26 | December 2017 | Powered Sport Flying Computer aided design and machining allows designers to make light and strong structural parts. New Gyro Design the fixed leading edge. That means that the air first encounters the rudder leading edge straight on and is then guided left or right according to control inputs from the pilot. Denis calls that a morphing airfoil shape. Denis likes the tall tail because he has less torque effect from the prop blast pilots encounter with a short tail. The tall tail encounters the full prop blast instead of just the lower half of the blast that a short tail gets. He points to his control cables that are trimmed straight in the neutral position. Without having to build an offset into the controls, that makes the rudder more efficient. Of course a tall tail has to be brought in closer to the center of gravity of the aircraft in order to keep it out of the path of the rotor. The gyro’s prerotator is a mechanical drive, driven by a belt off the engine. Denis has it set up like a helicopter collective with a twist throttle. The collective is what tensions the belt. With that setup, Denis can finesse the throttle as he is bringing up the prerotator. And once a pilot is finished with the prerotation, he can push the lever down and a safety catch locks it in place. That disables the prerotator completely once your wheels leave the ground. He likes the twist throttle personally, but does plan on offering a conventional throttle quadrant for those who want that. Denis is selling the gyro in kit form. He provides the components for the chassis, the flight controls, the tail, the rotorhead, and the prerotator. He will be offering other components to the builders such as the wheels and brakes, which are all built in-house. The customers will source their own engines, rotorblades, propellers and instruments. Of course he will provide a list of recommended components. The rotorblades he has been using for the design are 23’ and 24’ Dragonwings by Rotor Flight Dyanamics. The engine Denis designed around was the Rotax 582. However, he wants to offer many different engine mount configurations so the customer can build their gyro the way the customer desires. Denis just wants to make sure that the engine mounting requirements stay within the right geometries and thrust lines of the design. He doesn’t want an engine installation to necessarily change too much on the aircraft framework. So far, all of the aircraft built or sold use that Rotax 582. There is one exception. One customer is putting a Hirth
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