homebuilt safety

"anonymous coward" wrote in message
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I imagine you would want something that would deform around (for the sake
of argument) 10-20Gs.

Hmm....just shooting from the hip, that sounds like good range.

one's foot, so my worry is that if you used a foam that was soft enough to
protect your back, it would be easy to put your foot or elbow through it.

I'd think you'd put a covering of something rigid over it. Maybe a thin
layer of glass or maybe just some epoxy to make the top rigid enough to
prevent dinging it under normal use.

Behind the canard - in my dreams.

Maybe the thing to do is mount the seat to something that will give somewhat
under crash loads. Might be hard in something like a Long/Vari-EZ, since (I
think, working from memory here) that the EZ seat is mounted directly to
some major structural members. Would need some additional stuff to isolate
the seat with some energy-absorbing stuff that would let it give a bit
(probably don't need more than a couple of inches in a crash).

I have heard that the racing drivers use alu honeycomb. That sounds like
it might be seriously expensive.

There's probably a ton of data on stuff that people have tried for driver
protection in the automotive world. Unfortunately, air-bags are out of the
question for aviation use (for the pilot at least....probably for everyone).
But there must be a ton of other stuff. I'd bet that NASA has sponsored a
bunch of research under the GA revitalization thingy that would be
applicable. Rather than us spend our time speculating here, maybe some
Google time is warranted. There is probably someone at NASA Langley that
would serve as a point of contact, too. There might even be some technology
transfer programs around that we could take advantage of. Not sure how they
would react to helping the average joe home-builder, but I'm sure they make
a lot of data available to certified manufacturers.

Pete