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X-Plane Design Contest for Popular Mechanics

by Mr. Flight on February 13th, 2006

This email came in from Austin, the author of X-Plane. I thought I would pass it along here for any X-Plane Plane builders that might not subscribe to xplane-news. I’d love to enter something myself but I doubt I will have enough free time before the Feb 28 deadline.

Popular Mechanics is getting ready to do a COVER STORY on where aviation will be in 20 years for 2-person personal-flyers. One way to predict this future? Let X-Plane tell you! The angle the story will take is this: Austin and his band of customers can use X-Plane to predict where aviation will be in 20 years by entering futuristic designs and seeing how they fly. By simulating what we can’t build yet. By planning what is soon to be built!

The plan here is to see the first-generation of nearly automatic planes with “highway-in-the-sky” systems, where you really only need a throttle and stick and maybe flaps and a simple interface to enter your destination and you can easily fly the plane through hoops to get where you are going in any weather. Artificial stability systems are allowed and encouraged. Morphing wings, including variable sweep, variable-dihedral, variable-incidence, and wing-retraction (a new feature in the Plane-Maker airfoils screen) are all allowed and encouraged.

So, here is the contest: Design an airplane in X-Plane 8.32 or later to meet the requirements below, and whoever has the best plane according to our scoring system wins. We may also award for fastest plane, best-flying plane, most practical plane, and weirdest plane design. Be sure to TEXTURE these planes as well… no gray whales for Popular Mechanics! If you win in any category, your plane may be featured in the cover story, and YOU may be featured as well!

So get to work! Design the coolest, fastest, longest-range, best-handling 2-place personal-flyer you can, and email the aircraft pack to me (zip-file to austin@x-plane.com with a note on the power-setting and altitude you want me to fly it at) BY FEBRUARY 28 for judging. Feel free to do your submission earlier and I will give you feedback (IF I have time!) so you can improve your design and re-submit before the deadline.

OK, here are the specs:

The plane must have room for 2 people. The empty weight must be 750 pounds. The fuel must be 150 pounds. The gross weight must be 1300 pounds. This leaves 400 pounds for payload.

The plane may have: a single turboprop engine of 125 hp with an SFC of 0.45 (Specific Fuel Consumption) or a single jet engine with 450 lb of thrust and an SFC of 0.45.

The plane should have a parachute.

The plane must be able to get airborne at max weight in 500 feet. The plane may NOT fly above 24,000 feet to achieve it’s score.. we DON’T want these things smacking Airbus A-380’s with 900 mph closure speed!

The fuselage should have a Cd of 0.04 if it is aerodynamic and teardrop-shaped, higher otherwise. You must use default, un-modified airfoils that come with X-Plane.

… AND you must also use whatever the default flap coefficients are for whatever flap-type you specify.

no JATOS or puffers or additional rockets allowed of course.

the plane must also fit inside a 25′ x 25′ x 10′ hangar.

The score will be as follows:

When flying at MAX weight (1,300 pounds), and taking off in 500 feet or less, and climbing to 24,000 feet or less, the score is the CRUISE SPEED IN MILES PER HOUR TIMES THE RANGE of the plane in statue miles, where you specify what altitude and cruise power setting to use when you submit the plane, so that I fly the plane the way you want me to so I can fly your best-possible score.

I have already done a few preliminary designs, and have achieved scores of about 280,000. Can you do better?

GET TO WORK IN PLANE-MAKER AND MAKE YOUR IDEAL PLANE OF THE FUTURE AND EMAIL IT TO ME! YOUR DESIGN COULD MAKE THE COVER OF POPULAR MECHANICS IF YOURS IS THE BEST!

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