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um.. aren't those flight computers that they teach you how to use in groundschool a form of slide rule? IIRC, Richard Feynman prefered the circular slide rules. He claimed they acheived high accuracy in a smaller form-factor than linear rules. However, the fact that pretty much every pilot today knows how to use a slide rule doesn't change the fact that the guys at skunkworks were superstars.

I can't decide if that's a joke or a typo.

Isn't whether he pays them or not relevant? Unpaid volunteer elves are OK, but paid or slave elves are not?

KiethO: I'm not sure you're right about a variety of things here. Survivability: My general impression is that composites tend to do better. They might appear to take more damage, but they are also much easier to repair. That they take more damage is debateable too. They're lighter planes, no? That would suggest less kinetic energy in any accident. pound-for-pound, composites are stronger which means that in comparable accidents, the composite plane should have to dissipate less energy and have more strength to do it in. 3 flying surfaces: maybe it sounds better, but what about drag? More wings could mean more drag which probably means a less efficient plane. I've read a claim by an aerodynamics expert (he was a prof somewhere...) that the conventional airplane design is in fact the most efficient design. He claimed that mostly on the basis of drag: in straight and level cruise, the tail should be in a mostly neutral lift config, which means little drag, which should mean that all your drag is directly caused by the main wing. A canard, he claimed, would have more drag since you have 2 lifting surfaces, both loaded, and the smaller airfoil is likely, he argued, a less efficient airfoil. So he's made a myriad assumptions, but you at least have to admit that its not a simple design issue. If it was, every plane would look like the piaggio. Having said all that, don't trust me: I'm not a builder, nor a materials expert, nor a plane designer. I'm not even a solo-ing student pilot yet. I would wait until Marc Z. shreds my comments before taking them as anything resembling fact. I look forward to it, personally.

Thanks for the answer, Marc. I guess I was really driving for a sense of how different the Velocity seats are form the SQ2000 seats. I intend to ask the factory, but I don't presume they know anything about the SQ2000, since they build velocities. The fact that a similar accident hasn't happened doesn't mean that one couldn't.

Well, I was working with 1/8" ABS, but I'll take Marc's claims about the relative difficulty of working with acrylic. Based on that, I think its pretty clear that, *IF* I'd tried, I would have ruined the acrylic in a short afternoon. Can you really do 3 chapters that fast?

Vacuforming I dont think its as tough or expensive as you beleive. Check out www.501st.com, and do google searches for making stormtrooper armor. Its very easy to build a vacuform table, and then sculpt a mold from plaster. I suspect you'd need a larger table to make windshields than what the costumers are doing, but that means 2 things: 1) more or bigger shopvacs 2) more or bigger heating elements. (I wouldn't try to just use a heat gun, its too uneven) If you're willing to go to the effort to build your own plane, and redesign significant elements, I don't think that the vacuforming of the canopy will be much of a roadblock. There's a really good book on the subject that I have somewhere. I'll post the name etc when I find it in this mess I call home.

I`ve been planning to build a velocity for a while. I`ve been reading alot about the differences between it and the cozy. I was pretty sure about the decision, until I read an accident report on Mark Zeitlin`s website. http://www.cozybuilders.org/N2992_Accident_Eval/index.html OK, I have to admit I`m a little confuzzled about what plane it was that crashed. It sounds like it was a mish-mash of cozy MkIV and SQ2000 (of which I know little. The manufacture seems to be defunct). anyhow, its clear that the seats were not like the cozy, which, as I understand them, are basically thwarts (to use a naval term) in the fuselage. This should be quite strong. The crashed plane had seats that were not structural, and ripped out in the crash, and appeared to not have a great deal of strutural strength themselves. So my question is about the seats in the velocity. How do they compare? Could "It seems that these seats have no true structure to them, and are closer to lawn chairs in their design and structural integrity." possibly describe velocity seating?

Bill James wrote a blog posting about the difference between the Long and the Vari. http://www.ezchronicles.com/2007/03/longez-more-practical-airplane.html EZ-Chroncles is always a good read.

yes, that helps a lot. I *was* confusing myself quite a bit. Thanks

As I understood it, canard planes are usually designed so that the canard stalls at a higher airspeed than the main wing so that the nose will drop before the main wing stalls, making a stall "resistant" plane. The alternative is a canard that is still flying when the main wing stalls, which would aggravate the stall and be hard to recover from... I think. However, I was reading about retractable gear on infinity's website, and saw this in the FAQ: I don't think this FAQ point is terribly well written, but it seems to say the opposite: that the canard stalls at lower speeds than the main wing, because, during takeoff, the nose lifts off first. Now I'm not so sure what's really going on! What am I misunderstanding/overlooking here? Is it possible that the canard stalls at a different AOA but the same speed?