Phantom (oz15010)

About this Plan

Phantom. Free flight power model.

Direct submission to Outerzone.

Update 26/12/2023: Added article, thanks to RFJ.

Quote: "Capt Jay reveals all in how he came to design this exciting high performance free flight contest machine. Combining the best of the best he manages to achieve his design goal, free flight that can win consistently in or on the smaller flying fields.

It seems like the hardest part of this is to sit down and write it. First, as most of you can readily observe, this ship is not a true original - I don't think I've seen more than 3 or 4 really original FF's in the past umpteen years! The Phantom is an updated and much modified version of Al Velars MexiBoy. Hi there Al! How you doin fella? I informed Ol' Al of what I was doing and he gave his blessings - well, at least he said he wouldn't sue for plagiarizing. Matter of fact a precedent was set a few years ago in what was then American Modeler magazine. Remember the Ephemeris, the Hi-thrust version of Carl Goldberg's sailplane?

As a family man I unfortunately don't have the time necessary to indulge in original design work; however, the better half thinks I have too much time as it is.

In the spring of 1966 I had a yen to build a 'man sized aircraft' and get out of the 1/2A rut. After leafing through mucho mags I finally decided on the 978 sq in Mexi-machine. I built it light, and flew it in B with A ST 29RV and in C with the 35RV. We had nothing but fun and success with it. In May of 1967 a fuse failure let it go OOS with a new ST 29 on board (sob!) never to be seen again.

Now as most of us know, in the East flying areas are not from horizon to horizon; so in Florida we flew 3 minutes with 12 and 15 sec runs. Other areas flew 10 and 12 sec runs! The design trend logically grew toward the smaller faster climbing machines.

We therefore decided to adapt the basic Mexi to a smaller, faster ship to stay competitive. The result is what you see here, a hot climbing machine with the same floating majestic glide as its well known ancestor. Briefly the major differences are: Wing: smaller area (850 sq in), under cambered section (C610B), quasi-elliptical planform, larger rib spacing, greater tip dihedral..."

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Article.

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