Curriculum · in progress
Design one aircraft, all the way through.
The blog answers questions as they come up. This is the other thing: an ordered course where you design an RC aircraft of your own, decide each thing in the order you would really have to decide it, and check every step in Wing Builder. The aircraft is yours, not ours to read about.
Written so far: 2 of 6. The rest are listed below in the order they will come, and they are not links until they exist. To hear when the next one opens, the waitlist on the home page is the way.
01 · Setting the brief
Decide what you are flying before you draw any of it. What has to be settled first, what you can leave open, and the speed and rough chord that fix the Reynolds number the next two units need.
02 · Reading an airfoil
What camber and thickness actually do. A NACA 4-digit section is closed-form, so the shape follows the digits as you drag them, and the way to learn it is to generate them.
03 · Airfoil aerodynamics
How cl, cd and cm move with angle of attack and Reynolds number, and where the stall starts. Read the XFOIL polars and pick the section your own brief actually calls for.
04 · Picking the planform
Span, taper and sweep, run as trades in Wing Builder. The section you chose comes back here: strip theory puts its 2D polar onto the spanwise loading to give a three-dimensional answer.
05 · Cutting foam
From drawing to airframe. Where a design holds up once you build it, and where it does not.
06 · First flight
Find out whether the wing did what the solver said it would, and read the difference where it did not.