I’m designing an airplane.
Come along with me on the journey as we bring an experimental aircraft design to life. We’ll explore structures, aerodynamics, performance, and more along the way…
LEARN. BUILD. FLY.
why?
“I could never do that!” is probably the thing I hear most often if I tell someone I’m interested in designing planes. But I believe Dick Rutan was right when he said, “If you can dream it, you can do it.”
I’ve been drawing and dreaming about airplanes since my first crayon, and many years later, I stumbled across a Popular Mechanics article on kit-built airplanes.
I thought about building a plane from a kit, but there were so many things I wanted to modify that I realized it really would be better to start fresh.
After I became a private pilot, I got a better idea of what I want in an airplane, and while many planes come close, the challenge of making one uniquely suited to my liking is hard to resist.
Science, freedom, beauty, adventure: what more could you ask of life? Aviation combined all the elements I loved. There was science in each curve of an airfoil, in each angle between strut and wire, in the gap of a spark plug or the color of the exhaust flame. There was freedom in the unlimited horizon, on the open fields where one landed. A pilot was surrounded by beauty of earth and sky. He brushed treetops with the birds, leapt valleys and rivers, explored the cloud canyons he had gazed at as a child. Adventure lay in each puff of wind.
–Charles Lindbergh
how?
The next thing I usually hear is, “but how do you know it will fly?”
Fair question, since I’m not an engineer. Well, it turns out that light aircraft design has been pretty well-understood for 80 years or more, particularly for smaller airplanes that homebuilders are typically building.
Many textbooks and technical references are readily available these days that a designer in the 1940s could have only dreamed of.
My learning journey started with a little paperback book called Simplified Aircraft
Design for Homebuilders by Dan Raymer. I recommend it to anyone crazy enough to give this a try.
But soon I realized I’d need more books–which raised more questions, requiring still more books. Over the years, that’s grown to a small library of a couple hundred books (not to mention countless articles saved on the computer) on aviation generally, as well as design and construction.
Some of my favorites are in the resources section, and I’ll continue to add more to that list over time.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
–Teddy Roosevelt
what’s
ellipsair?
It’s just a working title for the project (and no, I don’t intend to start a company and market an airplane design).
Many of the airplanes I’ve doodled have elliptical wing planforms. I’ve always been drawn to their elegance, and of course in the early days of aviation, the pioneering aerodynamicist Prandtl identified elliptical lift distribution as producing the
least induced drag.
So for now, this airplane will have elliptical wings with all of the challenges and compromises that entails. We’ll see how that goes in the design process…
And to be clear, I am not associated with Ellipse Aero (although it looks like a neat plane and I guess I’m not the only one who likes ellipses).