The September Begbroke meeting had a fascinating talk by Alan Smith about his experiments with vertical take off and how to incorporate the design into one of his unique flying wings.

Alan’s latest project are vertical takeoff aircraft that transition into horizontal flight utilising his design ideas with flying wings. Alan talked about how he was using ‘flying bedsteads’ to perfect the vertical take off part of the flight using frames of the same weight and CofG as the actual airframes he has designed and built before transferring the motors and control unit across once the set up was successful

As part of the talk he gave a demonstration of his vectored thrust bedstead in tethered flight. In this case held gently by a club member while in the hoover mode. The power needed to fly these models is much greater than conventional aircraft and was clearly seen during the demonstration

It was a very interesting and informative evening.

Next months meeting on October 15th there is a talk by Matt Clay on the Sabre/Skylon Spaceplane project using reaction motors so don’t miss that.

Some photos of Alan’s previous talk from 2023 about his flying wings  can be found here