Over at RCUniverse, Greg Covey has written a two-part story/tutotial on how he turned a Multiplex Magister foam trainer into a working homage to the Bell/Agusta BA609 Tiltrotor VTOL aircraft.
The tail thruster looks a little funky to me (it doesn't reverse, so the plane always flys a bit tail-heavy with that thruster compensating) but otherwise it's a very impressive first pass at a fucntioning VTOL. It's not clear to me why the tail rotor is needed at all (it isn't in the full-size plane), but perhaps this will be explained in part two of the series, coming soon.
[Thanks to Craig Horner for the link]
The V-22 can also mix the cyclic & nacelle angles to control pitch
attitude. Dual cyclics in a model would be pretty heavy & expensive. The
real answer is probably a combination of cyclic, nacelle angle, & fuel.
So it basically compensates for not having changeable pitch rotors like a heli, I guess. It still feels like there should be a better way---putting the battery on a sliding tray to change the CG would at least emulate the real one.
The models need a tail rotor for pitch control. The full size ones control pitch by shifting fuel around. Interestingly, the V-22's method of pitch attitude control is not mentioned on any Google search.
Comments
attitude. Dual cyclics in a model would be pretty heavy & expensive. The
real answer is probably a combination of cyclic, nacelle angle, & fuel.