Raptor Aircraft

NHWannabe said:
No disagreement that Peter has done a lot of bubble gum and duck tape fixes and some of his decisions have been, I'll be generous here, questionable but he's still gotten an aircraft off the ground. I don't think I could do that and that may be a low bar but I give him credit nonetheless.
Click to expand...
Haven't seen any bubblegum. But seen plenty of foil tape. Maybe the bubblegum is coming for the new oil seal?
 
Racerx said:
Haven't seen any bubblegum. But seen plenty of foil tape. Maybe the bubblegum is coming for the new oil seal?
Click to expand...

The one fix I remember when he had the test pilots from out west looking over the airplane was epoxying a block of wood under the rudder pedal as a stop, because if the pedal went too far it was binding and catching on something. Let's not figure out why its binding, just glue some wood to block it. :loco:
 
I've only watched a few of the flight videos and it appears there are some awful oscilations or lack of stability issues with this airplane. Watching the last video, I felt like I was in a rocking chair as the plane seemed to pitch up and down in a rhythmic way. Is it just me or do others see it too? I'm plenty adventurous and tend to be a risk taker from time to time, but you wouldn't catch me taking a ride in this thing any time soon.
 
Last edited:
donjohnston said:
It's always the wind. Even though he only flies on dead calm days... It's the wind causing all those gyrations.
Click to expand...

I liked the latest video when the tower gave wind conditions as "variable" and cleared him to land. On final Muller makes a remark about the left crosswind and he's gonna get some practice in flying it.

:D
 
midwestpa24 said:
The one fix I remember when he had the test pilots from out west looking over the airplane was epoxying a block of wood under the rudder pedal as a stop, because if the pedal went too far it was binding and catching on something. Let's not figure out why its binding, just glue some wood to block it. :loco:
Click to expand...
If it was going past full deflection, then it would be perfectly appropriate to put in a stop.
 
Lindberg said:
If it was going past full deflection, then it would be perfectly appropriate to put in a stop.
Click to expand...
And a block of wood was a much better choice than a block of steel, which he tends to like.
 
FastEddieB said:
Funny, I was kinda disappointed he didn’t go for one slightly wider pattern while he was at it.

50673013861_30be8566ff.jpg
Click to expand...
Is that called the "Dick Pattern" ?
 
The dude is a CFII and he doesn't know how to tell the tower what he wants to do. Why are you making the kid guess what your intentions are.

"I can do whatever I want"...yes, yes you can. It's just not a good idea. Someone must've ****ed in his wheaties today. Between his tone and the comments he's had a rough one. Know how to solve all of it? Not post everything on social media/youtube.
 
Last edited:
And how is it possible that a CFI doesn't know that using cabin air for static will usually result in "high and fast" altimeter and airspeed? I think that I learned that within the first couple of hours when learning to fly.
 
Racerx said:
The dude is a CFII and he doesn't know how to tell the tower what he wants to do. Why are you making the kid guess what your intentions are.

"I can do whatever I want"...yes, yes you can. It's just not a good idea. Someone must've ****ed in his wheaties today. Between his tone and the comments he's had a rough one. Know how to solve all of it? Not post everything on social media/youtube.
Click to expand...

Agreed...although I think he would have been okay had he simply been open to the input of those originally participating. His arrogant, holier than thou persona when it’s clear he’s suffering from rectal-cranial inversion is what has drawn most of the heat...I think had he checked his ego at the door, there would still have been the usual internet trolls, but they would have had a small voice compared to the supporters.
 
Though the signal to noise ratio in the comments was pretty low, there were some decent suggestions made in a crowd-sourced sort of way. I’d think he’d want to take the time to sort through them for some free advice. But not wanting to listen to suggestions may just be part of his M.O.
 
FastEddieB said:
Though the signal to noise ratio in the comments was pretty low, there were some decent suggestions made in a crowd-sourced sort of way. I’d think he’d want to take the time to sort through them for some free advice. But not wanting to listen to suggestions may just be part of his M.O.
Click to expand...
Remember the video where he announced he was going to move to Valdosta? "IM MAKING THE CALL". Tells me everything we need to know about his MO. Very abrasive
 
jaxcessnadriver said:
“I can do whatever I want! It’s an experimental aircraft.” :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

I caught that.

On the one hand, he’s right - at least to a point.

On the other hand, I think this was regarding his placing of his static port in the cabin of the plane. In that context, many pilots/builders/flight instructors could point out that due to Mr. Bernoulli and the venturi effect, cabin pressure will virtually always be less than ambient pressure once the plane is moving. Worse, that pressure will drop with speed, causing the errors in both airspeed and altitude to increase with speed. Not to mention this is supposed to eventually be a pressurized aircraft, presenting another set of problems. Obviously, someone suggested “You can’t just stick the static port somewhere in the cabin”, and that’s what precipitated his “I can do whatever I want” remark. Not a good sign.
 
Racerx said:
Remember the video where he announced he was going to move to Valdosta? "IM MAKING THE CALL". Tells me everything we need to know about his MO. Very abrasive
Click to expand...
I'll be clear on this...if many of the suggestions 'offered' here were made in the same manner to me in the context of an airplane I was either designing or testing I'd just tell you to pound sand. Think what you want.

Nauga,
who doesn't crowdsource his test plans
 
nauga said:
I'll be clear on this...if many of the suggestions 'offered' here were made in the same manner to me in the context of an airplane I was either designing or testing I'd just tell you to pound sand. Think what you want.
Click to expand...
I worked for decades with professional designers of aircraft and spacecraft. All of them were accustomed to well-meaning (and not-so-well meaning) non-experts trying to tell them what was wrong with their design. ALL of them would tell the suggesters to pound sand. A few, very few, would do so mostly politely (Dick Van Grunsven is one). If the suggester had some known design expertise they might listen a bit. But unknown "experts" pontificating? Got savage, sometimes.

Even once caught one experienced designer training a new one. "They're going to make comments, right? That ******* Smith, especially. You just say, "no, this is the way it's going to be.' And that's it."

So yeah, I agree with Nauga that PM deciding not to listen to the Great Unwashed is not unusual.

Ron Wanttaja
 
Ron, I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that none of those experts you worked with insisted on sharing his every thought with the entire world.
 
OneCharlieTango said:
Ron, I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that none of those experts you worked with insisted on sharing his every thought with the entire world.
Click to expand...
Voluntarily? No.

But they had to participate in Preliminary Design Reviews (PDRs) and Critical Design Reviews (CDRs) where they were expected to describe the complete process used for design decisions. In front of a crowd of Air Force second lieutenants, Army captains, Navy Lieutenant Commanders, GS-XXs from the various TLAs, and consultants from Aerospace Corporation, Rand, Sandia, SAIC, and similar companies. All of which concentrated on showing their bosses how utterly vital they were to our program by driving down to the tiniest level of design detail.

(can I get an A-men from somebody? :)

I was once at a PDR where an Aerospace engineer argued for 45 minutes over our choice of random number generators. Fifteen years later, he was at a PDR for the follow-up program, and AGAIN wasted 45 minutes over the re-use of the same random number generator.

I was the lead engineer on my last program, developing a set of microsats. Total program budget was less than $10M. At the PDR, I had my eight-engineer team. There were over 50 government representatives.

So I'm not squawking at PM no longer listening to input....

Ron Wanttaja
 
I mean... if someone got on YouTube and started telling us to eat raw chicken or that drinking sea water was healthy people would call that out too

There's a difference in peanut gallery when it's people giving unsolicited advice to an otherwise qualified person (like arguing with Alton Brown about the best way to prepare a roast) vs watching a complete imbecile nearly set the kitchen on fire and burn everything they're cooking later tell you that they're the best cook they know and everyone else is wrong

I really don't have a horse here.. and I'm not sure why my mind is on food. But there is a difference in "noise"
 
I don't think any of us really expected him to listen to any of the comments on Youtube. I know if I were the one posting videos I'd be turning off comments as well and following my own program. Difference being that program would include people far more experienced than me that could advise me on courses of action to take, not just whatever sounded good at that moment.
 
wanttaja said:
Voluntarily? No.

But they had to participate in Preliminary Design Reviews (PDRs) and Critical Design Reviews (CDRs) where they were expected to describe the complete process used for design decisions. In front of a crowd of Air Force second lieutenants, Army captains, Navy Lieutenant Commanders, GS-XXs from the various TLAs, and consultants from Aerospace Corporation, Rand, Sandia, SAIC, and similar companies. All of which concentrated on showing their bosses how utterly vital they were to our program by driving down to the tiniest level of design detail.

(can I get an A-men from somebody? :)

I was once at a PDR where an Aerospace engineer argued for 45 minutes over our choice of random number generators. Fifteen years later, he was at a PDR for the follow-up program, and AGAIN wasted 45 minutes over the re-use of the same random number generator.

I was the lead engineer on my last program, developing a set of microsats. Total program budget was less than $10M. At the PDR, I had my eight-engineer team. There were over 50 government representatives.

So I'm not squawking at PM no longer listening to input....

Ron Wanttaja
Click to expand...
Ron, these are called.............."stakeholders"........
 
wanttaja said:
Voluntarily? No.

But they had to participate in Preliminary Design Reviews (PDRs) and Critical Design Reviews (CDRs) where they were expected to describe the complete process used for design decisions. In front of a crowd of Air Force second lieutenants, Army captains, Navy Lieutenant Commanders, GS-XXs from the various TLAs, and consultants from Aerospace Corporation, Rand, Sandia, SAIC, and similar companies. All of which concentrated on showing their bosses how utterly vital they were to our program by driving down to the tiniest level of design detail.

(can I get an A-men from somebody? :)

I was once at a PDR where an Aerospace engineer argued for 45 minutes over our choice of random number generators. Fifteen years later, he was at a PDR for the follow-up program, and AGAIN wasted 45 minutes over the re-use of the same random number generator.

I was the lead engineer on my last program, developing a set of microsats. Total program budget was less than $10M. At the PDR, I had my eight-engineer team. There were over 50 government representatives.

So I'm not squawking at PM no longer listening to input....

Ron Wanttaja
Click to expand...

Question... Did any of those reviews result in any "finds" that would have eventually mattered? Or, did the reviews prompt the team to cross its T's and dot its i's more thoroughly? It is hard to quantify the cost/benefit of these things, but there are plenty of examples where the right question at the right time would have saved someone or something's bacon.
 
kyleb said:
Question... Did any of those reviews result in any "finds" that would have eventually mattered? Or, did the reviews prompt the team to cross its T's and dot its i's more thoroughly? It is hard to quantify the cost/benefit of these things, but there are plenty of examples where the right question at the right time would have saved someone or something's bacon.
Click to expand...
I don't recall any major "gotchas" exposed at these meetings. Not to say none ever happened, just don't recall any major mistakes.

At one meeting, the customer representative was offended by our choice of aluminum for an antenna. He demanded we execute a trade study into alternate materials. We had to point out that the aluminum antenna was due to be delivered the following week.

On another program, our structural engineer miscalculated the launch loads. When we put it on the vibration table, the spacecraft structure actually broke. Would have been nice if the review attendees had detected the mistake, but no. My general impression is that none of the attendees at these meetings had ever actually *built* something.

Last ~20 years of my career, we were a "Rapid Prototyping" operation... the goal was to reduce cost and accelerate development by shedding (among other things) the useless administrative impact of these meetings. We actually renamed the meetings, so that no one could jump up and say, "Hey, where's the XXXX analysis that's supposed to be shown at a CDR!" We also incorporated Goverment representatives (typically lieutenants and captains) right into our design teams. Full access to all records (except financial ones) and membership on all working teams. Gave them hardware experience, and cut down a lot of the reporting overhead.

I documented our basic rules here: :)

http://www.wanttaja.com/rapid.html

Ron Wanttaja
 
I remember decades ago when I worked for MMA on a project we had a customer representative who would always ask a dumb question and his boss would give this pained expression. It got so that we would try and predict in advance what dumb question he would ask and have a foil ready to answer it. Remember the days of foils before PowerPoint existed? :p
 
nauga said:
I'll be clear on this...if many of the suggestions 'offered' here were made in the same manner to me in the context of an airplane I was either designing or testing I'd just tell you to pound sand. Think what you want.

Nauga,
who doesn't crowdsource his test plans
Click to expand...

I don’t disagree with this with regard to the internet masses and their “expertise.”

However, I’d also bet that you wouldn’t hesitate to take input from your peers and/or experts in a given area if you were in territory that was uncharted for you. I’d also bet that you wouldn’t throw out well-established basic aircraft construction concepts because they were inconvenient, or because your ego wouldn’t let you admit that someone else might be right. Peter has violated both of these concepts.
 
Omalley1537 said:
I don’t disagree with this with regard to the internet masses and their “expertise.”

However, I’d also bet that you wouldn’t hesitate to take input from your peers and/or experts in a given area if you were in territory that was uncharted for you. I’d also bet that you wouldn’t throw out well-established basic aircraft construction concepts because they were inconvenient, or because your ego wouldn’t let you admit that someone else might be right. Peter has violated both of these concepts.
Click to expand...

The expertise Peter is being given is from the internet masses. How do you identify the expert opinions in the chaff? How does he know that xXx_Bungholio_420's comments are actually from Kelly Johnson Jr? :D
 
schmookeeg said:
The expertise Peter is being given is from the internet masses. How do you identify the expert opinions in the chaff? How does he know that xXx_Bungholio_420's comments are actually from Kelly Johnson Jr? :D
Click to expand...
I'd humbly submit that some of the wheat may have been found amongst the input that he paid established experts for.
 
schmookeeg said:
The expertise Peter is being given is from the internet masses. How do you identify the expert opinions in the chaff? How does he know that xXx_Bungholio_420's comments are actually from Kelly Johnson Jr? :D
Click to expand...
He rejected some of the advice from the Wasabi flight test guys. Although he did address some. IIRC, there were a couple people on the field in north Georgia that stopped helping or he ran off because he didn't like their advice.

I think the fact that he is all alone on this project now speaks volumes to that issue.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top