Unreal Aviation "Ugly-B" TiltFan research aircraft.

The Ugly-B Tilt-Fan is a copy of the Doak 16 research aircraft. It features tilting ducted fans on the ends of short wings, a rear mounted jet engine with a dorsal intake, all-flying T tail and a bifurcated jet exhaust exiting upwards and downwards for pitch-control in the hover. Vanes in the ducts give yaw-control in the hover and roll-control in the cruise.

Essentially a single seater but there is a jump seat for a brave passenger or observer.

I have included an exhaust effect that blows heat haze up and down from the tailpipe and a gauge that automatically takes care of the duct tilting operation as you transition through 80 knots. Cruise speed is 220 knots and the fuselage attitude is level in both hover and cruise,
another trick taken care of by the automatics (I'm quite pleased about that one).

It is also VERY stable (for a helicopter), has an autopilot for cross-countries, is capable of loops and rolls and above all, looks really cool. :-)

Like the Doak 16 original, the aircraft is a 'bitsa' made up of lots of other aircraft, the idea being to keep it simple and using ready made items from my parts bin meant that it was modelled, textured, animated and flying within one day (and then another three weeks of tweaking).

The vanes aren't animated, as their axis' in the hover are 180 degrees the other way round from cruise and this would have been rather difficult to do. The tailplane isn't animated either but there is suspension and nosewheel steering.

I don't really care about the former as animated control surfaces look silly as they always move far too much for realism.

That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it. :-)

The panel is no more than a token gesture (you might recognise the bitmap) but there is a simple VC.

I didn't model a Doak 16 because I have been unable to source any drawings for it. Doing my own design* means that nobody can argue about how accurate it is. :-)

*It isn't a design as such, i.e. I haven't actually designed a full size Doak-alike, this is just a flying cartoon and fun alternative to yet another silver tube.


Installing:

FS2002 users must move any gauges in the Panel folder into their default gauges folder.
Drop the Unreal folder into your default Gauges folder, overwriting if prompted to do so. Do not move the contents of this folder to another location. FS9 users can leave this in the Panel folder.

Put the fx_heat_haze_tf file into your main Effects folder.

This effect is based upon the amazing light-based jet exhaust effects by Nick Needham.


Flying:

Despite the looks, it's a helicopter and is flown as such in the hover and at low speeds. The differences start to show themselves as you gain speed: The animated ducts, the fuselage attitude in cruise, the speed and aeroplane handling all lead you to believe this is not a helicopter at all. Be warned though, should your realism settings involve engine unreliability or should you run out of fuel you will have to close the throttle to lower the collective because your 'aeroplane' will revert to a helicopter and expect you to do an autorotative landing. Keep the speed up to around 90 knots and do a run-on landing, aiming for 80 knots as you touch down. This 'keeps it real' visually, as the full size aircraft would actually be incapable of performing a 'flare to zero airspeed' autorotation as the fans have insufficient disk area. Indeed, the real thing would probably have a total recovery parachute, as the glide is somewhat brick-like when the engine stops!

Due to the wheels, you can do a nice fast roll-on landing if hovering is something you haven't mastered yet. It's no trainer but it IS stable once you get the knack.


Thanks to P T Waugh for the code for the tilting ducts with airspeed, without which, this aircraft would have been pointless.

Thanks also to Tom Woods for his HUD version of Antii Pankkonen's helicopter autopilot.

Finally, thanks to FSEdge and Milton Shupe for all the help and advice without which, I would have abandoned the project.


That's it, have fun.
Kevin Bryan
Unreal Aviation
whirlybug@cix.co.uk
Any email to this address that contains attachments of any sort will be nuked without me seeing them so plain text only, please.