Designing Airplanes That Shape Shift to Fly Electrically

Dean Sigler Electric Powerplants, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

Dr. Brien Seeley has a dream, often repeated in this blog, of bringing pocket airparks into our neighborhoods.  But the ideal of commuting by small two-seat aircraft and alleviating the crushing gridlock on our highways can only be realized with aircraft that are quiet, able to land and take off within a football field (much like ultralights), and yet cruise at up to 200 miles per hour (much like high-performance lightplanes).  This amalgamation of Quicksilver and Lancair might seem unlikely, but Dan Raymer showed attendees at this year’s Electric Aircraft Symposium a possible solution to the dichotomy. Raymer, head of Conceptual Research Corporation and author of Aircraft Design: A Conceptual Approach, and Dan Raymer’s Simplified Aircraft Design for Homebuilders, is an internationally-recognized expert in RDS, or robust design strategies.  RDS is defined as a systematic approach to finding optimum values of design factors which result in economical designs with low variability.  As a recognized expert in this area, Raymer brought his …