bepps

This is what I want to build! Kindo. He just stuck 2 jets comonly used in model airplanes on a retractable pylon behind the pilot. Me I'd prefer to use an old starter out of a larger jet or APU. Every jet you see in the sky, attached to the main engines is a much smaller engine that can be started with a small electric motor. They use it to blow its exhaust through the main engine to get it spinning to start it. Once the main engine is running they just shut the little one down an it just rests mostly idle for the rest of the flight. Just like the electric starter in your car. It cranks the engine over and that's it.

As with car staters, althugh sometimes the starter will wear out before the engine has and get replaced, usually, after the car has been scrapped the starters perfectly usable and has years of service left in it. Certainly when it was replaced while the car was running.

So in every airplane that reaches the end of its service life there's 2-8 of these tiny starter jets just sitting there with thousands of hours of usable time left in them. They're about the size of an office trash can and weigh 20-40lbs er so and put out about 50lbs of thrust and can be had rather cheaply.

I'd much prefer to put one of those in the fuselage behind the passenger seat. Have small closable NACA inlets for the jet intake and have a closable exhaust outlet. It's doubtful I'd ever close them. I'd want to just use the aircraft for cross country flying. They typically use around 2-3 GPH so in a 10hr flight that's only 30 gallons or 180lbs. About the same weight as one person. A big person, but the size of person that you design for when you're designing an airplane. Even with 2 people already in there with 40lbs of stowage, the stall speed would still keep the rollout within reason with a long runway. Probably around a 60-70mph stall speed and with 50lbs of thrust, takeoff distance would probably be around 600-800 feet. Using a turbine you got plenty of compressed air to pressurize the cockpit at any altitude. The long wings would enable it to fly at extreme altitudes no problem, probably up to 80,000 feet. That's U-2 territory. It would be a $15,000 U-2. Go too far above that and there wouldn't be too much air for the engine to suck in so it'll be droppin power off and the cruise would drop down a fair bit. Still, you can see the curvature of the earth from that high. And up that high there wouldn't be near as much drag so it would cruise along quite a bit faster, probably close to 300mph. That would give it a range of 3000 miles with 10hrs of feul. Enough to go to anywhere in the world.


Or maybe I'll just get this. That'd get me somewhere in a big hurry. A lil heavy on the gas though. It uses aproximately 2000 gallons of feul per hour.