Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Three issues with pusher-prop "tail-less" designs:

1) While they are more stable in nominal flight regimes, they are far harder to recover to stable flight from perturbations. It turns out, it's (overall) much safer to have a plane that will BOTH stall easier (more predictably) and recover easier than one that is less likely to stall in the first place, but difficult to recover from. One analogy I often use is the difference between a mid-engine car and a front-engine layout. While the mid-engine car has a greater overall theoretical "handling" performance ceiling, a front-engine car behaves more predictably (less twitchy) at the limits.

2) They are more susceptible to CG/balance issues so they have less practical cargo capacity because just a weee bit of pitch/yaw/roll trim results in a drastic drop-off in the aforementioned stellar lift efficiency.

3) They have much longer take-off and landing runway requirements due to less ground-effect and much less overall wing efficiency at near-stall speeds.



Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: