That much flex just makes me nervous. Can you tell any difference in control feel and smoothness from straight and level to the deflection you get in heavy turbulence or steep turns when the G’s go up and the flex get radical?
How do they keep the bend radius of the ailerons and the wing the same and keep it smoothly working?
Would you not be limited to spoiler’s for roll control when in high deflection conditions?
You could say that. I just call it ugly.
My local club is Guelph Gliding and Soaring (though it’s nowhere near Guelph anymore, and hasn’t been for years) I used to do some flying there, before I was poor/moved on to powered flight. Great group of guys, nice place, I can really speak no ill of them, though I didn’t learn to fly there; I learned through Air Cadets. There’s also a couple others in the area, but I haven’t visited them SOSA being the largest.
My medical examiner happens to be one of the guys at Guelph, so on my last medical, I spoke to him about the whole towpilot deal. Apparently, it wouldn’t be a problem if I had taildragger time (at this point, I have none.) It also wouldn’t be a problem if their previous towplane, a Citabria hadn’t crashed a bit over a year ago (destroyed the plane, but thankfully the pilot was only injured), because their towplane is now a Piper Pawnee, which is only single seat… So they can’t convert people to tailwheel anymore.
So I’m thinking I might head back to the cadets and see what they say (they fly some very well maintain Bellanca Scouts). Though this may be just fantasy as I already have plenty to do in the air (working on my CPL and Balloon licences… Nice days are pretty well booked up right now. Too many plans, too crappy of weather.)
“Overboard tube”, eh? Well, that’s the last time I gaze at a glider in open jawed admiration.
The photo shows the wings at 1G, without much flex. The upsweep you see is the designed shape of the wings. (Efficiency gains are possible when designers do this.)
Yes, the feel changes, but only modestly. The control systems within the wings are carefully designed to work well even when the wings are seriously flexed.
Basically, by using control rods supported so they flex with the wing, and good-quality bearings aligned so friction doesn’t appreciably increase.
Gliders do have spoilers, but nearly always for glidepath control only - left and right spoilers deploy together and there is no way to operate them separately (as would be necessary for roll control). With proper design, ailerons are fully effective up to the G-limits of the glider (typically something like plus 6/minus 4).
This is the one big drawback to a Pawnee, which seems to be the towplane of choice these days. I haven’t flown one, but it’s said to be quite benign for a taildragger - learning to fly it should not be a big deal.