On Sun, 11 Feb 2018 10:52:02 -0800, stu857xx wrote:

How about one that flys backwards?

A canard gives lift instead of the horizontal stab pushing the tail
down.

It's been tried a few times in the competition Free Flight model building
world. Its easy to to make them fly quite well. I lost one, a 27" McCanard
with a TeeDee .010 on it, upward in a thermal. I remember it was quite
easy to trim, but had no d/t provision on the plan so I hadn't fitted
one: hence it climbing several hundred feet on the glide and disapearing
over a hill.

Doug Joyce got into the US F1C team with a set of canard models but,
whoile the climb was good, they didn't glide as well as conventional
layout models. The problem is that the main lifting surface has to
operate at a lower AOA than the foreplane because the latter MUST stall
first for the aircraft to be stable. This means that in almost all cases
the mainplane will be operating at a less than optimal AOA.


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