Duckhawk wins

On 5/27/2012 7:23 AM, Papa3 wrote:
On Sunday, May 27, 2012 1:37:20 AM UTC-4, Wade wrote:

The version chip was flying for the contest was the DuckHawk SV.
The max gross weight is 960 LB and he never flew above 880 LB
during the contest. Thanks, Wade

Which means that he was essentially flying at 11 lbs wingloading if
the 80sq ft wing area listed on the Website is accurate. That's
pretty amazing considering we rarely had more than 3-4kts of often
broken lift. I never went with more than 9lbs in my LS8, and that
was often too much. I know Chip didn't carry all of the water all
the time, but still...

The 80 sq feet is accurate! It provides the DuckHawk with an amazing
(for a 15 meter glider) 30:1 aspect ratio. The relatively light weight
of the glider due to the the small size and carbon pre-preg construction
gives is a significantly lighter span loading than an ASW 27, etc glider:

DuckHawk at 11 lbs/sq ft = 17.6 lbs/foot span loading
ASW 27 at 11 lbs/sq ft = 21.3 lbs/foot span loading

We're all used to thinking in terms of wing loading, but Greg Cole told
me the span loading is the important factor for thermalling - lighter is
better.

--
Eric Greenwell - Washington State, USA (change ".netto" to ".us" to
email me)