Flying Flight Design CTLS

This weekend I was flying on Flight Design CTLS. This is fully composite 2-seat small airplane, empty weight is just 326kg. This airplane costs about 200k euro, 1 hour of rental in the air club is ~200$. According to our approximate calculations it eats about 7 liters of gasoline (AI-95) per 100km of flight, some actually use it to travel across Russia.

On the video takeoff is at 3:45 , I am in control at 8:45 and landing at 11:45.

Among others flying same day my impression was the most neutral, apparently I am not going to be adrenaline addict. That was extremely interesting, but that's it. My interest was completely fulfilled.

I finally figured out that ailerons are much more useful than rudder. With ailerons you utilize maximum aerodynamic quality of the wings when changing direction of flight, while with rudder only fuselage is working, so you have aerodynamic quality of only 2-3 - this means you are loosing much more energy for the same rotation. It always felt unnatural that RC airplanes tend to use rudders for rotation, not ailerons.

The airplane itself:


Other aurplanes and choppers waits for their pilots:


Dispatcher radio on the ground:


Each plane has GPS+GPRS trackers, so dispatcher can see situation in the sky without radar:














On the way home after all this - Boeing 737-800 feels like it is "flying" on the rails...