Month: June 2024

After many teething problems, the rtfm-aero.com website is now live.  It is the reincarnation of a much older site I created a good number of years ago.  Today I started importing pages from the old site to the new.

In the process, I saw that a significant amount of information was now out of date, and I’ll be updating this over the next few days.  But the good news is that the Tiny Cedar Flea now has a home, and a place you can visit to add your comments.

I have also created a Facebook page for the little plane:  https://www.facebook.com/groups/2005021576329962

So please free to pop across, comment, subscribe etc.  If I can get 1000 subscribers, I would be super-pleased.  I plan to get a dedicated YouTube channel also, because starting in 2025, I plan to video document the building of the Tiny Cedar Flea in 15 minute weekly episodes.  Now that is both a challenge and I’m sure it’s going to be a lot of fun.  Right from building the formers, to the first test flight.

Regards,

Duncan

I’ve been chatting to the guys over at HBA, who’ve introduced me to the Nanadovic configuration (two fixed wings, zero horisontal gap between the TE of the front and LE of the rear wing) and the rear wing positioned about 1/3 chord below the front wing.

This is extremely close to the configuration I have been considering for the Tiby Cedar Flea. The only real difference is that the TCF wings can pivot. Below is a more modern Nanadovic example, with the two wings joined by a plane – which significantly increases wing rigidity.

Fascinating. According to “Cluttonfred”, a well-respected HBA contributor, who translated Nanadovic’s paper, Nanadovic did his graduate work in France in the 1930s notably in finding the most efficient combination of gap and stagger for a biplane wing. His conclusions were as follows:

“Recent experiments by M. Nanadovic at the St. Cyr laboratory show that with a particular configuration of a biplane, one can see improvements over a monoplane of the same profile of 25% less drag, 15% more lift, and 51% better speed range.”

This is remarkable, if true. And we have reason to doubt his academic findings. Nanadovic ascribes these results to the effect of the geometry of the two wings, which act to pull the airflow of the front wing over the rear wing (something the Flea community refer to as the “slot effect”.

So my idea to produce a low-wing Flying Flea seems to have support from Nanadovic. And that’s very encouraging.