The guy's putting out a lot of videos. The latest today shows a groundspeed at rotation of about 10-11 knots faster than indicated air speed. Takes him 22 long seconds to get to 75 knots ground speed.

Another major problem he has ignored is his pitot tube placement. 22 seconds is stupid, I think a loaded 747 accelerates harder than that.

The acceleration seemed pretty slow.

I think he needs to stop focusing on videos and work on the plane. His videos are pretty bland with no real content. I think he must feel pressure from his investors to show what he is doing.

I was watching the latest video from Mike Patey and after it was done YouTube auto played the latest Raptor video. Two totally different worlds. Haha. The Raptor video was so boring and painful.

Mike P has built two amazing custom aircrafts in the time that Peter has built his. I guess my point is Mike P is a monster and man he does stuff right. Haha


Mike

Based on today's video, getting the front wheel off and maybe the right side, he's going to have this thing in the air. I would want a much longer runway to do any ground effect flying. I think this may end before the test pilots get back to check it out.

What's wrong with where the pitot tube is?

he does appear to have a bit of a howard hughes complex going on there, doesn't he ? of course hughes had 1000 engineers working on his projects

Another major problem he has ignored is his pitot tube placement. 22 seconds is stupid, I think a loaded 747 accelerates harder than that.

Unless he takes this thing to a dry-lake to get it in ground effect, the story will end badly.
Once you run out of runway... now what? Nothing else has been proven.
So many goofy things on that craft...
Everything should have been removed, and only added back in once the airframe was proven air-worthy.

Let's say for a minute that this Raptor prototype flies successfully.

Is there any realistic way to get a production version down to a reasonable empty weight?

What's wrong with where the pitot tube is?

Start over.

Tim

Distance from the end of the runway to the windsock is 2500ft. This thing is going to need a 10000ft runway for testing

That airspeed-groundspeed difference does seem like a bit much. The TAS correction at 75KIAS on these runs is about 3 knots (maybe 1 or 2 more than that if you want to account for humidity), certainly not 10~ish.

The altimeter reading looks pretty steady during the runs and that suggests his static port placement is pretty good (the altimeter reading drops about 40' after he chops the power; this could be a minor concern in flight or it could just be a side effect that happens only when this airplane is on the ground).

It would probably be worth his while to temporarily use one of those extra long pitot tubes that are common in flight test.




At the beginning of the video he say something about the local time being a few minutes after 8 on a Sunday morning:

KCNI 191330Z AUTO 00000KT 10SM CLR 27/22 A3017 RMK AO2
KCNI 191310Z AUTO 00000KT 10SM CLR 26/22 A3017 RMK AO2
KCNI 191250Z AUTO 00000KT 10SM CLR 25/23 A3017 RMK AO2

It is interesting - he referenced that they were targeting 85kts for initial tests. That's going to start to push any accelerate-and-stop distances at his 5000' runway.

He's basically at 75kts by midfield...and the faster speeds will eat more runway, so 75->85 will be...sporty. Losing some weight would help...but as mentioned, that'll be a tough one at this point in the project.

EDIT - and for extra irony, one would want the AC off for max power (and to minimize non-essential systems) during testing anyway...

I wonder how Peter is going to engage w/Elliot over the long(er) term? Peter strikes me as more of a "SQUIRREL!" personanity. I can imagine that Peter and Elliot will part ways sooner rather than later. An example of Elliot's work is the debrief in this video. It begins @ 23:30 ...

Is it rude to start a pool when one of the fires the other?

[youtube]https://youtu.be/pACi9aS-oxo[/youtube]