Blohm&Voss P.179
By Dick Sarpolus
A never produced Luftwaffe fighter builds fast, looks unique and flies great!
PHOTOGRAPHY: DICK SARPOLUS T 32
his airplane raises the question, “Is it a scale project if the original air- craft design was never built and flown?” I build and fly for my own fun and enjoyment, not for competition, so the answer to that question doesn’t concern me too much. In this case, the Blohm & Voss P.179 was an advanced design concept de- veloped during World War II, but it was nev- er actually built and flown.
It was to have been powered by a BMW 14-cylinder radial engine, could carry 1100 pounds of bombs beneath the fuselage, and was to have two 20mm cannon below the pi- lot’s position. The main landing gear re- tracted outwards into the wingtips. Blohm & Voss, for whatever reasons, also had worked up a number of other asymmet- ric aircraft designs and one of them, their P.141, did make it into small quantity pro- duction for use in the war. So we knew that an asymmetric aircraft design could fly well. And, years later, several R/C scale models of the P.141 have been successfully built and
flown. I thought it would certainly be inter- esting to try their P.179 design and find out, more than fifty years later, if and how it would fly. Electric power and sheet foam profile con- struction make it pretty easy to try out an unusual design without a big investment in time, work, and material cost—sheet foam, some thin plywood, and a hot wire cut foam wing core. At a 42-inch wingspan and al- most 400-square inch wing area, from other warbird projects I had a good idea what size motor, prop, and battery pack would be needed for good performance. This is only a foamy profile, but I tried to stay pretty close to the scale outlines. The off-center design features are there, and as the model got close to test flying time, my flying buddy, Lou, was not at all encouraging with his opinions. He was betting on a very short test flight, with a violent ending.
The weather was too windy for a first test flight, but we went ahead anyway. The flight started off well, the plane flew right
AT A GLANCE Type:
Construction:
Wing span: Wing area: Length: Weight:
Wing loading: Prop:
R/C electric
sheet foam, plywood, hot wire foam wing
42 inches 400 sq. in. 33 inches 26 ounces 9 oz./sq.ft. 9–5
Motor: 120–150 watt brushless outrunner ESC:
20-amp
Battery: Radio:
Servos:
3S 1800–2200 mAh Li-Po 4-channel (3) micro
out of an easy hand launch, was doing well, but on a too low downwind pass the test pi- lot, me, messed up and the flight ended with a crash. Subsequent flights showed that this B&V design handles like a conventional model, does the usual mild aerobatics with no problems.
NOVEMBER 2012
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