Beck-Mahoney Sorceress - Design

Design

A reverse-stagger biplane, Sorceress represents the state of the art at the time of its design, and remains one of the great design classics of air-racing within the United States.

Lee Mahoney, the designer, had experience in airframe construction with composite materials, metal-to-composite bonding technologies, and computational fluid dynamics, applying his experience to design Sorceress, and achieve success with several noteworthy design features, including:-

• Use of engine exhaust air flow forms a Coandă effect-bonded laminar flow over the fuselage, increasing rudder efficiency by several orders of magnitude. Mahoney had originally designed the fuselage so that a fin would not be necessary - the fuselage would have ended with a rudder, but his partners however preferred a more conventional treatment, giving Sorceress one of the smallest conventional fins of any racing biplane to date.
• The aerofoil sections of the wings are designed as mirror image 'vanes' of symmetrical section - they interfere with each other's flow in a manner which provides very high efficiency in turns, where as one vane-set/wing begins to lose efficiency, the other gains more, allowing for extremely high lift in turns with minimal loss of velocity
• Sorceress gains a great deal from composite bonding, with one of the first airframes to demonstrate almost perfect streamlining combined with very great strength;the wing interplane struts are for show only, Sorceress being capable of flight without them, but racing rules require them.