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G"day All,Can anyone point me to the comparative accident statistics A) For Gyros vs other types of light/ultralight aircraftB) For RAF2000 vs other types of gyros...Many thanks in advance.GG
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Hi GeoffBefore we answer your question, can you explain why you ask?SamL......
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Sure, no worries.The Royal Aerosports Club of Jordan (www.royalaeroclub.com) has an RAF 2000 in the Hangar. It had a rotor strike (someone put it through a windsock pole, I think- I don"t think it tipped over), and has been under tarpaulins since about 2005. I"ve been lobbying to get it repaired; Last week, I thought I"d won through
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Geoff,Any aircraft can be flown safely within its flight envelope. What I see in the statistics is that RAFs figure pretty highly in them, but this could be for the mere fact of them being "popular".This quote [I"ve been lobbying to get it repaired; Last week, I thought I"d won through] disturbs me - you"re not out to win anything here, you"re here to have fun.. if you have a "win" mindset that implies to me some militaristic thinking - please go to the AOPA web site - www.aopa.com [or .org?] and review their articles on decision making. Gyro"s are made for fun, not pain or death, sadly they sometimes go the other way.You say this machine has suffered a rotor strike via a pole. Bearing in mind that a rotor stores about 8 MegaJoules of energy and it has to go somewhere - usually very quickly - you should ask yourself "where" it went. If the rotor stops within a second the instantaneous power input to the rotor, pole and airframe is around 11,000 HP - any motor that big is seriously scarey and in my book is called a "mangle-ator". That is for a rotor doing flight RPM, maybe this one wasn"t, but you don"t know that - or do you?Getting it flying again will require the most rigourous inspection of the machine to reveal all and any faults generated by this potential power input, the face value of the machine, even if it looks OK is zero.. I suggest pulling it down to look for elongated bolt holes, cracks, displaced mast and keel plates, damaged bearings, rudder cables, bent control rods and clevis joints, etc, etc. Do a thorough forensic examination, please, I don"t want to read about you. Please examine my thread "what not to do" on this site for a few pointers on what to look for.As to the stability of these aircraft you will see that they seem to be a target for stability modifications - now why is that so? In my reckoning the cabin on these things is like a caboose on a train, only the RAF is flying **** first. If you have a look at the RAF-TORR, a RAF pod on a Torr airframe you might be getting near the thrust line Centre of Mass geometry required as far as mass is concerned.. but that is a static stability thing.. the aerodynamics are a whole different story.... the back end of the cabin looks like the back of a bus, then you chuck a big lump of a motor behind that and then put a radiator behind that again.. then an incredibly effective air beater [prop] behind that again, it all adds up to the centre of drag being offset from the prop thrust line and horribly turbulent air reaching the rudder and elevator = overturning pitching moment and overturning rolling moment on the airframe all the time, not a happy recipe given that these moments have to be corrected by an incredibly short coupled "wing" and rudder/elevator combination - like the RANS aircraft which prove a little too twitchy for some to fly. I think if I were to fly one I"d being fitting it with a stabiliser and elevator with near 1.5 times the frontal area forward of the mast in plan and elevation, then I might feel kind of safe [This applies to almost any gyro I"d jump in]. Check the Area x Distance from COM moment about the centre of gravity, you"ll probably be disturbed by the result, and "stacked" surfaces do not count for 5hit, this is for both plan views and side elevations of the craft.I"d move the radiator above the motor to do two things, the first being to move the radiator drag up above the thrust line to compensate for the usually high thrust to drag line offset on these machines, the second being to make the motor the thing that is always immersed in coolant, rather than the radiator - a radiator will condense steam, but a motor sure as hell won"t - they"re really good at making it, and you are flying in the desert. It also saves the radiator from some of the sand blasting that it might cop in the desert. You might notice that the Rotax two banger engines usually have their radiators mounted above the motor, not below - why so? Another thing to do is have a high /
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