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Author Topic: Anyone Fly Delta Wing Control Line?  (Read 2554 times)

Offline Angelo Rosa

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Anyone Fly Delta Wing Control Line?
« on: December 01, 2009, 10:56:31 AM »
Hi,

I'm a R/C flyer whose I've been intrigued with control line flying lately (last flew C/L back in the early 1980s).  I'm currently working on a small electric R/C conversion (.10 class). I'm already considering future project and among the few NIB kits I have on hand are the Model Tech Mach Racers (both Mini and .40 size versions) Delta Wing.  I'm wondering if these are good candidates for C/L conversion.  I haven't seen much on C/L delta wing airplanes.

Your input is greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Angelo
« Last Edit: December 15, 2009, 01:19:32 PM by Angelo Rosa »

Offline Jim Pollock

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Re: Anyone Fly Delta Wing Control Line?
« Reply #1 on: December 01, 2009, 10:39:17 PM »
Angelo,

Try looking up the plans for the Fierce Arrow.  You won't be disappointed there are two sizes of the airplane about 620 sq in and 485 sq in.

Jim Pollock

Offline Balsa Butcher

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Re: Anyone Fly Delta Wing Control Line?
« Reply #2 on: December 04, 2009, 06:23:14 AM »
Bill Netzband also did a throttle controlled delta called (I think) the Dingus. Was a competitive carrier design in the day. I'm sure there were others but he probably experimented and published more delta designs anyone else.  8)
Pete Cunha
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Offline Dalton Hammett

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Re: Anyone Fly Delta Wing Control Line?
« Reply #3 on: December 04, 2009, 06:55:10 AM »
*******************
Hello Angelo

      I have a large wing I kind of inherited from Phil Spillman when he moved from our area.  I have no idea what it is but I have a .45 on it and that just holds it out there on 60' lines.  I had to add a lot of outboard weight to keep it flying flat also.   It does create some interest when the club flies for the public......    The handsome old guy in the picture is me !!!

Dalton H.
« Last Edit: December 04, 2009, 08:37:48 AM by Dalton Hammett »
Dalton Hammett  
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Offline Angelo Rosa

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Re: Anyone Fly Delta Wing Control Line?
« Reply #4 on: December 04, 2009, 08:22:23 AM »
Hi, Dalton,

Thanks for the info, but where's the photo?  :!

Angelo

Offline Dalton Hammett

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Re: Anyone Fly Delta Wing Control Line?
« Reply #5 on: December 04, 2009, 08:38:22 AM »
There -   Fixed !!!!!!
Dalton Hammett  
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Offline Jim Thomerson

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Re: Anyone Fly Delta Wing Control Line?
« Reply #6 on: December 04, 2009, 04:56:25 PM »
There are Charles Mackey's Monster and Redwing.  Barry Baxter has them under Sport plans.
http://www.controllineplans.com/

Offline Robert McHam

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Re: Anyone Fly Delta Wing Control Line?
« Reply #7 on: December 04, 2009, 07:20:32 PM »
One of my earliest influences was at age 14, first year in high school, back issues of AAM! Not sure which issue but there was on one of the covers a yellow delta with a chimpanzee. Never built one however.

Robert
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Offline Angelo Rosa

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Re: Anyone Fly Delta Wing Control Line?
« Reply #8 on: December 05, 2009, 07:55:08 AM »
Hi, Everyone,


This is what I have in mind.


Offline Tim Wescott

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Re: Anyone Fly Delta Wing Control Line?
« Reply #9 on: December 05, 2009, 11:18:06 AM »
Well, no one has answered your real question, so I will do my best.  Hopefully someone who actually knows the right answers will then jump in and correct me:

It should do.  You won't have a high performance stunt plane on your hands, but it should get around OK.  Your lines will have to come out the leading edge, putting them farther outside the circle than the wingtip and complicating the wing construction, but you knew that.  I'd consider putting a "stinger" on the inside wingtip to carry line guides, with maybe an adjustable leadout -- but that'll look ugly, and be hard to make rigid, light, and aerodynamic.

Good luck with it!
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Offline Neville Legg

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Re: Anyone Fly Delta Wing Control Line?
« Reply #10 on: December 05, 2009, 01:56:01 PM »
If you have access to the Aero Modeller Annual 1953!!! there is a long article on deltas, a number of designs, and a lot of maths and diagrams.

Cheers      Neville
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Offline rustler

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Re: Anyone Fly Delta Wing Control Line?
« Reply #11 on: December 05, 2009, 02:00:26 PM »
Hi, Everyone,


This is what I have in mind.



I suspect the lower the aspect ratio, the more inferior the stunt performance will be. The higher the aspect ratio the better. This boils down to the nearer a conventional flying wing the better!
Ian Russell.
[I can remember the schedule o.k., the problem is remembering what was the last manoeuvre I just flew!].

Offline Angelo Rosa

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Re: Anyone Fly Delta Wing Control Line?
« Reply #12 on: December 05, 2009, 06:42:04 PM »
I thank everyone for their help and guidance.  I'm a huge delta/flying wing fan and was hoping to use what I have on hand.  The delta photos I posted are of a ModelTec Mach Racer .40 R/C ARF that I had purchased sometime ago and was just entertaining the thought. If not a good candidate for a stunter, then purhaps good for as sport C/L  flyer.  Additional information, this will also be an electric conversion, weighing in at about 3.5 lbs powered by a 400 watts power system.

Again thanks and the Happiest of Holidays/Merry Christmas!

Angelo

PS
Maybe I'll try small.  I have an old electricfied Wild Wiz .15............. :!

Offline wwwarbird

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Re: Anyone Fly Delta Wing Control Line?
« Reply #13 on: December 15, 2009, 08:20:48 AM »
 Track down Mike Pratt here on the forum. He's got an LA .46 powered delta version of his "Force" series called "Delta Force" that he's been fiddling with for a while and has it working really well. I think it's something like 900 square inches in wing area. It's a great looking model too. y1
Narrowly averting disaster since 1964! 

Wayne Willey
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Offline Andrew Tinsley

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Re: Anyone Fly Delta Wing Control Line?
« Reply #14 on: December 16, 2009, 07:44:16 AM »
   I played around with true delta control line "stunt" aircraft about 30years ago. It started as a bit of fun, but it got serious very quickly! The upshot of all my creations is, forget it!! There was no way I could get a tight turning aircraft. If you pushed all of my deltas, they just at best "mushed" or worse still, stalled, out of any tight turn. Nothing I tried could get round this behaviour. I think it is just an intrinsic characteristic of the breed.
   Now large rounded stunts looked highly impressive. I think that Russler has it right, low aspect ratio planes, stunt awful! High aspect ratio far better!
Now I wonder how a canard would work? ............No, my build programme is full to overflowing with good flying planes, why waste time and balsa on another wild goose chase.

Andrew.
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Offline Serge_Krauss

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Re: Anyone Fly Delta Wing Control Line?
« Reply #15 on: December 16, 2009, 09:52:33 AM »
   ... The upshot of all my creations is, forget it!! There was no way I could get a tight turning aircraft. If you pushed all of my deltas, they just at best "mushed" or worse still, stalled, out of any tight turn. Nothing I tried could get round this behaviour. I think it is just an intrinsic characteristic of the breed.
Now large rounded stunts looked highly impressive. I think that Russler has it right, low aspect ratio planes, stunt awful! High aspect ratio far better!
Now I wonder how a canard would work?
Andrew.

Andrew-

Some qualifying comments...

I would not expect pure deltas to stunt really well, but did you have the c.g. back at about 45% of the root chord from the leading edge? That would be at about 18% MAC.

A "cropped" delta should work better, and Mike Pratt's apparently does. This gives more "useable" (forward) lifting area - or at least lengthens the "tail" moment by moving the a.c. forward. On tailless designs with t.e. elevators, up-elevator gives a negative camber to the airfoil to pitch the plane, and that resultant a.o.a. is what provides the lift to the compromized wing. It'll mush for sure with too much nose weight to lift, especially with the compromised lift so far back on a pure delta.

Low-A/R stunters  (but how low?) can stunt OK, but flapped ones won't turn as efficiently as those with higher aspect ratios. The high-A/R stunter will be much more affected by wing gusts. It's the typical compromise. I posted (SSWF) a method to reduce this problem. I think that without flaps, you can easily get a relatively low aspect ratio plane to turn quicker than the pilot - especially a flying wing, which may dip before it rises, but will do it too fast for anyone to see it. It's all in the proportions, but the old combat designs turned plenty sharply.

I wrote a large amount on canards a year ago, but it was lost in the crash. Canards have the disadvantage of a far forward neutral point and a wing compromized by the downwash from the canard as well as being restricted to lower than its maximum lift coefficient. For maneuvering, these disadvantages are a net negative for canards. They will never stunt as well as an aft-tailed plane. That's the short version; they just do not have the lift advantages that so many imagine. If you'd like more quantitative information, visit the Stanford Aeronautical site and down load one of their papers, entitled "Design and Analysis of Optimally Loaded Lifting Systems" (by Ilan Kroo), or see last month's EAA Sport Aviation[/i], where there's a very good article on Canards.

SO...Cropped deltas (with enough tip removed) are not bad, but concentrating too much lifting area at the rear, where the elevator works oppositely, is no advantage. There must be some analog here to canards...

SK

Offline minnesotamodeler

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Re: Anyone Fly Delta Wing Control Line?
« Reply #16 on: December 17, 2009, 01:44:36 AM »
How bout this one?  .061 powered "sorta" Fierce Arrow scaledown.
--Ray 
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Offline Andrew Tinsley

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Re: Anyone Fly Delta Wing Control Line?
« Reply #17 on: December 17, 2009, 05:18:33 AM »
Serge,
          To be a little more accurate, my deltas were "real deltas" that is to say an equilateral triangle. The ribs had a constant thickness hence the airfoil percentage thickness got less as you moved from the tips to fuselage, in the first couple of iterations. I don't have the notes I made in those days, but I varied the C.G. from being way forward (Had difficulty in flying much more than gentle climbs and dives) to so far rearwards, that it was almost uncontrollable.
  Provided that the C.G. was not ridiculous, then the stunting was smooth with relatively large radius manouvers. Any attempt to go tighter in loops or to go square would precipitate a mush or stall. I was using a 4-2-4 engine run and when I upped the engine size, things got interesting. Full up would stall the plane, with nose going more or less vertical. The engine would pick up and simply haul the plane upwards. Not really the best way to go square. As the plane rotated, it appeared to stop dead (probably did!) as if it had hit a brick wall (aerodynamic braking!). It was a party trick until the last attempt.....The plane just disintegrated!
  Later builds, were smaller, I varied the wing thickness, considerably, but they all flew exactly the same. Large radius loops...fine, anything tight....disaster. The Mk1 and 2 were big, and they were very impressive on 70' lines, but not real stunters.
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Offline Serge_Krauss

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Re: Anyone Fly Delta Wing Control Line?
« Reply #18 on: December 17, 2009, 08:08:26 AM »
Andrew-

It sounds as though you were quite thorough, and your observations are well presented! Apparently c.g. was not the problem.

So here's something I didn't mention in my distracted state (hadn't solved the editing problem here - now OK).

Deltas also have exaggerated spanwise flow that encourages tip stall and other wierd stuff - at least on larger, faster planes. It probably disrupts lift. The first practical deltas encountered a related phenomenon that Alexander Lippisch had found with his DM-1 glider and explained (hypothesized about) during WW II. They couldn't get reasonable performance until they sharpened the leading edge toward the center, ultimately adding strakes. Here, vorticity was something they actually sought to generate along the leading edges, and this was for subsonic flight. I've noticed numerous research papers (AIAA, NACA/NASA...) directed at this topic, even during the last 20 years. Anyway, looking at the old NACA report graphs I posted, (viewed by perhaps 5-7 other people) and reading some of Igor Burger's posts on model stabilizer sections, I wonder whether thin sections with sharp leading edges might work for pure deltas at our Reynolds Numbers. I don't know whether anyone has done this recently, but I do remember at least one model published around the 1950's or 1960's that had thin delta wings and "conical camber", something that wouldn't seem useful for stunt, but was employed on full sized planes (F-102?).

Regardless of all this, I still agree that the pure delta probably can't compete here with more conventional or less extreme configurations. Still, I hope there was some fun in experimenting to discover these things about your models. It sounds as though you did it right. I don't know whether Mike Pratt monitors this forum, but he seems to have done quite well with his cropped delta, more like a highly tapered, lower-A/R tailless plane. Since he's known for his practical testing and reconfiguring, it would be interesting to hear what things he tried and changed in arriving at his final configuration. I wonder how far afield he wandered in this development. Mike, 'you out there? I'll look around and see whether I can dig up a photo.

Edit:

I don't know about the ethics of this, but below is a photo of Mike and his "Delta Force" posted by Dennis Vander Kuur on SSW forum last January. You can see this, other pictures, and hear what Mike has to say with this link:

http://www.clstunt.com/htdocs/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=103&topic_id=322890&mesg_id=322890&listing_type=search

As usual, a search on SSW can provide excellent information on most CL topics from its huge archive.

SK
« Last Edit: December 17, 2009, 08:33:39 AM by Serge_Krauss »

Offline minnesotamodeler

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Re: Anyone Fly Delta Wing Control Line?
« Reply #19 on: December 17, 2009, 11:07:45 AM »
OK here's a more-nearly true delta, 1/2A slab wing.  Excellent trainer, very stable; will do nice round maneuvers if handled gently.
--Ray 
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Offline Tim Wescott

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Re: Anyone Fly Delta Wing Control Line?
« Reply #20 on: December 17, 2009, 11:52:08 AM »
Now I wonder how a canard would work? ............No, my build programme is full to overflowing with good flying planes, why waste time and balsa on another wild goose chase.

Andrew.

Funny you should mention "wild goose chase" -- Dick Sarpoulis published a canard stunter in Flying Models magazine (late '70s, early '80s) called the 'Wild Goose'.  It looked good, he reported it as being fun to fly, but that it didn't seem to have the performance potential of a conventional layout.  (and the elevator was out on booms that bracketed the prop, which looked like it'd make hand-starting a pain in the patootie).

But it might be a fun sport plane, if you have an engine to spare.
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Offline Andrew Tinsley

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Re: Anyone Fly Delta Wing Control Line?
« Reply #21 on: December 18, 2009, 02:05:09 PM »
Serge,
          I think you have second sight. A few years after I gave up on control line deltas, I read an article on using wing strakes on full size designs. I wondered if I may have been having some weird airflow that was not chordwise, maybe even some tip stalling. However my limited grasp of aerodynamics led to brain paralysis. I also didn't want to waste any more time on true deltas, I had this gut feeling that I wasn't going to revolutionise stunt!
  As to "Delta Force", I would class this as a flying wing and would expect it to be very much more agile than my deltas. I think that one has only to look at the history of combat wings to know that Delta Force would be good!

Regards,

Andrew.
 
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Offline john e. holliday

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Re: Anyone Fly Delta Wing Control Line?
« Reply #22 on: December 18, 2009, 07:01:30 PM »
Funny you should mention "wild goose chase" -- Dick Sarpoulis published a canard stunter in Flying Models magazine (late '70s, early '80s) called the 'Wild Goose'.  It looked good, he reported it as being fun to fly, but that it didn't seem to have the performance potential of a conventional layout.  (and the elevator was out on booms that bracketed the prop, which looked like it'd make hand-starting a pain in the patootie).

But it might be a fun sport plane, if you have an engine to spare.
 

I have my version of the Wild Goose.  I call mine the Blue Goose because it is blue.  First flights were scary and a hand full.  I have cut into the leading edge so I could move the leadouts further forward.  Also cut the movement down on the rear movable surface.  Put lead on the outboard boom under the canard.  I have witnesses that have seen it do a pattern as well as I can do them, but the air has to be fairly calm.  Flying it, it looks strange to me(the pilot) with the rudder and short fuse.  Took a little getting use to the looks.   I have a OS LA 40 on mine. 
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Offline minnesotamodeler

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Re: Anyone Fly Delta Wing Control Line?
« Reply #23 on: December 18, 2009, 07:51:46 PM »
In looking over the Fierce Arrows, I think they are a scaled up Half Fast series plane. I guess that is the closest I have come to flying a delta type plane. D>K

They also fly about like the old Half Fast.  Sure can make 'em stagger.
--Ray 
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Offline john e. holliday

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Re: Anyone Fly Delta Wing Control Line?
« Reply #24 on: December 19, 2009, 08:33:17 AM »
Come on now Ray,  the ones I have seen fly make me want to build one.  I have seen several at VSC and Jim Piscetto a local flyer has one.  It is all in how you trim them.  Mike McAdams used to do the stunt pattern with a VooDoo and score better than most of the local guys.  It is the judges had to think quick about score for the VooDoo.
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Offline minnesotamodeler

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Re: Anyone Fly Delta Wing Control Line?
« Reply #25 on: December 19, 2009, 12:19:48 PM »
Everyone's entitled to their opinion, John, but the Voodoo is not the Half Fast!  The more modern stabilator-type planes fly circles around the older flying wing types like Half Fast, Wow, T Square, etc. They represented a quantum leap in combat design and performance.

Sure the flying wings (deltas, etc.) can be trimmed to not stagger in maneuvers, but only by sacrificing square corners and tight turns. My 1/2A (3/4A, .061) Fierce Arrow type flies fine as long as you don't push it, and keep things big and smooth.  To avoid stalling in turns, it either has to be trimmed noseheavy or employ very limited control surface movement.  Either approach makes tight turning and square corners sort of impossible. I enjoy flying it and am glad I built it, but recognize its limitations. It ain't a great stunt ship and can never be.

Now, move the tail off the TE of the wing, whether it be with booms and stabilator, or fuselage and stab/elevator, and you have a different creature.  Now you can trim for those sqaure corners/tight loops, whether it be fast (combat) or slow (stunt), without the "staggers".  That's what they did with the Voodoo type planes, and it made a major difference in how you trimmed and the performance you could expect. A HalfFast couldn't compete with a Voodoo, whether in the combat circle or fast-stunt either one.

Flying wings are fun, simple in design and build, have a distinctive look, make good sport planes, trainers, etc.; just have limitations inherent in the design when it comes to severe maneuvering like the Pattern requires.

That's my opinion and I'm stuck with it--I mean sticking with it, or something...
--Ray 
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