DR1 (Von Richtofen's plane) out of flat depron sheets...

very cool, gunga, sanest thing you've ever posted here. like its aerobatic capabilities, ssems very similar to what WWI planes could do, as far as I can tell (maybe a bit better at a vertical climb than they were). kudos to the constructor (or to you if you built it, congratulations). very neat video.

Patience isn't one of my main virtues and there's no way I could put anything like that together from scratch. Notice he has ailerons on all three wings while apparently the real Fokker only had them on the top wing. If you assume always that more lift is better, then a triplane was the ultimate aircraft.

I think that was the idea, and shorter wings gave you more agility and a smaller turning radius. But I believe in practice that was somewhat cancelled out by the extra bracing and strutting required for the third wing.

WHERE is the Baron 's real plane?

In a museum somewhere ?





David

That's a good guess, hard to say. He was shot down but if memory serves he managed to get the plane on the ground before he died.

Oddly, witnesses said that he predicted his own demise to several people,
a few days b4 it happened.

Patton did too.


Arguably, Patsy Cline did too.

I suspect that's one of those predictions that was made fairly frequently and usually came true, considering the short time most pilots were in combat before they died--a couple days and you were usually dead. If almost all of them weren't fatalistic, I'd be surprised. Flying any of the WWI planes was a totally fatiguing hairy-assed bitch from what I've heard--you came back nearly dead from fighting with the plane, even if you never got shot at, which had to wear them down and out, and make them pessimistic. I thought von Richtofen crashed, hafte go check wikipedia.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoBr7KVxMGo&feature=related

this one sounds better...

OK, gunga's right, he was in a prolonged low level pursuit of a British plane and it seems likely he was killed by a machine gunner on the ground firing at his plane, since the shot came up through his body. He lived long enough to make a controlled landing but died minutes later, and his plane was pretty much destroyed by souvenir hunters.

Boy, Robert's ad software matching is good--I keep getting an ad for a 30" Fokker DRI RC balsa model at the bottom of the thread page, wanna bite, gunga?

Not really. Best looking multi-wing kit I've seen so far is the Multiplex Gemini:

http://www.multiplexusa.com/downloads/M214224%20-%20Kit-Gemini_ModelAviation.pdf

Street price is around $105. Kit is very nicely engineered and the plane appears to have the main features of the motor gliders which everybody learns to fly 4-channel with, sleek and sharp enough to fly through wind, low wing loading, big enough to see and keep oriented pretty easily....

That pilot is good with a capital G. That thing is basically a kite with a small engine and landing it in any sort of a wind can't be anybody's idea of fun.