Peter Jenkins

I know that if you fly for hire and reward in a light aircraft that you need the aircraft to be on a Public Transport C of A and the pilot needs to hold a commercial licence. The tragic death of that footballer who trusted his life to a cowboy who flew him from the UK to France and then ended up losing control of the aircraft as he wasn't a rated instrument pilot was a classic case in point. To fly for hire and reward with a model aircraft also requires the right insurance not your ordinary insurance. The Policeman should have checked that and he'd no doubt have found that was not the case. The guy had said he earned his living from posting videos on the internet. He should have been prosecuted in my opinion.

As S of S Defence, Shapps will have a keen eye on what the CAA is proposing as the MoD has spent years discussing flying UAS outside their ranges. As we have all seen, the use of drones in the Ukraine war by regular military has gone up exponentially. Being able to conduct military training outside ranges may be a wish for some in the military. Hence, my view that Shapps will remain engaged - albeit from a different viewpoint and without being completely in charge.

My comment was to contrast the FAA and CAA. I was told I was wrong. I merely answered his question using his words Ron.

The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) is the British aviation authority. The Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) is the USA's aviation authority. The link you posted is clearly marked FAA. So yes, you completely misunderstood the results of the 737 Max enquiry. That related to the FAA and not the CAA.

Who cares how they do it in the USA. The CAA certainly wouldn't have outsourced the clearance of the 737 Max to the manufacturer. Our whole political set up is completely different. In the USA, the people distrust their government and while you could make a case for us Brits distrusting our government, on the whole we do place our trust in our elected government. If we lose trust we vote in another lot - it's not thst simple in the USA. In the US system you have power split between the President, Congress and the Supreme Court. Politics is driven far more by money in the US than here. I think your mindset is more what I found in the USA than I find here. Still, each to their own.

Last flights tend to be when rules get broken! I remember a last flight when I was at RAF Brawdy and the pilot doing the weather check returned and "wired up the joint"! It certainly got my attention as I was just finishing breakfast in the Mess before heading down to the flight line! Can't remember what happened to the pilot but I think it was his last operational day anyway! The aircraft was a Hunter either a Mk 9 or Mk 6A and those could go pretty fast at sea level if you wound them up! Not as fast as a Frightening though!

I don't know if the spelling of sure was deliberate so as to fit in with how today's kid's spell!

Good point, well presented! They will probably just press delete instead.

Apparently, most BMFA Members throw their copy knto the bin unopened according to many comments on here.

A recent buyer of my book, also a forumite, has agreed to let me post his comment on my book verbatim. I hope you find it interesting. Comment I have been slowly digesting your book, not been putting anything into practise as have not had a chance to fly, I have checked out my Wot4 to ensure it’s ready to go mind so will using that for now. I really like the easy way you have written it, for beginners but easy to get on with, having spent so many years with gliders I have got into a rut a little and although I thought I knew how to trim models this has reminded me of things I have not done for years but what is more a better understanding as to why, strange I know but I believe those who taught me back then were very good at explaining to me at the time but I more or less did it parrot fashion without really thinking about it but just recognising some traits. I am really enjoying it, just feel I must have become complacent over the years and with lack of time some models fell by the wayside before I had a chance to get to their full potential as they were not as good as I hoped. I feel I hadn't made the best use of my time unfortunately, due to more snatching a flight here and there and getting easily lead astray with new toys! That stops now and the New Year’s resolution is to make the most of what I have got and (one for the wife) sell on those I don’t used before getting another. Your book has done so much more for me! 😂 focus being one important thing. Thank you for that.

You can make some adjustments when the aircraft is static but the only definitive way to check this is during flight testing and then finalusing any further adjustments.

I did actually have a client tell me what the desired outcome was as part of our initial interview! That was in the public sector but I'd heard the same thing from a colleague working in the private sector. Of course, it isn't always like that in consultancy as often the client doesn't have the time or resources to investigate an issue and calls in consultants to carry out the investigatory work and presents options. At the end of the day, it's the client who decides what to do with the consultants recommendations.

Sam, I've sent you a PM.

If you aim to fly precision aerobatics then you should understand that setting downthrust to exactly 1.5 deg is not the end of the story. You then need to fly the aircraft to make sure that the downthrust is correct for your aircraft. The chances are it won't be. However, before you get there it is more important to set up the CG to its optimum position. Any other trim adjustments then follow. If you change the CG after you have made the other trim changes they will all then need to be re-done. CG position is the single most powerful trimmimg tool at our disposal.

On the contrary, someone has already told you how to do this. So, can I ask if you own and know how to use a protractor? As has already been said, you can draw lines on the plan but if you don't have a plan then you can draw lines on a piece of paper. Mark a point along the line that represents the front of the fire wall and, using the protractor, measure a point that is 1.5 deg down from the datum line and one at 90 deg to that new point. Draw lines to connect your new 90 deg point passing through the origin and then measure, at bolt height, the distance between the fire wall and the new 90 deg line. That will give you the amount you need to pack up the top bolts to achieve your 1.5 deg downthrust. Of course, your firewall might be mounted at a different angle than at 90 deg to the aircraft's datum line. To find out what it is mounted at you will need to draw a datum line on your model. Set your datum line along the length of the fuselage aligned with the tail plane. Most, but not all, tail planes tend to be mounted at 0 deg to datum. Now measure from the top and bottom of the firewall and transfer these positions to the side of the fuselage and draw a line through them crossing your horizontal datum line. Now use your protractor to measure the angle between these two lines. The could be 90 deg in which case you have now established that there is no up/down thrust. In your case, it may well have some up thrust built in. So measure the distance between your the line at 90 deg to the datum line and the fire wall line. This amount of built in up thrust needs to be added to your downthrust figure on your piece of paper and gives the total packing needed between the motor mount and the firewall. That's how it's done when the model has been built. Alternatively, you can just keep packing the top motor mounting bolts until when you apply power the aircraft does not change its flying attitude. If you have to get the motor shaft exiting from the nose at a set point in the cowling then simply use the paper drawing you have to mark the position of the cowling hole. Then adjust the vertical position of the motor until the line representing the major axis of the motor crosses the position of the centre of the cowling hole. Move the engine mounting bolt holes to this new position and, hey presto, the motor shaft will exit the cowling in the right position.

The reason that many full size aircraft do not have any up or side thrust to the engine is because there is a pilot sitting in them with a set of instruments that tells them if the aircraft is slipping, skidding, climbing or diving. All aircraft have an elevator trimmer that is used regularly during different phases of flight e.g. take off, climb, cruise etc. All aircraft will have small trim tabs on the rudder and aileron and these are set so that at cruising speed the aircraft flies with wings level and without any need for rudder. The rudder is used most of the time when not in cruise to balance the aircraft. The fixed tabs are set by the flight test guys at the manufacturer or your licensed engineer who can adjust them to sort out these issues. Larger aircraft, especially multi engined ones, also have aileron and rudder trimmers to easy crew work load. As soon as you apply or reduce power in a full size aircraft you will see the nose rise/fall and swing from side to side. As we don't sit in our aircraft we don't generally see these changes in attitude immediately but it soon becomes apparent that your aircraft is climbing or diving with the application of power. When I watch the average club pilot flying, they rarely fly straight and level for very long and often say they have trimmed out their aircraft. On many occasions when I am asked to fly an aircraft it is rare to find that it is trimmed to fly straight and level hands off. I did that recently to a club members model and found that even then he was constantly moving the stick (mode 2 so RH stick) even when he didn't need to. I told him to get it flying S&L and let go of the stick. It flew in a straighter line than he had ever managed while I had been watching. He was just so used to constantly having to correct for an out of trim model it had become standard flying practice. He also was not used to flying the aircraft in a straight line. Take off was invariably curved and the climb out always curved despite there being no reason for either of these issues. Trying to get him to fly a rectangular circuit was very difficult as he tended to fly in a meandering flight path and seemed oblivious to this. Getting the aircraft's motor thrust line set up so that even quite large power changes do not have an immediate effect of aircraft attitude is well worth doing. It's not a case of just building in the stated down and side thrust but also flying the model and observing what the application and removal of power does and then fine tuning the engine mounting so that you get to the position that all specialist aerobatic aircraft end up in. Why bother? It makes the aircraft much easier to fly so that you can consider other things such as what you want to fly instead of spending all your time just flying your aircraft. It really is worth the bother. I let the club mate I am referring to fly my 2 m F3A aircraft and it was if he was flying on rails - once I'd told him he didn't need to move the stick constantly. Aircraft don't fly accurately straight out of the box without being set up and trimmed even 2 m F3A airframes!

In my experience, it usually means one of two things: 1. No independent reviewer. You know what you meant when you wrote it but will another reader think it's either ambiguous or confusing? 2. A last minute change, usually via cut and paste, that goes wrong because even the person who made the change didn't read the whole paragraph at the end of the change.

I bet no one got an independent reviewer to read the questionaire before publishing it. Are you volnteering Ron?😁

Hi Adrian Thanks for setting out your motor, wing and tail plane settings plus the fact that you need a lot of up elevator trim for level flight. Clearly, for a symmetrical wing section to produce lift it must be at a positive angle of attack. In such a case, the wing produces both a lift force and a moment that tends to pitch the wing up and so we use the tail plane to provide a counter force to this - a down force. With your setup, the wing is at 0 deg so will need to be raised to a positive AoA to generate lift. The tail plane is set at +1 deg so, in relation to the wing, with air flowing over both, and controls at neutral, the TP will produce an upward force tending to push the wing incidence to a negative figure. To counter this, you have had to use "a fair bit of up elevator trim" in order to generate a down force from the whole tail plane. That down force is set for your selected level flight speed to pitch the wing to the incidence that at that airspeed generates sufficient lift to balance the entire weight of the aircraft, and the additional lift needed to counter the down force generated by the TP, in order to maintain level flight. The motor being at 0 Deg will now provide a small element to add to the lift force arrived at by multiplying the thrust force at 0 deg by the sine of the angle of incidence of the wing at level steady flight multiplied by the motor's thrust force. So, at steady level flight at your datum speed, lift force is generated by the wing, a small amount from the motor and a decrement from the tail plane with the resultant net lift force matching the aircraft's weight force. Ordinarily, I would expect to see the wing at a small positive AoA, somewhere between 0.7 and 1.0 deg with the TP at 0 deg. Your starting position is why you have to have so much up elevator trim. If you could increase the wing incidence so that it was in that range rather than at 0 deg, and reduce the TP incidence to 0 deg then you might find that amount of up elevator trim will be different according to: 1) is greatly reduced; 2) requires some down trim or 3) is zero. You can then adjust the TP incidence so that you no longer need any elevator trim to adjust the TP force to be the required value at that speed and weight of the aircraft. On my current F3A machine, I only have wing incidence adjusters so I have to have some elevator trim for my chosen level flight speed. In my case, my motor thrust line is -1 deg (I have a contra fitted), wing initially at 0.7 Deg to eventually 1.25 deg and TP at 0 deg but with some up elevator trim (can't remember how much this is physically since I "zeroed" the servo position by adjusting the threaded clevis. The reason for the increase in wing incidence from the starting value of 0.7 deg was to cater for the requirement to fly a vertical upline hands off to address a pitch to the canopy with the original setup. The pitch to the canopy in vertical flight i.e. no wing lift, meant that there was too much down force from the TP in that state. Counter intuitively, increasing the wing incidence steadily from 0.7 deg to 1.25 deg meant that I needed the fuselage tail to be raised a little bit to reduce the wing incidence back to that required for S&L flight at my datum speed and therefore the TP down force to be reduced a little bit. I continued to increase wing incidence until the required down force needed from the TP was sufficiently reduced to achieve S&L flight on the vertical upline such that the remaining TP down force did not cause a pitch to the canopy on a vertical upline. The slight down thrust from the motor also contributes to this summation of forces and moments. Conversely, a pitch to the undercarriage on the vertical upline would have required an increase in the TP trim force to counter that and that would have required a reduction in the main wing incidence. It all sounds a bit counter intuitive but if you sit down with a piece of paper and draw some force arrows it will become a bit easier to follow. Hope that helps. Lastly, I would not describe the aircraft as being unstable enough for aerobatic flight but rather its stability margin (which is what it's called) is reduced thus enabling aerobatics more easily while the aircraft is still in the stable regime i.e. the CG is still in front of the neutral point. In the full size world, this would equate to stick force per "g" being pulled. In an airliner you might want something like a 50 lb pull force per "g" whereas in an aerobatic aircraft like an Edge that might be around 10 lb per "g" or less - e.g for a 6 g pull the pilot would need to exert a pull force of 60 lb so you might actually want less stick force per "g", say 5 lb in such cases. You could certainly fly the same manoeuvres with a higher stick force per "g" but it would become tiring and require a good deal of strength. For models, this equates to the servo torque that we have available and why we specify such higher torque servos for aerobatics as we want the surfaces to move fast on some manoeuvres e.g. snap rolls. That is also why we move the CG to a more aft position while still retaining positive stability and possibly neutral stability. I have to say, I don't like flying aircraft with neutral stability! Conversely, a CG too far forward makes the aircraft "heavier" to fly as I recounted with stick force per "g" above. Of course, in today's full size world, you can make an unstable aircraft feel stable by using flight control computers that alter the feel of the aircraft as its speed varies. Gyros do the same for us but watch out if the gyro fails with an unstable aircraft!

Yep, same as the Apres Ski stuff. Wait for the end of Feb and go to a ski wear shop and you'll find them flogging them off even cheaper! Good time to get ski jackets and salopettes. But my Dickies onsie does for me!

Look like Apres ski boots!

I use a pair of Zippo hand warmers. If you fill them up completely, they are good for 12 hours. I usually just half fill them and get just over 6 hours out of them. One of each hand in a trouser pocket. I highly recommend them. You do need to replace the catalytic burner from time to time and also buy some Zippo lighter fuel. Worth firing them up 30 mins before you leave the house to get them nice and warm.

I seem to remember you are East Anglia based. So am I. I managed to make the trip to the AGM as a day trip. I would also observe that only a few clubs in East Anglia sent reps to the Esst Anglia Area meetings that were held in the Bury St Edmunds area. The latest East Anglia Area AGM was on Zoom but only a few clubs attended. The Area meetings are open to all club members to attend but there will only be one vote per club. I only ever have seen one or two club members attend in the 6 years I used to be involved. I suspect your wish for one member one vote would be met with the same sort of response as we see from clubs. So I suspect it will be the same people who will step forward to do the hard graft and there will be no difference in outcomes. Just look at what happens in Clubs.

My goodness, has it taken you all this time to realise that? Why do you think there is a specific comment in Article 16 that states that a single rotor machine can be flown above 400 ft provided its AUW does not exceed 7.5 kg but if you have more than 1 rotor you are limited to 400 ft?

Well Matty, looks like the BMFA are ahead of the game and that your pearls of wisdom aren't quite as shiny as you thought. Surprising really!