Moyes Dragonfly
File:Dragonfly.jpg
Type Civilian aircraft
Author(s) Torsten Dreyer
FDM JSBSim
Status early-production

Introduction

 
The Moyes Dragonfly

This is a model of a Moyes Dragonfly, a microlight plane built by MOYES, Australia. It is made of aluminium tubing, wing and empennage have a dracon skin. The pilot sits on the very front of the main tube with a breathtaking, undisturbed view.

The dragonfly has excellent slow flight characteristics and is suitable for towing of hanggliders.


,

Features

Basic flying

Basic flying features are quite simple and almost perfect as a starter for pilots. Takeoff and landing is simple and due to it's slow flying speed, the Dragonfly is perfect for scenery exploration.

The FlightGear model of the Dragonfly supports banner towing. The banner to tow has to be picked up from the ground during the flight and can be released in flight before landing.

Configuration

Do use this feature, a small configuration file is needed telling FlightGear where the banners are on the ground. It is a small XML file placed in your FlightGear home directory (which is ~/.fgfs on linux) named groundbanner.xml. The content of groundbanner.xml is a list of banners to be placed and looks like this:

<PropertyList>
  <groundbanner>
   <path>Aircraft/Dragonfly/Models/GroundBanner.ac</path>
   <lat type="double">37.6199</lat>
   <lon type="double">-122.3735</lon>
   <heading type="double">280</heading>
 </groundbanner>
</PropertyList>

This example places one banner at KSFO left to 28R at the runway intersection. There can be any number of <groundbanner> elements to place more of them.

You can verify that the banners were loaded on the output of your console window. For each configured and loaded groundbanner there is a message

GroundBanner created
 
Banner on the ground


Using

 
Approaching the banner

To pick up the banner from the ground, approach the rope between the two pylons at an altitude of less than 15ft agl. When the pickup succeeded, a message is printed on the console window

banner-pickup

and you will notice a change in the flight-behaviour due to the increased drag caused by the banner on your tail. You can see the towed banner when looking back or changing the view.

 
Banner picked

you can release the banner by pressing the 'o' (lower case letter, not zero). You will notice a decrease of the drag and can see the banner falling down when looking at it.

 
Banner released

Issues

  • aerodynamic coefficients are a very rough guess
  • aerodynamics and movement of the banner is far from being realistic
  • banners do not disappear from ground after pickup
  • add a pilot when viewing from outside

External links

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