Hangar 9 Phoenix7
Don Lowe designed this Pattern plane in 1965 and now it’s back as a 21st Century ARF!
By Frank Granelli PHOTOGRAPHY: FRANK GRANELLI & FRANK FANELLI J 28
ourney back with me now to those thrilling days of yesteryear. To the days when flying fields rocked to the sound of high-performance Preci-
sion Aerobatic (Pattern) airplanes roaring into center at 150 mph with their hair on fire and their 60-sized glow engines screaming over 13,000 rpm. Watch as thousand-foot loops and stall turns mix with perfectly straight slow and point rolls stretching from horizon to horizon. Then, Pattern contests were everywhere,
had hundreds of entrants and Pattern air- planes were common. While designers worked feverishly to make their airplanes more competitive they advanced model de- signs giving us the wonders we fly today. Some of the best of these fantastic ma-
chines belonged to Don Lowe’s Phoenix se- ries. The first Phoenix, a Taurus-like air- craft with a fiberglass fuselage and a
highly-swept, 68-inch wooden wing first flew in 1965. In the early 1970s the Phoenix design matured into the famous Phoenix 5 featuring a 63-inch, reduced sweep, 690 square inch wing and a 60-inch long fuse- lage. Then Don released the Phoenix 7 that proved to be the best flyer of them all and a world class airplane. The Phoenix 7’s fuselage had more side
area for better knife edge performance while the wing area was kept at 690 square inch- es retaining the V’s excellent roll perfor- mance. A great thing about early Pattern airplanes is that they were designed before computer transmitters appeared. The design itself had to resist “walking” in knife edge at- titudes, have no rudder coupling or pitch ten- dencies and could not pull out of prolonged vertical down lines. The Phoenix 7 excelled in these areas without mixing which was good since there was no such thing then.
Hangar 9’s new Phoenix 7 ARF retains all
the original Phoenix 7’s excellent airframe performance but adds some modern tech- nology such as individual aileron servos and dependable electric retractable landing gear. It is a true ARF featuring a one-piece wooden wing, attached control surfaces and a plug-in stabilizer. The color scheme is that of Mark Radcliff’s Phoenix 7 flown in several World Championships starting in 1975. The only real work required to get the Phoenix 7 in the air is to mount the engine and the retractable nose gear. While the Phoenix 7 is supplied with fixed gear, please don’t even think about flying it without re- tracts. This is a high-speed precision air- plane designed to fly with the gear gone. About the saddest thing I have seen in our sport was watching a similar airplane, a Troublemaker, flying in the 1998 Nationals
DECEMBER 2011
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