Andy, give up now on the hovercraft and RC drones, just launch one of those F-100D ZEL from you back yard.

On Sunday, March 20, 2016 at 4:30:23 PM UTC-7, Andy Blackburn wrote:
On Sunday, March 20, 2016 at 2:22:53 PM UTC-7, DaleKramer wrote:
On Sunday, March 20, 2016 at 3:08:51 PM UTC-4, Andy Blackburn wrote:
+1, but I want a delivery position...if it works. Fingers crossed.

Andy

I will consider that a deposit on delivery position #1

#1? maybe I need a few brave should in front of me.

Yes - way back when I worked at NASA Ames on variable stability helicopters as part of grad school. They had the XV-15 tilt rotor there and well as the RSRA - talk about bad transitions to forward flight. It has a rotor that was an oval cross section with blowing slots on both leading and trailing edges. The idea was to stop the rotor in flight and swap the slots you were blowing out of on the blades that were facing aft (they were symmetric airfoils (fore and aft AND top/bottom) - so "aft" was more of a term of art as it depended entirely on the blowing setup. In forward flight it was an X-wing planform. I understand the transitions were "exciting".

You have an easy problem in comparison.

I agree with enough power and pitch authority you ought to be able to make the transition to forward flight (and back) without to much drama. The question I can't answer with simple math is exactly how much power you need. You've got a swept wing so it ought to be able to produce lift at pretty high AOA which is good. At some point the vertical component of the thrust vector will be insufficient to hold the aircraft in hover and as you continue to pitch over the wing better take up the slack or you will be in ballistic territory. If your total thrust to weight is 1.3:1 you will run out of thrust to hold hover at T*sin(Theta) = W, or Theta = arcsin(1/1.3) = arcsin(0.77) = 50.3 degrees nose up pitch. That might be a bit high, even for a highly swept wing. You'll need to get the elevator unstalled as well if you want to actually fly the thing through the transition with the stick. The hope is that the nose will want to pitch over anyway once you get started so you'd think you could sort of mush your way through the transition until the boundariy layer on the wing gets attached and the wing gets lifting - and hope that it doesn't get so draggy that it wants to mush and settle for very long.

My Dad was the project test pilot for a variation on this theme back in 1958:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDstVGAmI74

Like I said, with enough thrust you can do pretty much anything you want.

Andy