Why Did I Buy This Weird Cozy MKIV Canard Airplane?

why did I buy this weird airplane [Music] so you gotta admit this is pretty unconventional airplane it's a Canard obviously the name of the channel is Canard Boulevard Canard it's French for duck and that refers to the Canard Wing up front the reason for that is that there was an early airplane in uh early 1900s in France that was a Canard with the elevator of the stabilizer in the front and when it was flew over it kind of looked like a duck when it flies with this head stuck out so the name stuck as a Canard so this is a Canard aircraft basically means the elevator or the horizontal stabilizer is in the front rather than in the back so let's have a look at a conventional airplane and see how it flies so here's a conventional airplane with the wing at the front more or less and a horizontal stabilizer at the back engine at the front so we have people inside pretty much underneath the wing right where the center of gravity is and also where the wheels are the center of gravity is pretty much right where the front seats are you have some back seats and then you have a heavy engine up front the heavy engine weighs more than all of this stuff at the back so why doesn't this thing fall on its nose when it goes flying well that's because of the horizontal stabilizer this horizontal stabilizer is actually a wing upside down it generates lift in downwards rather than upwards this Wing generates lift up so the airplane goes flying this horizontal stabilizer generates lift downwards to balance the engine so with a horizontal stabilizer pushing downwards that means this Wing has to generate extra lift upwards to offset the downwards lift of the horizontal stabilizer so it's lifting the engine occupants and the weight of that tail pushing downwards all at the same time this airplane is different the wing is in the back and then we have a Canard in the front this one is different because both Wings the main wing and the Canard generate lift there is no downforce that means that the main portion of the weight it means the fuel engine passengers the center of gravity is right about here everything ahead of it has to be lifted by the Canard so this does all the heavy lifting of all the heavy stuff like engine and Fuel and whatnot and then for the front seat passengers that's pretty much lifted by the Canard why is that good because now we don't have any downforce being generated by a horizontal stabilizer which means we don't have to overcome that downforce with extra lift when you generate lift you generate drags so if you have to generate less lift to lift the same weight that means you have less drag which means the airplane goes faster on less fuel it's more efficient also look at the length of the airplane from the nose to the tail is much shorter than the conventional airplane because we don't have to have that tail that goes way way out back to the horizontal stabilizer every bit of surface area on the airplane generates drag from parasite drag so because the fuselage is much shorter there's less of it to push through the air which means again less drag which means it goes faster it's more efficient on less fuel that's why this airplane with 180 horsepower engine will Cruise all day long at 170 knots which is around 200 miles an hour where the same engine in a Cherokee 180 goes maybe 120 knots and uses more fuel so why isn't every airplane like this there is another advantage in that the angle of incidence of been Canard is greater than the angle of incidence of the main Wing what the hell does that mean the angle of incidence determines when the wing is going to stall so if the angle of incidence on the Canard is greater than this Wing that means when we slow down and pull a high angle of attack this Wing the Canard is going to stall before this one ever gets a chance to so if we're actually in a situation where we're in danger of stalling this stalls first so if you think about it this is lifting the back end this is lifting the front end so if the Canard stalls and stops generating lift what happens well the plane is going to fall on its nose because now I've got lift at the back end and no lift at the front end so it's going to go down what happens when you go down angle of attack it gets reduced the wings no longer stalled so literally a stall in a Canard it's not stall proof but almost all proof because when you actually bring it back into a stall it just basically does this because as a Canard stalls then it nose down then it stalls and nose down so it just comes a gentle Bob not only that while it's doing that while you're actually in a stall you can turn there's no danger in in spinning or stalling because the main Wing never gets close to a stalls so you can do gentle turns with the nose kind of bobbing around in a circle like this in a stall turning completely safely I don't know if I do it but you can there are some things like these vordolones here that at high angle of attacks prevent the spanwise flow of air down this swept Wing to keep it attached to the wing that helps the the this Wing not stall and the reason for that is because this has to have a swept Wing because the tail the vertical stabilizers have to be behind the airplane in order to give it some directional stability and the only way to get those horizontal stabilizers behind the airplane is to have the wings swept back like that it goes faster and it uses less fuel it's very slippery it's very efficient and it's very docile and easy to fly it's safe it's a safe airplane it's really hard to do something stupid in this airplane so what are the drawbacks well you might notice it has no flaps a traditional airplane has flaps on the wings that that it can lower which increa allows it to generate more lift at lower speed lowers the stall speed so you can come in to land or if you need to take off on a slow speed or a short Runway you can generate extra lift at a slow speed and then when you are up and you don't need that anymore you can retract the flaps make the wing more efficient generates less lift but it can go at a higher speed with less drag this airplane doesn't have flaps why because when you put the flaps down it changes the shape of the wing and the center of lift or the center pressure actually moves backwards so on a regular airplane when you drop the flaps it actually tips forward like that on its nose and then you have to trim it back in order to to correct for that well what happens in this airplane if you added flaps to it all of a sudden it's going to try and tip forward on its nose now you need a whole bunch of extra lift on the Canard to to overcome that and the Canard isn't designed for that it could be designed for that they could make it bigger with a bigger elevator on it and actually make it compensate but now you've got a bigger airfoil and you've got more drag and that means it's going to be too sensitive when the flaps are retracted there was a commercial aircraft called the beach Starship that actually got around that by having the front canards actually sweep back and forth so they could alter the sweep on it which would change the the amount of lift being generated by the car so it could compensate for its flaps so because it doesn't have flaps that means it lands fast and it takes off fast you can't horse it off a Runway you have to actually get up to a sufficient speed that the Canard starts to fly because if there's not enough air speed for this Canard to generate enough lift to lift the front of the airplane off the ground you're not going flying so once the Canard starts to generate lift on your takeoff run and you can get it lifted up a bit now you rotate the main wing and it starts generating lift and off you go but you need 65 or 70 knots in order to do that which means you need long runways and those runways have to be hard surface because of the fairings on here they're especially the nose wheel they're not meant for grass or unimproved runways you need solid smooth runways to do that same thing goes for landing no flaps on Landing so you come in and you've got to land pretty fast you need 65 or 70 knots over the numbers depending on your weight in order to keep everything flying and then you have to bleed off that speed over the runway and you obviously need to use your brakes once you get down so you do need some runway for this airplane that can limit where you want to go into and out of so that is a trade-off uh extra benefit is because there's no engine right in front of you turning up the air and making all kinds of noise you know a few feet in front of your head instead it's way at the back so it's much quieter I think than traditional conventional airplanes and you can actually hear the wind when you're flying it's almost like a glider you can hear the wind the Airstream around the front of the airplane which is kind of neat you can you can actually get a sense of how fast you're going just by listening to that wind the last real limitation of a Canard if you think about a conventional airplane everything's pretty much hanging right underneath the wing the center Spar of the wing uh is where all the passengers sit and you have the tail one in the engine and the other it all kind of balances right on that Wing So if you want to add more people in it's all going pretty much close to the center of gravity baggage people so you can load it up and your only real limitation is how much can you carry this airplane very different because you can load up the back seat and you can put all kinds of bags and Fuel and things in there right up to Max gross weight and this thing will carry it and in fact this airplane will carry four people in full fuel it has significant carrying capacity of course you're going to need a really long Runway to do that but it can do it however you have limitations for the front seat because the front seat is so far up from the the center of gravity small changes up here make very big changes in the overall center of gravity calculations so if I'm sitting here up by myself in order to fly this airplane I actually have bags of lead shot I've got 20 pound bags of lead shot and one goes up in the nose in here and one is right up in here so I have 40 pounds of lead shot in this airplane when I fly this by myself in order to get the weight and balance envelope correct similarly if I have two people up here I'm limited as to how much weight I can carry up here it's typically around 400 pounds is about the limit combined for the front seat so if you have a plus size friend and you yourself could stand to lose a few this is probably not the airplane for you so there are some CG limitations and it does take a little bit of finesse because you need to make sure that you have the ballast on hand that you might need and you need to be able to to ask people their weights and tell them no if need be what happens if you your CG is too far forward or too far back well it's just like any airplane it's bad you don't want to do that if it's too far forward the Canard can't lift it you might not even get off the ground you'll just run off the end of the runway and never generate enough lift on the Canard to get the main Wing into enough of an angle of attack that it's actually going to rotate and start flying if you have it too far back you will get the front off the ground no problem at all however it's even worse at this point because if you are past your aft CG and you stall the airplane the Canard will not stall first the main Wing will stall first the Canard will keep flying because it's hardly got any load on there's almost no weight on it so it's not going to stall instead your main Wing is going to stall main Wing stalls on Canard aircraft are typically not recoverable once it gets into a stall the airplane just kind of just comes down like this and because you now have no relative airflow over your control surfaces there is not much you can do about it except ride it down to the ground it does come down about 40 miles per hour or so I'm told um there have it has happened where people have loaded their planes out of CG and ended up stalling the main wing and coming down most have survived a couple have not there is one that I know of where he was able to actually recover it by working the Rudders back and forth and he got the airplane doing a little bit of a Dutch roll until One Wing fell just enough that he got some air speed over the Canard and was able to recover but that's the exception rather than the rule so CG critically important in this airplane and the CG limits and restrictions are much more important and restrictive than a conventional airplane so that is definitely a trade-off now I I know I kind of went off into the weeds and aerodynamics of this airplane but I really wanted to explain some of the reasons why I bought this airplane and those aerodynamic reasons are considerable and that's that's some of the main reasons why I chose the cozyana Canard in general I hope you found this interesting or informative uh if you have any questions or comments uh Corrections especially I'm no expert I know Fair bit about this airplane and airplanes in general but I'm sure there are many many people out there that know way more than I do and I may have misspoken or gotten something wrong so if if you uh hear something that I said that doesn't sound right please please let me know in the comment section below I really appreciate when people do that and please if you just have 10 seconds please click like on the video and subscribe to the channel I'm really trying to grow this channel so that people can can come to it and be entertained and informed and by doing that especially subscribing to the channel it really helps me grow it so that other people get to see these videos and that means I can make even more alright that's it thanks for watching let's go flying

Channel: Canard Boulevard

Views: 129,867

Keywords: Canard, Cozy, Cozy MKIV, Long-EZ, Airplane, EAA, Experimental, Flying, Aviation, Takeoff, landing, aerodynamics, stall, spin

Id: ycLQaiX4ylE

Length: 14min 49sec (889 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 17 2023