Bassakwards

[CRAZY IVAN5]

15 hours ago, D Bellis said:

A simple answer would be stall characteristics. A true canard configuration stalls completely, and consequently the recovery requires a lot more altitude than a conventional configuration. 

 

Full-stall a J-3 Cub, and it almost recovers itself with very little loss of altitude. Full-stall a Rutan Quickie, and it needs a thousand feet or more to recover. 

 

Easily Googleable for anyone that wants to look it up. 

 

Just to clarify, adding little "canards" to delta designs (or the B-1) does not convert the airframe into a canard configuration. A true canard's forward surfaces are lifting surfaces, not airflow control devices. 

 

HTH,

D

Agreed! I read somewhere awhile back where even bug splatters and dew upset things on the Vari-ez. I remember thinking to myself well that's a bit touchy. Concur on the Piper Cub .

[CRAZY IVAN5]

I should clarify that ,bug splatters and dew on the canard. I 've often wondered how true that is as I've never talked to a pilot of one of these [Vari-eze]

[Oldbaldguy]

2 hours ago, CRAZY IVAN5 said:

I should clarify that ,bug splatters and dew on the canard. I 've often wondered how true that is as I've never talked to a pilot of one of these [Vari-eze]

The rain and bugs business was true with the early EZs because the airfoil just didn’t like it but this was resolved relatively quickly by changing the airfoil on the canard.  The Long EZ did not stall in the traditional way because the canard would stall first causing the nose to drop, automatically reducing the AOA of the wing with no further action required of the pilot.  It was thought that a properly rigged EZ could not stall and depart but that was proved false when someone ventured into that dark corner and found that it would in fact depart when forced into a deep stall.  A Cub is no picnic, either, if you are mean to it.  Just because they look stodgy and slow does not mean they will not hand you your lunch if pushed.  Cross one up at the wrong time and over you will go.  Treat a Cub right and you can’t beat it.

[Oldbaldguy]

18 hours ago, D Bellis said:

A simple answer would be stall characteristics. A true canard configuration stalls completely, and consequently the recovery requires a lot more altitude than a conventional configuration. 

 

Full-stall a J-3 Cub, and it almost recovers itself with very little loss of altitude. Full-stall a Rutan Quickie, and it needs a thousand feet or more to recover. 

 

Easily Googleable for anyone that wants to look it up. 

 

Just to clarify, adding little "canards" to delta designs (or the B-1) does not convert the airframe into a canard configuration. A true canard's forward surfaces are lifting surfaces, not airflow control devices. 

 

HTH,

D

Respectfully disagree, D, on several counts.  Stall a Cub and when it breaks hold the stick back and see what happens.  It will not recover itself.  Rutan EZ canards were designed to be stall resistant in that the canard would stop flying before the wing did, allowing the nose to drop enough for the wing to continue to fly with no input from the driver - a properly rigged EZ will simply bob its way along without the wing actually stalling til you eventually hit the ground if you were dumb enough to play that game.  In other words the canard stalls but the primary lifting surface does not.  A conventionally configured airplane does not work like that - once the wing stalls the tail is along for the ride.  Aeronautically speaking, a Quickie is a tailless negative stagger, high aspect ratio biplane, not a typical canard.  Both wings on a Quickie are primary lifting surfaces.  You can’t compare its handling characteristics to an EZ or any other canard because they are nothing alike.  I don’t need to google this stuff because I am old enough to have lived it and have been around all sorts of airplanes my entire life.  I am not anti canard or ignorant of canards - they work just fine.  I was simply curious if anyone on the site had an opinion as to why canards never made much of a dent in the industry.  After all, the first airplane was one.  I’d have thought more designers would have copied and improved on that design but they did not.  The planform we are so used to seeing with the primary lifting surfaces in front of the horizontal stabilizers in back and a long fuselage connecting the two took over at some point and apparently designers never looked back.  There is nothing wrong with canards, so I suspect the market - or maybe lawyers or maybe even the mission - made its choice and we’ve stuck with it ever since.  But that’s just me.  I’ll try to stick with proper modeling topics in the future, but, you know, pinot makes me do weird things, so there’s that.

 

[D Bellis]

3 hours ago, Oldbaldguy said:

There is nothing wrong with canards.

Not "wrong" per se, but buyers (and designers) prefer aircraft configurations with proven flight characteristics and fewer [potentially fatal] quirks. 

 

D

Edited March 12 by D Bellis

[Archimedes]

23 hours ago, Oldbaldguy said:

Respectfully disagree, D, on several counts.  Stall a Cub and when it breaks hold the stick back and see what happens.  It will not recover itself.  Rutan EZ canards were designed to be stall resistant in that the canard would stop flying before the wing did, allowing the nose to drop enough for the wing to continue to fly with no input from the driver - a properly rigged EZ will simply bob its way along without the wing actually stalling til you eventually hit the ground if you were dumb enough to play that game.  In other words the canard stalls but the primary lifting surface does not.  A conventionally configured airplane does not work like that - once the wing stalls the tail is along for the ride.  Aeronautically speaking, a Quickie is a tailless negative stagger, high aspect ratio biplane, not a typical canard.  Both wings on a Quickie are primary lifting surfaces.  You can’t compare its handling characteristics to an EZ or any other canard because they are nothing alike.  I don’t need to google this stuff because I am old enough to have lived it and have been around all sorts of airplanes my entire life.  I am not anti canard or ignorant of canards - they work just fine.  I was simply curious if anyone on the site had an opinion as to why canards never made much of a dent in the industry.  After all, the first airplane was one.  I’d have thought more designers would have copied and improved on that design but they did not.  The planform we are so used to seeing with the primary lifting surfaces in front of the horizontal stabilizers in back and a long fuselage connecting the two took over at some point and apparently designers never looked back.  There is nothing wrong with canards, so I suspect the market - or maybe lawyers or maybe even the mission - made its choice and we’ve stuck with it ever since.  But that’s just me.  I’ll try to stick with proper modeling topics in the future, but, you know, pinot makes me do weird things, so there’s that.

 

No googling: Could it not have been that the early canard designs were all naturally unstable in pitch (The Flyer was known to be so) and had to be positively flown rather than trimmed to fly hands off? I too am puzzled that until jets became the norm, pusher designs (not only canards) remained firmly in the minority. This is weird because pushers (and canards in particular) offer a lot of positives, many of which you have listed. In the very early days though, pitch stability was not one of them. Just a thought.

 

Kind regards,

Paul

[Oldbaldguy]

41 minutes ago, Archimedes said:

No googling: Could it not have been that the early canard designs were all naturally unstable in pitch (The Flyer was known to be so) and had to be positively flown rather than trimmed to fly hands off? I too am puzzled that until jets became the norm, pusher designs (not only canards) remained firmly in the minority. This is weird because pushers (and canards in particular) offer a lot of positives, many of which you have listed. In the very early days though, pitch stability was not one of them. Just a thought.

 

Kind regards,

Paul

Good points.  This is where I was hoping we’d go on this topic.  I am all but certain Rutan made canards a common thing that worked every time.  And he used a slide rule, not a computer.  His Variviggen didn’t quite connect with builder/fliers but the VariEZ did and the LongEZ did in spades.  That airplane flies backwards and does it very well.  It was designed from the beginning to be a stable cross country platform - even in IFR - that performed well on minimal horsepower. Then, when Beech tried to take it commercial, they failed miserably.  Why????  I think because their Starship looked weird to most buyers. They eventually blamed Rutan for designing a plane for them that they could not sell when maybe it was the Wrights’ fault all along.  The Wrights, in their naïveté gave us canards because canards were the answer that worked when they tried it.  So why didn’t the follow-on designers improve on the canard design?  Could it be the Wrights were their own worst enemies?  They were by all accounts a litigious pair and were quick to call in the lawyers when somebody tried to steal their limelight.  They even told the Smithsonian that they had to accept and support them as the first to fly in the face of all other evidence or they would take their Flyer out of the museum and go home.  Could it be that what we now know as a traditional airplane came to be in a universal sense because the Wrights threatened to pitch a fit whenever anyone was perceived to infringe on their patents?  I can’t answer that question with any degree of certainty, but wouldn’t it be something if modern day aviation looks like it does because the original creators’ jealousy forced aeronautical development away from their own work and into the laps of others who came after them, essentially cutting their own throats?  

[Archimedes]

1 hour ago, Oldbaldguy said:

Good points.  This is where I was hoping we’d go on this topic.  I am all but certain Rutan made canards a common thing that worked every time.  And he used a slide rule, not a computer.  His Variviggen didn’t quite connect with builder/fliers but the VariEZ did and the LongEZ did in spades.  That airplane flies backwards and does it very well.  It was designed from the beginning to be a stable cross country platform - even in IFR - that performed well on minimal horsepower. Then, when Beech tried to take it commercial, they failed miserably.  Why????  I think because their Starship looked weird to most buyers. They eventually blamed Rutan for designing a plane for them that they could not sell when maybe it was the Wrights’ fault all along.  The Wrights, in their naïveté gave us canards because canards were the answer that worked when they tried it.  So why didn’t the follow-on designers improve on the canard design?  Could it be the Wrights were their own worst enemies?  They were by all accounts a litigious pair and were quick to call in the lawyers when somebody tried to steal their limelight.  They even told the Smithsonian that they had to accept and support them as the first to fly in the face of all other evidence or they would take their Flyer out of the museum and go home.  Could it be that what we now know as a traditional airplane came to be in a universal sense because the Wrights threatened to pitch a fit whenever anyone was perceived to infringe on their patents?  I can’t answer that question with any degree of certainty, but wouldn’t it be something if modern day aviation looks like it does because the original creators’ jealousy forced aeronautical development away from their own work and into the laps of others who came after them, essentially cutting their own throats?  

Good points on Burt Rutan. He had a genius to be able to look at convention, then to work from first principles and come up with something better. There is good evidence that supports everything you say about the Wrights. The Wrights were the first to fly under power and record documentary evidence that they did so. They were methodical when others simply used trial and error and certainly did not record what they did half as well. Have you looked at Alberto Santos Dumont’s designs? The 14 bis was also a canard. It was also unstable in pitch. Until Rutan, canards after those very first designs were tiring for pilots to fly or, in the last 30 years, have begun to use ever greater computing power to control their deliberately designed in instability (I had it on good authority from one of the test team at BAE Wharton that a Eurofighter cannot be flown by a human alone for example). 

 

As you say, Burt Rutan’s breakthrough was to create designs that were relatively easy to build and removed the tiresome canard pitch instability. Self builders of aircraft are people who are natural iconoclasts whereas those who buy biz-jets tend to be much more conservative (what sweeping generalisation that is!). In other words I think that you are right and the Beech Starship did look weird to the C-Suite executives who were paying for the next corporate plaything and knew nothing about aircraft design. But, I think there is hope for the canard yet. 

 

Cheers (I’m drinking a nice Sancerre btw…)

Paul

[Rampenfest]

Sorry, not really on the topic of canards….but on the Starship.

 

From my random tid-bits of knowledge about it that I have heard and read through the years:

 

Forgetting looks, one of the huge drivers of why it failed was simply cost. It ended up costing almost double the originally planned cost. This was due to lots of newer technological advances that had to pass muster of the FAA (the composite design being the main one)

 

There were lots of maintenace issues early on, which led to the plane being in the hangar a lot. The plane also ended up weighing more than 12,500 lbs which now made it require a type rating. (Additional cost for training and certification) 

 

Ironically, Beechcraft/Raytheon built it as a “competitor” to their own King Air series which arguably did everything the same or better than the Starship and at a cheaper cost. 
 

It is undoubtedly a cool looking plane. I have met a couple pilots who have flown it, and they had very positive things to say about it. 
 

Just some random stuff to add to the convo. 

[Archimedes]

17 hours ago, Rampenfest said:

Sorry, not really on the topic of canards….but on the Starship.

 

From my random tid-bits of knowledge about it that I have heard and read through the years:

 

Forgetting looks, one of the huge drivers of why it failed was simply cost. It ended up costing almost double the originally planned cost. This was due to lots of newer technological advances that had to pass muster of the FAA (the composite design being the main one)

 

There were lots of maintenace issues early on, which led to the plane being in the hangar a lot. The plane also ended up weighing more than 12,500 lbs which now made it require a type rating. (Additional cost for training and certification) 

 

Ironically, Beechcraft/Raytheon built it as a “competitor” to their own King Air series which arguably did everything the same or better than the Starship and at a cheaper cost. 
 

It is undoubtedly a cool looking plane. I have met a couple pilots who have flown it, and they had very positive things to say about it. 
 

Just some random stuff to add to the convo. 

Interesting stuff. Its lack of popularity seems driven by factors not purely related to it being a canard but in part due to Beechcraft's management of the project. 

 

Up to 2020 Piaggio have been building their 'kind-of-a-canard' in the Avanti (with over 200 built so far) so it appears that some off-the-beaten-track designs can be successful. Man, that is a lot of flying surfaces on one airframe....that said, the FAI lists it as the fastest propeller driven production aircraft with speed of 927.4 km/h (576.3 mph; 500.8 kn). 

[Rampenfest]

The Piaggio indeed has a lot going on visually 

 

It is a fast bird, and I have seen a lot more of them flying around than a Starship. Something funky is that those forward “canards” actually have flaps that deploy with the main wing flaps! 

[Oldbaldguy]

The Beech Staggerwing Museum at Tullahoma, Tennessee, in the US has pretty much one of everything Beechcraft built, including a Starship.  I pulled up to the front door of the museum one day in my Cessna 182 and the sweet young thing receptionist asked, “Oh!  And what model Beech is that?”  Honest.  That’s how focused this bunch is.  So, after looking at all those gorgeous Staggerwings, I ended up poking and prodding the Starship, mainly because it was open and they held it in such disdain that I don’t think they cared.  The airplane takes up a lot of space because it is long in every direction.  Most canards are fairly close coupled and compact, but the Starship is more like a regular airplane that flies backwards.  It’s fuselage is a pencil - round and narrow in cross section.  If you are an executive with aspirations of grandeur, there is no way you are going to get in and out of that thing or move around in it with grace and elan.  Same can be said for the cockpit.  The two front seats are about as easy to scramble into as a Formula 1 car - no way to get in and out of the pit and still appear professional in front of your boss and his girlfriend.  Seasoned pilots must have had an awful time with that.  And as far as arriving in style, well, there are old Soviet crop dusters that have more ramp appeal.  It seems to me that Beech had no idea where Rutan’s head was or where he was trying to take them.  Instead of getting the King Air killer they’d hoped for, they got this long-winged, skinny thing that was loud and expensive and that customers looked at all side-eyed, like they expected it to fart in front of their wives. Beech had no idea what they had or what to do with it.  Instead of developing the airplane and building a market for it, the board got mad and stomped around blaming Rutan for making them look foolish.  The acrimony was palpable and the divorce was downright nasty.  Beech was so petty after the dust settled that they towed the fully functional, sub scale proof of concept article that Rutan built for them as part of the contract - it flew and performed very well, BTW, which is why Beech went ahead with the project - to the ramp in front of his facility and ran over it with a bulldozer.  Learjets were all the thing for a while years ago but they soon lost ground to fatter, more comfortable corporate jets.  People with that kind of money don’t want to be forced to crawl around in their fancy airplane like the Hunchback of Notre Dame.  The Beech boys missed that point and frankly, I don’t think Rutan ever even thought of it - he was laser focused on performance.  So the airplane died a horrible death and took whatever promise the canard had with it.  Even now, years after the LongEZ proved its worth, performance and economy as a personal airplane, the most popular design extant is the conventional, all aluminum RV series - airplanes with the tail in the back and the engine in the front like Pug Piper and Clyde Cessna intended all along.

[Archimedes]

12 hours ago, Oldbaldguy said:

The Beech Staggerwing Museum at Tullahoma, Tennessee, in the US has pretty much one of everything Beechcraft built, including a Starship.  I pulled up to the front door of the museum one day in my Cessna 182 and the sweet young thing receptionist asked, “Oh!  And what model Beech is that?”  Honest.  That’s how focused this bunch is.  So, after looking at all those gorgeous Staggerwings, I ended up poking and prodding the Starship, mainly because it was open and they held it in such disdain that I don’t think they cared.  The airplane takes up a lot of space because it is long in every direction.  Most canards are fairly close coupled and compact, but the Starship is more like a regular airplane that flies backwards.  It’s fuselage is a pencil - round and narrow in cross section.  If you are an executive with aspirations of grandeur, there is no way you are going to get in and out of that thing or move around in it with grace and elan.  Same can be said for the cockpit.  The two front seats are about as easy to scramble into as a Formula 1 car - no way to get in and out of the pit and still appear professional in front of your boss and his girlfriend.  Seasoned pilots must have had an awful time with that.  And as far as arriving in style, well, there are old Soviet crop dusters that have more ramp appeal.  It seems to me that Beech had no idea where Rutan’s head was or where he was trying to take them.  Instead of getting the King Air killer they’d hoped for, they got this long-winged, skinny thing that was loud and expensive and that customers looked at all side-eyed, like they expected it to fart in front of their wives. Beech had no idea what they had or what to do with it.  Instead of developing the airplane and building a market for it, the board got mad and stomped around blaming Rutan for making them look foolish.  The acrimony was palpable and the divorce was downright nasty.  Beech was so petty after the dust settled that they towed the fully functional, sub scale proof of concept article that Rutan built for them as part of the contract - it flew and performed very well, BTW, which is why Beech went ahead with the project - to the ramp in front of his facility and ran over it with a bulldozer.  Learjets were all the thing for a while years ago but they soon lost ground to fatter, more comfortable corporate jets.  People with that kind of money don’t want to be forced to crawl around in their fancy airplane like the Hunchback of Notre Dame.  The Beech boys missed that point and frankly, I don’t think Rutan ever even thought of it - he was laser focused on performance.  So the airplane died a horrible death and took whatever promise the canard had with it.  Even now, years after the LongEZ proved its worth, performance and economy as a personal airplane, the most popular design extant is the conventional, all aluminum RV series - airplanes with the tail in the back and the engine in the front like Pug Piper and Clyde Cessna intended all along.

Now that IS an insight. Thank you for sharing that. Having the insight from someone who has actually been inside one of those things is gold dust. Also, the Piaggio (rolled out in 1986) is faster its faster than a Starship (400kts vs 334 kts) and has always cost less although its range is shorter. According to PilotFriend.com... "Reasons for the lack of demand probably included price, performance, and economic conditions. The list price in 1989 was $3.9 million, similar to the Cessna Citation V and Lear 31 jets, which were 89 and 124 knots faster than the Starship at maximum cruise, respectively. The Piper Cheyenne turboprop was faster and sold for $1 million less."

 

Kind regards,

Paul

[tucohoward]

This is a great video on the subject. I have watched it many times. Greg has excellent videos for anyone who likes the technical side of things.

 

Cheers,

Jay

[FLMattModelling]

3 hours ago, Archimedes said:

Now that IS an insight. Thank you for sharing that. Having the insight from someone who has actually been inside one of those things is gold dust. Also, the Piaggio (rolled out in 1986) is faster its faster than a Starship (400kts vs 334 kts) and has always cost less although its range is shorter. According to PilotFriend.com... "Reasons for the lack of demand probably included price, performance, and economic conditions. The list price in 1989 was $3.9 million, similar to the Cessna Citation V and Lear 31 jets, which were 89 and 124 knots faster than the Starship at maximum cruise, respectively. The Piper Cheyenne turboprop was faster and sold for $1 million less."

 

Kind regards,

Paul

"has always cost less although its range is shorter"  

 

That is a funny comment for the following reason. I am in the avionics business and had a customer that wanted his ELT changed in an Avanti. No joke, the Service Bulletin from Piaggio stated that installation to remove and install the new ELT was 250 hours of labor. The tail and fuel tank had to be removed to gain access, then re-installed when done.

 

It is a beautiful aircraft and I love the sound when one flies over. But, I would never own one for the maintenance alone.