A fantastic tool for designing a plane or learning aerodynamics

Kevin Garrison

Admit it, you’ve always had an idea for a great airplane. Ever since those first drawings you made in elementary school (when you were supposed to be learning your multiplication tables), you’ve been an airplane designer.

Now, with DaVinci Technologies’ “Airplane PDQ,” you can see if your designs have a chance of getting off the paper and into the sky.

“Airplane PDQ” is a conceptual/preliminary design tool for light homebuilt and general aviation aircraft. It was designed specifically for you and me, the amateur airplane designers. Did you ever wonder if a 300-horsepower engine mounted on your Cessna 150 would really work? “Airplane PDQ” gives you a chance to find out without all the crashing, burning and lawsuits.

This software, priced at $75, comes in a single CD. It’s easy and quick to install, and it seems to be very user friendly. It took this semiliterate computer nerd about five minutes to get it up and running, and that includes the time I had to wrestle with the plastic wrap. Once installed, you can immediately begin throwing ideas at the wall to see if they’re gonna stick.

“Airplane PDQ” is made up of three parts. First is an airplane-sizing wizard. On this page you can make some basic decisions about your new bird. How many people will it carry? How much will they weigh? How much do you need for cargo weight? How fast do you want this thing to fly? What rate of climb and what stall speed are you looking for?

While still on the sizing wizard, you decide whether you want a high wing, a low wing or a canard. Tricycle gear or taildragger? Do you want a V-tail, a standard tail or a T-tail?

“Airplane PDQ’s” second major feature is a full-feature, computer-aided design package for producing drawings and graphically manipulating the airplane design. This part of the program is fun, and it’s the closest thing to those airplane drawings your teacher always took away from you in school. Once you use the sizing wizard to decide on the parameters of your airplane, the program draws your design for you on screen. If, after looking at your design, you want to move a component like, say, a wing, just drag it where you want it with your mouse. The program updates everything for you. To print your drawings, all you need is a simple mouse click.

Remember, these drawings are preliminary in nature. “Airplane PDQ” will not produce blueprints that you can take into your basement for aircraft construction. In addition to telling you if your design is feasible, “Airplane PDQ” gives you performance figures to back it up.

Once you get the preliminary drawing the way you want it, you can check the third feature of “Airplane PDQ” to see if you are a design genius or a design dummy. The group-analysis function of this program is the most important and fun part of the whole thing. Here’s where you get actual numbers that relate to your dream of a new airplane design and help you analyze where you went right and where you went very, very wrong. This section is where you can analyze design changes for an airplane that already exists. Going back to putting a 300-horsepower engine on a Cessna 150, here is where you can see exactly what that mod would do to your airplane in hard figures.

Design analyses come in the form of various reports. The most useful is the Design Summary Report. It gives you a brief overview of your design’s characteristics and performance. It also gives you information similar to what you’d find on a specifications sheet from an airplane manufacturer. Maybe the reason I think the Design Summary Report is the most important aspect of “Airplane PDQ” is because it is the easiest for me to understand.

If you are truly a design nut, if you really did pay attention in math class and you understand such things as torque and moments, angular frequency, degrees Rankine and “2d drag polar for an airfoil section,” then you really ought to have this program on your computer. I’m just a kid who barely passed algebra, so a lot of the things in the Design Summary Report fly right over my dense head.

Which leads to the most valuable feature of this program and the reason that I suggest you go out and buy it, even if you’re not likely to get any closer to building an airplane than folding a piece of notebook paper and throwing it out a window: “Airplane PDQ” is probably the best educational tool I’ve ever seen for learning all the ins and outs of airplane design, aerodynamics and a host of other “namics.”

If all you do is buy this program, print out the users guide and read it cover to cover, you’ll get your money’s worth in new-found knowledge about the world of flying.

‘AIRPLANE PDQ’

System Requirements: Pentium-class Processor (300 MHz or faster recommended), 32 MB memory (64 MB recommended), Windows 95, 98, NT 4.0, 2000

To order: DaVinci Technologies, P.O. Box 5159, Laurel, MD 20726-5159; phone: 301-317-6568; E-mail: info@davincitechnologies.com; Web: DaVinciTechnologies.com.

From November 10th, 2000 issue of Flyer.  Reprinted with permission from Flyer Media, Inc.