almost 2 years now, but don't quote me on that). But one flying plane does not mean they have a reliable and manufacturable engine. Of course, I dunno who Bill Allen is. If that's a customer, nevermind me.

No insult offered, none taken.But the difficulty is the reason for looking at alternatives. Although I certainly studied optics in university, its not something I would consider one of my strong points. Software though... I can do that! Why make it tough when I can make it easy? (also known as "when all you've got is a hammer...") I'm not sure you do have the EFIS. Not all EFIS have an extra video-out to attach an external screen, most need to be mounted with a particular orientation, and none of them are, AFAIK, specifically designed with output that will translate well to a HUD. To get a nice HUD, we are likely going to need to do some fancy foot-work somewhere. I see 4 general options: 1) Find an EFIS where we have sufficient customisability to choose colour-schemes, and probably eliminate some info so that the HUD is readable and not too cluttered. 2) Try to correct for the non-optimal colour-scheme using optics 3) try to correct for the non-optimal colour-scheme using electronics 4) build our own EFIS. Why not just use a monochrome screen? Are you hoping to eliminate the artificial horizon?

Mine is 3 disks too. Disk 1 is all the plans, disks 2 and 3 are all the CPs.

Software is lighter than optics! If the art is kept simple enough, and monochrome, I don't think resolution will be terribly important. OTOH, there would be no need for a calibration system, and the CPU would not need to be as powerful, meaning less power drawn, cheaper, etc.

If you write your own system... Most graphics systems render the image into a flat viewing plane. You could, instead, render it onto a non-flat viewing surface, so that the image that is displayed on the LCD panel is distorted. If you get the distortion correct, the final image that the user sees reflected off the non-flat canopy will be square. Such techniques are used in good VR helmets, because they use one panel and a big lense to display both whats in front of your eyes and whats off to the side so that users have proper peripheral vision.

Indeed I have! 2 ideas: 1) The BM EFIS/1 has a VGA out, last I looked. Mount a bright panel facing up, and then mount a prism over it, and you have something pretty close to whats done in a military jet, from what I know. Ideally, you'd want to eliminate most of the colours used and go with some very simple high contrast line art for the HUD... If I can't get that out of BM, there's alot of resources on the net for making my own EFIS. I'd just rather not re-invent the wheel. 2) The eyetap (www.eyetap.org). I think the design Prof. Mann uses lacks resiliency if the computer, lcd or ccd fails, but I think that's some minor changes to fix. The eyetap opens up more possibilities for synthetic vision, I think, but having never actually used one, I have a suspicion that it only working on one eye might be disorienting in some circumstances.

Is this such a big deal? I'm learning to fly in a katana, and am flying with my left hand at all times. I'm only ever tempted to fly with my right hand on the stick when doing the downwind checks.

According to this, DreamWings went under in 2001.

It seems to me that there is a fair number of templates and jigs that you'll want... I wonder if its worthwhile buying the plans now, and working on all those jigs well in advance... I won't keep you busy for a year, but a few months at least...

How easily does that tube fall out? Are you not worried about that tube falling out and ending up in the engine and/or prop?

IIRC, I've seen some discussion recently on this forum about what would be needed to be done to a cozy to make it safe to deploy a BRS... It kinda sounded like a lot of effort if you didn't want the BRS to just rip the plane in half.

I guess the people putting the canopy hinge at the front of their cozy will have some difficulties with #7...

i don't think its that simple. The hayabusa really does generate alot of HP at speed. Many a racer has *complained* about the difficulty of dyno'ing the hayabusa, in my experience. That said, I should also point out that car!=motorcycle!=airplane. They're solving different problems, and in different environments. YMMV. ... but it really does sound like you should make a slippery plane and forget about the ram air intakes.

Vibration mounts. K, that makes sense. Just as an FYI, here's a post Andy Millin made to the velocity builder's mailing list today:

I'm having trouble with this whole ears thing. I mean, it seems to me that they're mounts for mounting the engine to the engine mount. Would it not be saner to build the engine mount to hold the engine sans ears? At the least, its like 4 less bolts to fail.

Sorry to ressurect this tangential conversation, but check out http://www.kal-soft.com/velocity/weblog.asp?pic=1207 . It looks like Andy Millin is running into this very issue with his IO-540.

this sorta reminds me of the before/after ads for weight loss. You haven't lost that much weight, you're standing straighter, and wearing clothes that are too large for you! That shop isn't messier, its poorly lit!

yes, that is a linear slide rule. My point is that this is a slide rule too: AFAIK, its pretty standard to teach all pilots how to use one. Thus, basically all pilots know how to use a slide rule, or at least they were taught how to.