Hey Eric, do you host your own web page or use someone? (I'm considering whether to take the plunge for web and/or blog.)

Quote Originally Posted by Eric Witherspoon View Post
Found this searching "box wing airplane" from 2005: http://tinypic.com/1ta9lv
That's interesting. I wonder what the real win, if any, would be for a nice wing like that with the high Reynolds numbers you'd get from an airline. It might be "fun" (if one were artistically inclined) to re-sketch that with the engines on the tail, converting the wings to the Synergy's double box tail (not box wing) and see what it looks like then.


... it would probably be much more involved to add fuselage plugs to generate a long-fuselage version, or, use the same (or minimally modified) fuselage with an "improved" wing. For example, the more recent versions of the 737 and 747 probably re-used a LOT of the existing fuselage design and tooling while incorporating new wings.
Most likely. I would guess that altering the length of the fuselage would alter the laminar flow characteristics all over place and ruin the design as far as "adaptability" goes. A single good design is great for people like us. Businesses need a basic design they can modify all over the place in minor ways.

But for a single-point design like the Synergy where if it was a kit, it would be available in the "one size" for a couple hundred units, until the "next size" becomes available.
Do you really think we'll see a couple of hundred Synergy kits in the next decade? It took RV and Velocity a long time to get there. Most successful kits are only in the hundreds. Right now I'm quietly hoping that they're focused on GFE only. I think they can take away all the prizes, if they can get it flying in time. If not, Pipistrel goes home with yet another bird designed to match the rules of the contest. IMHO, GFE should be about real progress, not a flying "America's Cup."

Though if I were going to design a first iteration to market, it would be the 2-seater. This, by far, seems to be the most popular seating capacity in homebuilt airplanes. More seats than this starts to get very expensive to build and power, and single seaters are always a very limited market (and not much less cost to build or power than a 2-seater).
The deal is, the Synergy is more efficient in flight (we think) than most two-seaters are now. It's a 180 HP engine, in an airframe with less drag than an RV-6, and seats 6. Materials costs, time to build, and time to qualify will all figure into this too.

Qualify ... it has two moving control surfaces. It has proverse (not adverse) yaw. I wonder if it has rudder pedals, and what it would be like to fly a machine without them.