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.
Read more about this topic: Beck-Mahoney Sorceress
Famous quotes containing the word design:
“With wonderful art he grinds into paint for his picture all his moods and experiences, so that all his forces may be brought to the encounter. Apparently writing without a particular design or responsibility, setting down his soliloquies from time to time, taking advantage of all his humors, when at length the hour comes to declare himself, he puts down in plain English, without quotation marks, what he, Thomas Carlyle, is ready to defend in the face of the world.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Joe ... you remember I said you wouldn’t be cheated?... Nobody is really. Eventually all things work out. There’s a design in everything.”
—Sidney Buchman (1902–1975)
“To nourish children and raise them against odds is in any time, any place, more valuable than to fix bolts in cars or design nuclear weapons.”
—Marilyn French (20th century)