Gee Bee pitch problem

Well, that's not ENTIRELY accurate, I have tried many times to explain to bumblebees that they can't fly, but they never listen.

The CG needs to be moved BACK a bit. With a forward CG, the elevator/stabilizer has more work to do to hold the nose up, so it has a higher angle of attack (downward) to do it. The prop slipstream will cause exaggerated pitch changes with forward CG. You want SOME of that pitch-up-with-power business so that the airplane has static stability. It's a legal requirement in full-scale, and makes scale flying much safer.

Nope. That's long been an argument in the flight training world. The current thinking is "Attitude + Power = Performance." So to go up, raise the nose and add power. To come down, lower the nose and reduce it. To go slow, raise the nose and reduce power. To go fast, lower it and add power. You seldom change one control setting without changing all the others. There's another saying, a bit more fun: "To go up, pull back. To come down, pull back more..."

Dan

Recent discoveries indicate that the bee doesn't generate lift in the same way birds and airplanes do. There's an intense spanwise vortex across the top of their wings which creates much lower pressure than Bernoulli's effect. This phenomenon has been noted in several spectacular accidents involving canard airplanes like the VariEze or Velocity, where the pilot manages to get the airplane into an unrecoverable, stable deep stall where the airplane will not drop its nose and resume flying, no matter what the pilot does, and sinks at something like 700-1000 feet per minute (about 8-12 MPH, as slow as a parachute descent) until it hits the ground and the pilot walks away. Studies seem to indicate the same spanwise vortex involved in producing so much lift at very low speeds, and I believe that we'll one day see some revolutionary flying machines based on it.

Dan

You think if I stall the GeeBee I could lank it the same way LOL? Doing a harrier with a R2, now that would be quite a bellyflop!

Shaun Bell

Nevermind...found it.

| Nevermind...found it.

So what did you find? I found this --

but it seems to suggest that the incredibly slow (< 1000 ft/minute) descents didn't actually happen, or were never accurately measured (suggesting that they didn't happen.)

Sure leaves a lot of questions unanswered. However, the fact that a couple of guys survived deep-stall crashes is fascinating. Ordinary airplanes would ill you for sure. As I understood from another source, the fella that died in the inverted crash was the same one that crashed earlier in the water. I can't recall the source.

Dan