I have been getting many questions regarding our aircraft, the KS-77 Vermillion, as to the direction of flight. It seems most of you think it is flying backwards.

Well, it’s not. The KS-77 does indeed fly forward, although I think I know where all the confusion is coming from. You see, the directionality of nearly every common aircraft is reversed from what you would expect to see from, say, a jet-liner or a Cessna.

The most important difference between ours and a traditional aircraft is that we were constrained to using a canard design, where the elevators (the horizontal part on most aircraft tails) lie in front of the main wing, at the nose of the plane. So, in the photograph to the right, the direction of flight would be to the right. Because of the many aerodynamic effects this causes, the result is a plane that is very difficult to stabilize in pitch.

All of the other differences to follow were decisions made by our design team for various reasons that I’m not going to go into in too much detail. Some other things that probably caused confusion:

Forward-sweep: The main wing is forward-swept, similar to airplanes such as the Grumman X-29. This has many beneficial effects such as greater lift, greater performance, better maneuverability, etc., however is very difficult to achieve structurally. These benefits really only come into effect when flying at speeds where you have to consider the compressibility of air (which is much faster than our models would fly), so our primary deciding factor was that it looked bad-ass.

Pusher-prop: The propeller and motor are located at the rear of the plane, meaning the propeller pushes the aircraft forward, instead of a traditional design where the propeller pulls the aircraft. This is relatively common in propeller, turbo-prop, and prop-jet canard designs.

Small tail: You may notice that our vertical stabilizer (which is the “fin” of a tail) is quite small and not easily noticed. It is, as always, located at the rear of the plane, well behind the CG. If this fin were larger, it would be much more obvious that that was supposed to be the back of the plane.

I hope this helped clear some of the confusion up.

Construction

For those who are wondering, the fuselage is constructed from a piece of carbon-Nomex-carbon sandwich borrowed from the Cerulean, UofT’s BlueSky Solar Car. The wings and canard are constructed from balsa ribs and spar caps, with shaped balsa leading and trailing edges. The wing frames are covered with Monokote, a type of shrink-wrap for model airplanes. The control surfaces are hinged with simple metal rods and are each actuated by one HiTec-HS55 micro servo via a pushrod. The motor is an AXi-Gold DC brushless motor, powered by a Lithium-Polymer battery and run with a speed controller, offering throttle control.