Firecracker (oz5392)

About this Plan

Firecracker. Free flight gas pylon model. Hi Steve - Here is Bill Winter's Firecracker from Model Airplane News magazine issue 10-49.

Quote: "The Firecracker, by Bill Winter.

For 'half class A' with the OK Cub furnishing power, the Firecracker is the result of several weeks' intensive building and experimenting with these interesting baby-enginal jobs. Principal objectives were good flight time, ease of adjusting, freedom from warps, and maximum strength without a weight penalty, and a high order of stability. This, truthfully, is largely a matter of mixing known facts with one's flying experience. The notion that anyone can produce a world beating airplane is archaic, plane reputations frequently being made by the designer's skill in flying them in contests. The most one can hope for is an easy to fly, viceless, high performance machine.

How well does the Firecracker meet these requirements? After many test flights in the still air of evening it became apparent that the Firecracker will do from 2:30 up, on 20 seconds engine run, with the OK Cub - subject to props, fuels, and similar factors. A great many flights ended somewhere between 2:30 and 3:45. Most effective flights that were not influenced by conditions, were a 55-second hop on a five-second motor run, and 4:15 (when it hit wires) on 25 seconds. A few flight did last longer but it was assumed that risers had been encountered. While these are not spectacular times, they are still-air times taken late in the evening, and are a yardstick of an airplane's worth. It will occur to fans of the racing-engined .60 classification that a Cub job must get exceedingly high, in little time, and then glide like blue blazes to rack up comparable durations. That the Firecracker is such a hot airplane - end it increases by a substantial margin any duration the writer has had out of his bigger airplanes - is mostly due to the extraordinary pep of its power plant. Of course, a few other considerations also have their affect.

The Firecracker was developed simultaneously with another pylon ship of about the same size (for foreign, consumption), Baby Spitfire-powered, which provided an excellent opportunity for comparing the effects of pylon height on turn, duration, and adjusting. The other pylon differed from the Firecracker in that the pylon itself was 3/4 inch lower, Vee-dihedral was used, and the fuselage was streamlined by the use of a circular cross section. A two-wheel gear was flitted, whereas the Firecracker has but one wheel..."

Direct submission to Outerzone.

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